Model-based recognition and motion tracking depends upon the ability to solve for projection and model parameters that will best fit a 3-D model to matching 2-D image features. This paper extends current methods of parameter solving to handle objects with arbitrary curved surfaces and with any number of internal parameters representing articulations, variable dimensions, or surface deformations. Numerical

We have been developing a theory for the generic representation of 2-D shape, where structural descriptions are derived from the shocks (singularities) of a curve evolution process, acting on bounding contours. We now apply the theory to the problem of shape matching. The shocks are organized into a directed, acyclic shock graph, and complexity is managed by attending to the most significant (central) shape components first. The space of all such graphs is highly structured and can be characterized by the rules of a shock graph grammar. The grammar permits a reduction of a shock graph to a unique rooted shock tree. We introduce a novel tree matching algorithm which finds the best set of corresponding nodes between two shock trees in polynomial time. Using a diverse database of shapes, we demonstrate our system's performance under articulation, occlusion, and changes in viewpoint. Keywords: shape representation; shape matching; shock graph; shock graph grammar; subgraph isomorphism. 1 I...

Advances in computer speed, memory capacity, and hardware graphics acceleration have made the interactive manipulation and visualization of complex, detailed (and therefore large) three-dimensional models feasible. These models are either painstakingly designed through an elaborate CAD process or reverse engineered from sculpted prototypes using modern scanning technologies and integration methods. The availability of detailed data describing the shape of an object offers the computer vision practitioner new ways to recognize and localize free-form objects. This survey reviews recent literature on both the 3D model building process and techniques used to match and identify free-form objects from imagery. c ○ 2001 Academic Press 1.

This paper presents an algorithm for computing the exact aspect graph of an opaque solid bounded by a smooth algebraic surface and observed under orthographic projection. The algorithm uses curve tracing, cell decomposition, and ray tracing to construct the regions of the view sphere delineated by visual events. It has been fully implemented, and examples are presented.

We present a novel approach to reliable and efficient recovery of part-descriptions in terms of superquadric models from range data. We show that superquadrics can directly be recovered from unsegmented data, thus avoiding any presegmentation steps (e.g., in terms of surfaces). The approach is based on the recover-andselect paradigm [10]. We present several experiments on real and synthetic range images, where we demonstrate the stability of the results with respect to viewpoint and noise.

AbstractÐThe main motivation of this paper is to propose a new classification and regression method for challenging highdimensional data. The proposed new technique casts classification problems (class labels as output) and regression problems (numeric values as output) into a unified regression problem. This unified view enables classification problems to use numeric information in the output space that is available for regression problems but are traditionally not readily available for classification problemsÐdistance metric among clustered class labels for coarse and fine classifications. A doubly clustered subspace-based hierarchical discriminating regression (HDR) method is proposed in this work. The major characteristics include: 1) Clustering is performed in both output space and input space at each internal node, termed ªdoubly clustered.º Clustering in the output space provides virtual labels for computing clusters in the input space. 2) Discriminants in the input space are automatically derived from the clusters in the input space. These discriminants span the discriminating subspace at each internal node of the tree. 3) A hierarchical probability distribution model is applied to the resulting discriminating subspace at each internal node. This realizes a coarse-to-fine approximation of probability distribution of the input samples, in the hierarchical discriminating subspaces. No global distribution models are assumed. 4) To relax the per class sample requirement of traditional discriminant analysis techniques, a sample-size dependent negative-log-likelihood (NLL) is introduced. This new technique is designed for automatically dealing with small-sample applications, large-sample applications, and unbalanced-sample applications. 5) The execution of HDR method is fast, due to the empirical logarithmic time complexity of the HDR algorithm. Although the method is applicable to any data, we report the experimental results for three types of data: synthetic data for examining the near-optimal performance, large raw face-image data bases, and traditional databases with manually selected features along with a comparison with some major existing methods, such as CART,

Abstract—A self-organizing framework for object recognition is described. We describe a hierarchical database structure for image retrieval. The Self-Organizing Hierarchical Optimal Subspace Learning and Inference Framework (SHOSLIF) system uses the theories of optimal linear projection for automatic optimal feature derivation and a hierarchical structure to achieve a logarithmic retrieval complexity. A Space-Tessellation Tree is automatically generated using the Most Expressive Features (MEFs) and the Most Discriminating Features (MDFs) at each level of the tree. The major characteristics of the proposed hierarchical discriminant analysis include: 1) avoiding the limitation of global linear features (hyperplanes as separators) by deriving a recursively better-fitted set of features for each of the recursively subdivided sets of training samples; 2) generating a smaller tree whose cell boundaries separate the samples along the class boundaries better than the principal component analysis, thereby giving a better generalization capability (i.e., better recognition rate in a disjoint test); 3) accelerating the retrieval using a tree structure for data pruning, utilizing a different set of discriminant features at each level of the tree. We allow for perturbations in the size and position of objects in the images through learning. We demonstrate the technique on a large image database of widely varying real-world objects taken in natural settings, and show the applicability of the approach for variability in position, size, and 3D orientation. This paper concentrates on the hierarchical partitioning of the feature spaces. Index Terms—Principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, hierarchical image database, image retrieval, tessellation, partitioning, object recognition, face recognition, complexity with large image databases.

A central problem in object recognition is to determine the transformation that relates the model to the image, given some partial correspondence between the two. This is useful in determining whether an object is present in an image, and if so, determining where the object is. We present a novel method of solving this problem that uses region information. In our approach the model is divided into volumes, and the image is divided into regions. Given a match between subsets of volumes and regions (without any explicit correspondence between different pieces of the regions) the alignment transformation is computed. The method applies to planar objects under similarity, affine, and projective transformations and to projections of 3-D objects undergoing affine and projective transformations. 1 Introduction A fundamental problem in recognition is pose estimation. Given a correspondence between some portions of an object model and some portions of an image, determine the transformation th...

The systems and concepts described in this paper document the evolution of the geometric invariance approach to object recognition over the last five years. Invariance overcomes one of the fundamental difficulties in recognising objects from images: that the appearance of an object depends on viewpoint. This problem is entirely avoided if the geometric description is unaffected by the imaging transformation. Such invariant descriptions can be measured from images without any prior knowledge of the position, orientation and calibration of the camera. These invariant measurements can be used to index a library of object models for recognition and provide a principled basis for the other stages of the recognition process such as feature grouping and hypothesis verification. Object models can be acquired directly from images, allowing efficient construction of model libraries without manual intervention. A significant part of the paper is a summary of recent results on the construction of ...

This paper demonstrates an automatic system for telling whether there are human nudes present in an image. The system marks skin-like pixels using combined color and texture properties. These skin regions are then fed to a specialized grouper, which attempts to group a human figure using geometric constraints on human structure. If the grouper finds a sufficiently complex structure, the system decides a human is present. The approach is shown to be effective for a wide range of shades and colors of skin and human configurations. This approach offers an alternate view of object recognition, where an object model is an organized collection of grouping hints obtained from a combination of constraints on color and texture and constraints on geometric properties such as the structure of individual parts and the relationships between parts. The system demonstrates excellent performance on a test set of 565 uncontrolled images of human nudes, mostly obtained from the internet, and 4289 assorted control images, drawn from a wide variety of sources.