A neural network approach to CSG-based 3-D object recognition

Describes the recognition subsystem of a computer vision system based on constructive solid geometry (CSG) representation scheme. Instead of using the conventional CSG trees to represent objects, the proposed system uses an equivalent representation scheme-precedence graphs-for object representation. Each node in the graph represents a primitive volume and each are between two nodes represents the relation between them. Object recognition is achieved by matching the scene precedence graph to the model precedence graph. A constraint satisfaction network is proposed to implement the matching process. The energy function associated with the network is used to enforce the matching constraints including match validity, primitive similarity, precedence graph preservation, and geometric structure preservation. The energy level is at its minimum only when the optimal match is reached. Experimental results on several range images are presented to demonstrate the proposed approach     

图匹配技术研究

图(Graph)在众多的科学领域和工程领域(如模式识别和计算机视觉)中具有广泛的应用 ,其具备 强大的信息表达能力。当图被用来表示物体结构时,衡量物体的相似程度将会被转化成计算两个图的相似度,这就是图匹配(Graph Matching)。近几十年来,对图匹配相关技术和算法的研究已经成为了研究领域内的一个重要课题,尤其是随着大数据时代的来临,图作为数据之间关系的一种表示形式,将会受到越来越多的关注。文中对图匹配技术的发展现状进行了综述,详细介绍了该技术的理论基础,梳理了解决图匹配问题的几种主流思路。最后,结合图匹配技术的一种具体应用对几种算法的性能进行了对比分析。     

Fourier domain representation of planar curves for recognition in multiple views

Recognition of planar shapes is an important problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The same planar object contour imaged from different cameras or from different viewpoints looks different and their recognition is non-trivial. Traditional shape recognition deals with views of the shapes that differ only by simple rotations, translations, and scaling. However, shapes suffer more serious deformation between two general views and hence recognition approaches designed to handle translations, rotations, and/or scaling would prove to be insufficient. Many algebraic relations between matching primitives in multiple views have been identified recently. In this paper, we explore how shape properties and multiview relations can be combined to recognize planar shapes across multiple views. We propose novel recognition constraints that a planar shape boundary must satisfy in multiple views. The constraints are on the rank of a Fourier-domain measurement matrix computed from the points on the shape boundary. Our method can additionally compute the correspondence between the curve points after a match is established. We demonstrate the applications of these constraints experimentally on a number of synthetic and real images.     

一种基于极坐标变换的点模式匹配算法

点模式匹配是目标识别、图像配准与匹配、姿态估计等计算机视觉与模式识别应用方向的基础问题之一。提出了一种新的利用点特征进行匹配的算法,该算法根据点集的分布与点位置信息,构建了点的特征属性图,通过极坐标变换得到对数极坐标的特征图,并利用几何不变矩方法对特征图进行描述。由特征描述向量的比较,获得粗匹配结果,然后通过几何约束迭代的方法获取最终的点集匹配结果。本文贡献如下:一,构建了一种点的极坐标变换特征,并运用不变矩进行描述,使所提特征具有旋转与平移的不变性;二,提出了利用点特征与整体点集几何约束结合的匹配算法,能有效克服出格点与噪声带来的不利影响。最终实验说明了算法的有效性和鲁棒性。     

基于骨架层次分解的目标的图表示

基于骨架的目标表示技术是模式识别和计算机视觉的重要研究内容,近年来人们提出了许多骨架化算法,但是有关利用骨架信息表示并识别目标的研究还非常有限。Ablameyko等1996年提出了通过分解由距离标号的骨架为有意义的结构基元从而获得目标的层次结构图的方法。该图可以准确地刻画基元之间的拓扑关系,但是它对于骨架中的噪声比较敏感。主要表现为噪声基元破坏其它基元的完整性和图的稳定性。该文采用将分支编组为分支链以及构造多尺度结构图的改进策略来克服这些缺点,最终获得了目标的节点数更小、节点显著度更高、节点间连接关系更稳定的多尺度图,从而显著地提高后续利用不精确图匹配技术进行目标识别的效率。这项技术已经被应用于一个基于形状特征的图像数据库检索系统中。     

基于相对角分布聚类和支持向量机的3维人脸特征点匹配技术的研究

人脸特征点自动定位及对应点匹配是计算机视觉和模式识别领域一个非常热门的研究方向,应用领域包括图像配准、对象识别与跟踪、3维重建、立体匹配等。通过相对角直方图分布和K均值聚类确定脸部特征点的聚类点集,再利用几何信息提取聚类点集的特征,进而采用支持向量机分类最终从点集中分离出39个脸部特征点。实验结果表明,此混合提取方法比单纯使用RAC得到了更好的匹配准确率,在给定的距离阈值范围内,50%的特征点定位准确率达到了100%。     

基于谱图理论的特征匹配方法研究和改进

图像匹配问题是计算机视觉领域的一个基本问题,广泛地应用于很多领域,如:模式识别,自动导航,医学诊断,计算机视觉,图像三维重构等领域。将所研究的问题转化为数学问题,再利用数学工具解决这一问题,成为当今研究的一种重要手段。在这里,将图像匹配中的图像转化为数学-图论中的图,利用谱图理论解决图像匹配问题,从而形成了一类比较流行而新颖的方法,针对这一方法进行了较为系统的探究并做出了改进。     

On the coding of ordered graphs

Ordered graph and ordered graph isomorphism provide a natural representation of many objects in applications such as computational geometry, computer vision and pattern recognition. In the present paper we propose a coding procedure for ordered graphs that improves an earlier one based on Eulerian circuits of graphs in terms of both simplicity and computational efficiency. Using our coding approach, we show that the ordered graph isomorphism problem can be optimally solved in quadratic time, although no efficient (polynomial-bound) isomorphism algorithm for general graphs exists today. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of the new method.     

Polyhedral object recognition by indexing

In computer vision, the indexing problem is the problem of recognizing a few objects in a large database of objects while avoiding the help of the classical image-feature-to-object-feature matching paradigm. In this paper we address the problem of recognizing three-dimensional (3-D) polyhedral objects from 2-D images by indexing. Both the objects to be recognized and the images are represented by weighted graphs. The indexing problem is therefore the problem of determining whether a graph extracted from the image is present or absent in a database of model graphs. We introduce a novel method for performing this graph indexing process which is based both on polynomial characterization of binary and weighted graphs and on hashing. We describe in detail this polynomial characterization and then we show how it can be used in the context of polyhedral object recognition. Next we describe a practical recognition-by-indexing system that includes the organization of the database, the representation of polyhedral objects in terms of 2-D characteristic views, the representation of this views in terms of weighted graphs and the associated image processing. Finally, some experimental results allow the evaluation of the system performance.     

自动分割视频序列中运动物体的新算法：多特征联合方法

视频编码标准MPEG-4增加了适于多种应用的基于视频内容的功能,为了支持这一功能和提高编码效率,MPEG-4将视频序列中的每一帧分解成视频对象面(VOP);另外,由于基于内容的视频检索和视频监控系统均期望用分割出的关键视频对象紧致地表示一个序列,同时由于视频分割技术在模式识别、计算机视觉等领域也得到了广泛的应用,因此,分割视频运动物体并跟踪运动物体的变化变得至关重要.为了对视频中运动物体进行有效的分割,在帧差图象的基础上,采用Canny边缘检测和随机信号的高阶矩检测相结合的方法,来自动分割视频序列的前景区域和背景区域,并在前景区域中应用区域生长法进行颜色分割,以精确提取运动物体的边缘;还利用边缘和颜色特征来对分割出的运动物体建立模板,用于解决非刚体运动中局部暂时停止运动的情况.实验结果表明,此方法可以有效地分割运动物体,并能跟踪运动物体的变化.     

Encouraging second-order consistency for multiple graph matching

The problems in computer vision of finding the global correspondences across a set of images can be formulated as a multiple graph matching problem consisting of pairwise matching problems. In the multiple graph matching problem, matching consistency is as important as matching accuracy for preventing the contrariety among matched results. Unfortunately, since the majority of conventional pairwise matching methods only approximate the original graph matching problem owing to its computational complexity, a framework that separately matches each graph pair could generate inconsistent results in practical environments. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple graph matching method based on the second-order consistency concept, which simultaneously considers the matching information of all possible graph pairs. We reformulate the multiple graph matching problem to encourage second-order consistency and design an iterative optimization framework. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both consistency and accuracy.     

Learning Graph Matching

As a fundamental problem in pattern recognition, graph matching has applications in a variety of fields, from computer vision to computational biology. In graph matching, patterns are modeled as graphs and pattern recognition amounts to finding a correspondence between the nodes of different graphs. Many formulations of this problem can be cast in general as a quadratic assignment problem, where a linear term in the objective function encodes node compatibility and a quadratic term encodes edge compatibility. The main research focus in this theme is about designing efficient algorithms for approximately solving the quadratic assignment problem, since it is NP-hard. In this paper we turn our attention to a different question: how to estimate compatibility functions such that the solution of the resulting graph matching problem best matches the expected solution that a human would manually provide. We present a method for learning graph matching: the training examples are pairs of graphs and the 'labels' are matches between them. Our experimental results reveal that learning can substantially improve the performance of standard graph matching algorithms. In particular, we find that simple linear assignment with such a learning scheme outperforms Graduated Assignment with bistochastic normalisation, a state-of-the-art quadratic assignment relaxation algorithm.     

Automatic 3d free form shape matching using the graduated assignment algorithm

Three-dimensional free form shape matching is a fundamental problem in both the machine vision and pattern recognition literatures. However, the automatic approach to 3D free form shape matching still remains open. In this paper, we propose using k closest points in the second view for the automatic 3D free form shape matching. For the sake of computational efficiency, the optimised k-D tree is employed for the search of the k closest points. Since occlusion and appearance and disappearance of points almost always occur, slack variables have to be employed, explicitly modelling outliers in the process of matching. Then the relative quality of each possible point match is estimated using the graduated assignment algorithm, leading the camera motion parameters to be estimated by the quaternion method in the weighted least-squares sense. The experimental results based on both synthetic data and real images without any pre-processing show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for the automatic matching of overlapping 3D free form shapes with either sparse or dense points.     

Conformal geometry and its applications on 3D shape matching, recognition, and stitching

Three-dimensional shape matching is a fundamental issue in computer vision with many applications such as shape registration, 3D object recognition, and classification. However, shape matching with noise, occlusion, and clutter is a challenging problem. In this paper, we analyze a family of quasi-conformal maps including harmonic maps, conformal maps, and least-squares conformal maps with regards to 3D shape matching. As a result, we propose a novel and computationally efficient shape matching framework by using least-squares conformal maps. According to conformal geometry theory, each 3D surface with disk topology can be mapped to a 2D domain through a global optimization and the resulting map is a diffeomorphism, i.e., one-to-one and onto. This allows us to simplify the 3D shape-matching problem to a 2D image-matching problem, by comparing the resulting 2D parametric maps, which are stable, insensitive to resolution changes and robust to occlusion, and noise. Therefore, highly accurate and efficient 3D shape matching algorithms can be achieved by using the above three parametric maps. Finally, the robustness of least-squares conformal maps is evaluated and analyzed comprehensively in 3D shape matching with occlusion, noise, and resolution variation. In order to further demonstrate the performance of our proposed method, we also conduct a series of experiments on two computer vision applications, i.e., 3D face recognition and 3D nonrigid surface alignment and stitching.     

基于多视图矩阵分解的聚类分析

在计算机视觉和模式识别领域,随着多源信息越来越多,图像的描述方法也越来越丰富,多视图学习方法能更充分利用这种多源信息,进而提高聚类的准确率.因此,本文提出了两种基于多视图学习的方法：MultiGNMF和MultiGSemiNMF方法.该方法是在矩阵分解的基础之上,结合以往多视图学习的框架准则,并利用了样本的局部结构形成的.MultiGNMF和MultiGSemiNMF算法不仅能学习视图间的互补信息,同时能保持样本的空间结构.但是,MultiGNMF算法只适用于非负的特征矩阵.因此,考虑到SemiNMF算法相对于NMF算法具有更大的扩展性,结合多视图学习的框架,本文又提出了多视图学习的MultiGSemiNMF算法.实验结果证实了这两种方法有较好的性能.     

3-D shape reconstruction in an active stereo vision system using genetic algorithms

The recovery of 3-D shape information (depth) using stereo vision analysis is one of the major areas in computer vision and has given rise to a great deal of literature in the recent past. The widely known stereo vision methods are the passive stereo vision approaches that use two cameras. Obtaining 3-D information involves the identification of the corresponding 2-D points between left and right images. Most existing methods tackle this matching task from singular points, i.e. finding points in both image planes with more or less the same neighborhood characteristics. One key problem we have to solve is that we are on the first instance unable to know a priori whether a point in the first image has a correspondence or not due to surface occlusion or simply because it has been projected out of the scope of the second camera. This makes the matching process very difficult and imposes a need of an a posteriori stage to remove false matching.In this paper we are concerned with the active stereo vision systems which offer an alternative to the passive stereo vision systems. In our system, a light projector that illuminates objects to be analyzed by a pyramid-shaped laser beam replaces one of the two cameras. The projections of laser rays on the objects are detected as spots in the image. In this particular case, only one image needs to be treated, and the stereo matching problem boils down to associating the laser rays and their corresponding real spots in the 2-D image. We have expressed this problem as a minimization of a global function that we propose to perform using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We have implemented two different algorithms: in the first, GAs are performed after a deterministic search. In the second, data is partitioned into clusters and GAs are independently applied in each cluster. In our second contribution in this paper, we have described an efficient system calibration method. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the feasibility of our approach. The proposed method yields high accuracy 3-D reconstruction even for complex objects. We conclude that GAs can effectively be applied to this matching problem.