Object Recognition with a Limited Database Using Shape Space Theory

Abstract

One of the main goals of image understanding and computer vision applications is to recognize an object from various images. Object recognition has been deeply developed for the last three decades, and a lot of approaches have been proposed. Generally, these methods of object recognition can successfully achieve their goal by relying on a large quantity of data. However, if the observed objects are shown to diverse configurations, it is difficult to recognize them with a limited database. One has to prepare enough data to exactly recognize one object with multi-configurations, and it is hard work to collect enough data only for a single object. In this chapter, the authors will introduce an approach to recognize objects with multi-configurations using the shape space theory. Firstly, two sets of landmarks are obtained from two objects in two-dimensional images. Secondly, the landmarks represented as two points are projected into a pre-shape space. Then, a series of new intermediate data can be obtained from data models in the pre-shape space. Finally, object recognition can be achieved in the shape space with the shape space theory.