Efficient contour-based shape representation and matching

This paper presents an efficient method for calculating the similarity between 2D closed shape contours. The proposed algorithm is invariant to translation, scale change and rotation. It can be used for database retrieval or for detecting regions with a particular shape in video sequences. The proposed algorithm is suitable for real-time applications. In the first stage of the algorithm, an ordered sequence of contour points approximating the shapes is extracted from the input binary images. The contours are translation and scale-size normalized, and small sets of the most likely starting points for both shapes are extracted. In the second stage, the starting points from both shapes are assigned into pairs and rotation alignment is performed. The dissimilarity measure is based on the geometrical distances between corresponding contour points. A fast sub-optimal method for solving the correspondence problem between contour points from two shapes is proposed. The dissimilarity measure is calculated for each pair of starting points. The lowest dissimilarity is taken as the final dissimilarity measure between two shapes. Three different experiments are carried out using the proposed approach: letter recognition using a web camera, our own simulation of Part B of the MPEG-7 core experiment “CE-Shape1” and detection of characters in cartoon video sequences. Results indicate that the proposed dissimilarity measure is aligned with human intuition

The Potential of Active Contour Models in Extracting Road Edges from Mobile Laser Scanning Data

Active contour models present a robust segmentation approach, which makes efficient use of specific information about objects in the input data rather than processing all of the data. They have been widely-used in many applications, including image segmentation, object boundary localisation, motion tracking, shape modelling, stereo matching and object reconstruction. In this paper, we investigate the potential of active contour models in extracting road edges from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) data. The categorisation of active contours based on their mathematical representation and implementation is discussed in detail. We discuss an integrated version in which active contour models are combined to overcome their limitations. We review various active contour-based methodologies, which have been developed to extract road features from LiDAR and digital imaging datasets. We present a case study in which an integrated version of active contour models is applied to extract road edges from MLS dataset. An accurate extraction of left and right edges from the tested road section validates the use of active contour models. The present study provides valuable insight into the potential of active contours for extracting roads from 3D LiDAR point cloud data

Word matching using single closed contours for indexing handwritten historical documents

Effective indexing is crucial for providing convenient access to scanned versions of large collections of historically valuable handwritten manuscripts. Since traditional handwriting recognizers based on optical character recognition (OCR) do not perform well on historical documents, recently a holistic word recognition approach has gained in popularity as an attractive and more straightforward solution (Lavrenko et al. in proc. document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL’04), pp. 278–287, 2004). Such techniques attempt to recognize words based on scalar and profile-based features extracted from whole word images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to holistic word recognition for historical handwritten manuscripts based on matching word contours instead of whole images or word profiles. The new method consists of robust extraction of closed word contours and the application of an elastic contour matching technique proposed originally for general shapes (Adamek and O’Connor in IEEE Trans Circuits Syst Video Technol 5:2004). We demonstrate that multiscale contour-based descriptors can effectively capture intrinsic word features avoiding any segmentation of words into smaller subunits. Our experiments show a recognition accuracy of 83%, which considerably exceeds the performance of other systems reported in the literature

Asymmetric Feature Maps with Application to Sketch Based Retrieval

We propose a novel concept of asymmetric feature maps (AFM), which allows to evaluate multiple kernels between a query and database entries without increasing the memory requirements. To demonstrate the advantages of the AFM method, we derive a short vector image representation that, due to asymmetric feature maps, supports efficient scale and translation invariant sketch-based image retrieval. Unlike most of the short-code based retrieval systems, the proposed method provides the query localization in the retrieved image. The efficiency of the search is boosted by approximating a 2D translation search via trigonometric polynomial of scores by 1D projections. The projections are a special case of AFM. An order of magnitude speed-up is achieved compared to traditional trigonometric polynomials. The results are boosted by an image-based average query expansion, exceeding significantly the state of the art on standard benchmarks.Comment: CVPR 201