DETECTION OF TEXTURE-LESS OBJECTS BY LINE-BASED APPROACH

This paper proposes a method for tackling the problem of scalable object instance detection in the presence of clutter and occlusions. It gathers together advantages in respect of the state-of-the-art object detection approaches, being at the same time able to scale favorably with the number of models, computationally efficient and suited to texture-less objects as well. The proposed method has the following advantages: a) generality – it works for both texture-less and textured objects, b) scalability – it scales sub-linearly with the number of objects stored in the object database, and c) computational efficiency – it runs in near real-time. In contrast to the traditional affine-invariant detectors/descriptors which are local and not discriminative for texture-less objects, our method is based on line segments around which it computes semi-global descriptor by encoding gradient information in scale and rotation invariant manner. It relies on both texture and shape information and is, therefore, suited for both textured and texture-less objects. The descriptor is integrated into efficient object detection procedure which exploits the fact that the line segment determines scale, orientation and position of an object, by its two endpoints. This is used to construct several effective techniques for object hypotheses generation, scoring and multiple object reasoning; which are integrated in the proposed object detection procedure. Thanks to its ability to detect objects even if only one correct line match is found, our method allows detection of the objects under heavy clutter and occlusions. Extensive evaluation on several public benchmark datasets for texture-less and textured object detection, demonstrates its scalability and high effectiveness

Automatska klasifikacija slika zasnovana na fuziji deskriptora i nadgledanom mašinskom učenju

This thesis investigates possibilities for fusion, i.e. combining of different types of image descriptors, in order to improve accuracy and efficiency of image classification. Broad range of techniques for fusion of color and texture descriptors were analyzed, belonging to two approaches – early fusion and late fusion. Early fusion approach combines descriptors during the extraction phase, while late fusion is based on combining of classification results of independent classifiers. An efficient algorithm for extraction of a compact image descriptor based on early fusion of texture and color information, is proposed in the thesis. Experimental evaluation of the algorithm demonstrated a good compromise between efficiency and accuracy of classification results. Research on the late fusion approach was focused on artificial neural networks and a recently introduced algorithm for extremly fast training of neural networks denoted as Extreme Learning Machines - ELM. Main disadvantages of ELM are insufficient stability and limited accuracy of results. To overcome these problems, a technique for combining results of multiple ELM-s into a single classifier is proposed, based on probability sum rules. The created ensemble of ELM-s has demonstrated significiant improvement of accuracy and stability of results, compared with an individual ELM. In order to additionaly improve classification accuracy, a novel hierarchical method for late fusion of multiple complementary descriptors by using ELM classifiers, is proposed in the thesis. In the first phase of the proposed method, a separate ensemble of ELM classifiers is trained for every single descriptor. In the second phase, an additional ELM-based classifier is introduced to learn the optimal combination of descriptors for every category. This approach enables a system to choose those descriptors which are the most representative for every category. Comparative evaluation over several benchmark datasets, has demonstrated highly accurate classification results, comparable to the state-of-the-art methods