5 research outputs found
A Framework for Symmetric Part Detection in Cluttered Scenes
The role of symmetry in computer vision has waxed and waned in importance
during the evolution of the field from its earliest days. At first figuring
prominently in support of bottom-up indexing, it fell out of favor as shape
gave way to appearance and recognition gave way to detection. With a strong
prior in the form of a target object, the role of the weaker priors offered by
perceptual grouping was greatly diminished. However, as the field returns to
the problem of recognition from a large database, the bottom-up recovery of the
parts that make up the objects in a cluttered scene is critical for their
recognition. The medial axis community has long exploited the ubiquitous
regularity of symmetry as a basis for the decomposition of a closed contour
into medial parts. However, today's recognition systems are faced with
cluttered scenes, and the assumption that a closed contour exists, i.e. that
figure-ground segmentation has been solved, renders much of the medial axis
community's work inapplicable. In this article, we review a computational
framework, previously reported in Lee et al. (2013), Levinshtein et al. (2009,
2013), that bridges the representation power of the medial axis and the need to
recover and group an object's parts in a cluttered scene. Our framework is
rooted in the idea that a maximally inscribed disc, the building block of a
medial axis, can be modeled as a compact superpixel in the image. We evaluate
the method on images of cluttered scenes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Unconstrained Road Sign Recognition
There are many types of road signs, each of which carries a different meaning and function: some signs regulate traffic, others indicate the state of the road or guide and warn drivers and pedestrians. Existent image-based road sign recognition systems work well under ideal conditions, but experience problems when the lighting conditions are poor or the signs are partially occluded.
The aim of this research is to propose techniques to recognize road signs in a real outdoor environment, especially to deal with poor lighting and partially occluded road signs. To achieve this, hybrid segmentation and classification algorithms are proposed. In the first part of the thesis, we propose a hybrid dynamic threshold colour segmentation algorithm based on histogram analysis. A dynamic threshold is very important in road sign segmentation, since road sign colours may change throughout the day due to environmental conditions. In the second part, we propose a geometrical shape symmetry detection and reconstruction algorithm to detect and reconstruct the shape of the sign when it is partially occluded. This algorithm is robust to scale changes and rotations. The last part of this thesis deals with feature extraction and classification. We propose a hybrid feature vector based on histograms of oriented gradients, local binary patterns, and the scale-invariant feature transform. This vector is fed into a classifier that combines a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using a Random Forest and a hybrid SVM k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN) classifier.
The overall method proposed in this thesis shows a high accuracy rate of 99.4% in ideal conditions, 98.6% in noisy and fading conditions, 98.4% in poor lighting conditions, and 92.5% for partially occluded road signs on the GRAMUAH traffic signs dataset