Color and Shape Recognition

The object "car" and "cat" can be easily distinguished by humans, but how these labels are assigned? Grouping these images is easy for a person into different categories, but its very tedious for a computer. Hence, an object recognition system finds objects in the real world from an image. Object recognition algorithms rely on matching, learning or pattern recognition algorithms using appearance-based or feature-based techniques. In this thesis, the use of color and shape attributes as an explicit color and shape representation respectively for object detection is proposed. Color attributes are dense, computationally effective, and when joined with old-fashioned shape features provide pleasing results for object detection. The procedure of shape detection is actually a natural extension of the job of edge detection at the pixel level to the difficulty of global contour detection. A tool for a systematic analysis of edge based shape detection is provided by this filtering scheme. This enables us to find distinctions between objects based on color and shape

Feature extraction based face recognition, gender and age classification

The face recognition system with large sets of training sets for personal identification normally attains good accuracy. In this paper, we proposed Feature Extraction based Face Recognition, Gender and Age Classification (FEBFRGAC) algorithm with only small training sets and it yields good results even with one image per person. This process involves three stages: Pre-processing, Feature Extraction and Classification. The geometric features of facial images like eyes, nose, mouth etc. are located by using Canny edge operator and face recognition is performed. Based on the texture and shape information gender and age classification is done using Posteriori Class Probability and Artificial Neural Network respectively. It is observed that the face recognition is 100%, the gender and age classification is around 98% and 94% respectively

Textual summarisation of flowcharts in patent drawings for CLEF-IP 2012

International audienceThe CLEF-IP 2012 track included the Flowchart Recognition task, an image-based task where the goal was to process binary images of flowcharts taken from patent draw- ings to produce summaries containing information about their structure. The textual summaries include information about the flowchart title, the box-node shapes, the con- necting edge types, text describing flowchart content and the structural relationships between nodes and edges. An algorithm designed for this task and characterised by the following method steps is presented: * Text-graphic segmentation based on connected-component clustering; * Line segment bridging with an adaptive, oriented filter; * Box shape classification using a stretch-invariant transform to extract features based on shape-specific symmetry; * Text object recognition using a noisy channel model to enhance the results of a commercial OCR package. Performance evaluation results for the CLEF-IP 2012 Flowchart Recognition task are not yet available so the performance of the algorithm has been measured by com- paring algorithm output with object-level ground-truth values. An average F-score was calculated by combining node classification and edge detection (ignoring edge di- rectivity). Using this measure, a third of all drawings were recognized without error (average F-score=1.00) and 75% show an F-score of 0.78 or better. The most impor- tant failure modes of the algorithm have been identified as text-graphic segmentation, line-segment bridging and edge directivity classification. The text object recognition module of the algorithm has been independently eval- uated. Two different state-of-the-art OCR software packages were compared and a post-correction method was applied to their output. Post-correction yields an im- provement of 9% in OCR accuracy and a 26% reduction in the word error rate

Effects of lighting on the perception of facial surfaces

The problem of variable illumination for object constancy has been largely neglected by "edge-based" theories of object recognition. However, there is evidence that edge-based schemes may not be sufficient for face processing and that shading information may be necessary (Bruce. 1988). Changes in lighting affect the pattern of shading on any three-dimensional object and the aim of this thesis was to investigate the effects of lighting on tasks involving face perception. Effects of lighting are first reported on the perception of the hollow face illusion (Gregory, 1973). The impression of a convex face was found to be stronger when light appeared to be from above, consistent with the importance of shape-from- shading which is thought to incorporate a light-from-above assumption. There was an independent main effect of orientation with the illusion stronger when the face was upright. This confirmed that object knowledge was important in generating the illusion, a conclusion which was confirmed by comparison with a "hollow potato" illusion. There was an effect of light on the inverted face suggesting that the direction of light may generally affect the interpretation of surfaces as convex or concave. It was also argued that there appears to be a general preference for convex interpretations of patterns of shading. The illusion was also found to be stronger when viewed monocularly and this effect was also independent of orientation. This was consistent with the processing of shape information by independent modules with object knowledge acting as a further constraint on the final interpretation. Effects of lighting were next reported on the recognition of shaded representations of facial surfaces, with top lighting facilitating processing. The adverse effects of bottom lighting on the interpretation of facial shape appear to affect within category as well as between category discriminations. Photographic negation was also found to affect recognition performance and it was suggested that its effects may be complimentary to those of bottom lighting in some respects. These effects were reported to be dependent on view. The last set of experiments investigated the effects of lighting and view on a simultaneous face matching task using the same surface representations which required subjects to decide if two images were of the same or different people. Subjects were found to be as much affected by a change in lighting as a change in view, which seems inconsistent with edge-based accounts. Top lighting was also found to facilitate matches across changes in view. When the stimuli were inverted matches across changes in both view and light were poorer, although image differences were the same. In other experiments subjects were found to match better across changes between two directions of top lighting than between directions of bottom lighting, although the extent of the changes were the same, suggesting the importance of top lighting for lighting as well as view invariance. Inverting the stimuli, which also inverts the lighting relative to the observer, disrupted matching across directions of top lighting but facilitated matching between levels of bottom lighting, consistent with the use of shading information. Changes in size were not found to affect matching showing that the effect of lighting was not only because it changes image properties. The effect of lighting was also found to transfer to digitised photographs showing that it was not an artifact of the materials. Lastly effects of lighting were reported when images were presented sequentially showing that the effect was not an artifact of simultaneous presentation. In the final section the effects reported were considered within the framework of theories of object recognition and argued to be inconsistent with invariant features, edge-based or alignment approaches. An alternative scheme employing surface-based primitives derived from shape-from-shuding was developed to account for the pattern of effects and contrasted with an image-based accoun

Face analysis using curve edge maps

This paper proposes an automatic and real-time system for face analysis, usable in visual communication applications. In this approach, faces are represented with Curve Edge Maps, which are collections of polynomial segments with a convex region. The segments are extracted from edge pixels using an adaptive incremental linear-time fitting algorithm, which is based on constructive polynomial fitting. The face analysis system considers face tracking, face recognition and facial feature detection, using Curve Edge Maps driven by histograms of intensities and histograms of relative positions. When applied to different face databases and video sequences, the average face recognition rate is 95.51%, the average facial feature detection rate is 91.92% and the accuracy in location of the facial features is 2.18% in terms of the size of the face, which is comparable with or better than the results in literature. However, our method has the advantages of simplicity, real-time performance and extensibility to the different aspects of face analysis, such as recognition of facial expressions and talking