The Use of Grouping in Visual Object Recognition

Abstract

This report explores the use of grouping in object recognition by computational systems. Many recognition systems in the past have performed an undirected search through the space of different segmentations of an image in order to recognize objects. This approach leads to significant problems of computational complexity and accuracy. The process of grouping determines the sections of an image most likely to come from a single object. This can tell a recognition system which segmentations of the image to consider first, improving both its speed and accuracy. The report describes a particular recognition system called GROPER. GROPER performs grouping by using distance and relative orientation constraints that estimate the likelihood of different edges in an image coming from the same object. The thesis presents both a theoretical analysis of the grouping problem and a practical implementation of a grouping system. And it discusses the relevance of this theory of grouping to human psychology. GROPER also uses an indexing module to allow it to make use of knowledge of different objects, any of which might appear in an image. We test GROPER by comparing it to similar recognition system that does not use grouping.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA201691

Entities

People

  • David W. Jacobs

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Aircrafts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computer Vision
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Geometric Forms
  • Geometry
  • Image Processing
  • Lisp Programming Language
  • Object Recognition
  • Probability Distributions
  • Psychology
  • Recognition
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Vision.
  • Theoretical Analysis.

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Space Objects