Abstract
Our objective in this thesis is to develop a method for establishing an object recognition system based on the matching of image regions. A region is segmented from image based on colour homogeneity of pixels. The method can be applied to a number of computer vision applications such as object recognition (in general) and image retrieval. The motivation for using regions as image primitives is that they can be represented invariantly to a group of geometric transformations and regions are stable under scaling.We model each object of interest in our database using a single frontal image. The recognition task is to determine the presence of object(s) of interest in scene images. We propose a novel method for afflne invariant representation of image regions in the form of Attributed Relational Graph (ARG). To make image regions comparable for matching, we project each region to an affine invariant space and describe it using a set of unary measurements. The distinctiveness of these features is enhanced by describing the relation between the region and its neighbours. We limit ourselves to the low order relations, binary relations, to minimise the combinatorial complexity of both feature extraction and model matching, and to maximise the probability of the features being observed. We propose two sets of binary measurements: geometric relations between pair of regions, and colour profile on the line connecting the centroids of regions. We demonstrate that the former measurements are very discriminative when the shape of segmented regions is informative. However, they are susceptible to distortion of regions boundaries as a result of severe geometric transformations. In contrast, the colour profile binary measurements are very robust.Using this representation we construct a graph to represent the regions in the scene image and refer to it as the scene graph. Similarly a graph containing the regions of all object models is constructed and referred to as the model graph. We consider the object recognition as the problem of matching the scene graph and model graphs. We adopt the probabilistic relaxation labelling technique for our problem. The method is modified to cope better with image segmentation errors. The implemented algorithm is evaluated under affine transformation, occlusion, illumination change and cluttered scene. Good performance for recognition even under severe scaling and in cluttered scenes is reported. Key words: Region Matching, Object Recognition, Relaxation Labelling, Affine Invariant.