METHOD AND DEVICE FOR PROCESSING AND FOR SEARCHING FOR AN OBJECT BY SIGNALS CORRESPONDING TO IMAGES

• US 20080131003A1
• Filed: 10/30/2007
• Published: 06/05/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 07/05/1999
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Rakuten Group, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Miroslaw Z. Bober
• Inventors: BOBER, Miroslaw Z.
• Granted Patent: US 7,505,628 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/199
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/5854 using shape and object relationship
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 10/46 Descriptors for shape, contour or point-related descriptors, e.g. scale invariant feature transform [SIFT] or bags of words [BoW]; Salient regional features colour feature extraction G06V10/56
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 10/752 Contour matching

Abstract

A method of representing an object appearing in a still or video image, by processing signals corresponding to the image, comprises deriving the peak values in CSS space for the object outline and applying a non-linear transformation to said peak values to arrive at a representation of the outline.

Claims

1. A method of representing an object appearing in an image or a sequence of images, by processing signals corresponding to the image, the method comprising deriving a plurality of co-ordinate values for peaks of the outline of the object in curvature scale space on the basis of the signals applying a scaling transformation based on the peak height co-ordinate values, scaling relative to the values for the other co-ordinate to arrive at a representation of the outline.

2. A method as claimed in claim 1 wherein the scaling is independent of the number of samples.

3. A method of searching for an object in an image or sequence of image by processing signals corresponding to images, the method comprising inputting a query in the form of a two-dimensional outline deriving a descriptor of said outline using a method as claimed in claims 1 obtaining a descriptor of objects in a stored images derived using a method as claimed in claim 1 and comparing said query descriptor with each descriptor for a stored object, and selecting and displaying at least one result corresponding to an image containing an object for which the comparison indicates a degree of similarity between the query and said object.

4. An apparatus adapted to implement a method as claimed in claim 1 or claim 3.

5. A computer system programmed to operate according to a method as claimed in claim 1 or claim 3.

6. A computer-readable storage medium storing computer-executable process steps for implementing a method as claimed in claim 1 or claim 3.