Principal Curvature-Based Region Detector for Object Recognition

Hongli Deng, Wei Zhang, Eric N. Mortensen, Thomas G. Dietterich, Linda G. Shapiro

Abstract: This paper presents a new structure-based interest region detector called principal curvature-based regions (PCBR) which we use for object class recognition. The PCBR interest operator detects stable watershed regions within the multi-scale principal curvature image. To detect robust watershed regions, we "clean" a principal curvature image by combining a grayscale morphological close with our new "eigenvectorflow" hysteresis threshold. Robustness across scales is achieved by selecting the maximally stable regions across consecutive scales. PCBR typically detects distinctive patterns distributed evenly on the objects and it shows significant robustness to local intensity perturbations and intra-class variations. We evaluate PCBR both qualitatively (through visual inspection) and quantitatively (by measuring repeatability and classification accuracy in real-world object-class recognition problems). Experiments on different benchmark datasets show that PCBR is comparable or superior to state-of-art detectors for both feature matching and object recognition. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of PCBR to symmetry detection.