Distance sets for shape filters and shape recognition

Traffic Sign Detection and Classification on the Austrian Highway Traffic Sign Data Set

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems rely on automated traffic sign recognition. Today, Deep Learning methods outperform other approaches in terms of accuracy and processing time; however, they require vast and well-curated data sets for training. In this paper, we present the Austrian Highway Traffic Sign Data Set (ATSD), a comprehensive annotated data set of images of almost all traffic signs on Austrian highways in 2014, and corresponding images of full traffic scenes they are contained in. Altogether, the data set consists of almost 7500 scene images with more than 28,000 detailed annotations of more than 100 distinct traffic sign classes. It covers diverse environments, ranging from urban to rural and mountainous areas, and includes many images recorded in tunnels. We further evaluate state-of-the-art traffic sign detectors and classifiers on ATSD to establish baselines for future experiments. The data set and our baseline models are freely available online.

Chord Bunch Walks for Recognizing Naturally Self-Overlapped and Compound Leaves

Effectively describing and recognizing leaf shapes under arbitrary variations, particularly from a large database, remains an unsolved problem. In this research, we attempted a new strategy of describing leaf shapes by walking and measuring along a bunch of chords that pass through the shape. A novel chord bunch walks (CBW) descriptor is developed through the chord walking behavior that effectively integrates the shape image function over the walked chord to reflect both the contour features and the inner properties of the shape. For each contour point, the chord bunch groups multiple pairs of chords to build a hierarchical framework for a coarse-to-fine description that can effectively characterize not only the subtle differences among leaf margin patterns but also the interior part of the shape contour formed inside a self-overlapped or compound leaf. Instead of using optimal correspondence based matching, a Log-Min distance that encourages one-to-one correspondences is proposed for efficient and effective CBW matching. The proposed CBW shape analysis method is invariant to rotation, scaling, translation, and mirror transforms. Five experiments, including image retrieval of compound leaves, image retrieval of naturally self-overlapped leaves, and retrieval of mixed leaves on three large scale datasets, are conducted. The proposed method achieved large accuracy increases with low computational costs over the state-of-the-art benchmarks, which indicates the research potential along this direction.

O2O Method for Fast 2D Shape Retrieval

A novel post-processing method, online to offline (O2O), to improve the efficiency of shape retrieval is proposed in this paper. The essence of this proposed method is to move more work that requires a lot of computation to offline. Based on this approach, the O2O rerank the retrieval result online with the help of the offline analysis. The result of offline analysis can be reused indefinitely, regardless of the query shape, as long as the database is unchanged. Therefore, O2O is very efficient and suitable for real-time applications. We evaluated our method for shape retrieval and recognition on five databases including MPEG-7 CE-1 Part B, Tari 1000, Animals, Kimia 99, and Swedish Plant Leaf. Our experimental results show that as a post-processing algorithm, O2O provides highly efficient and effective shape retrieval.

A Weighted Fourier and Wavelet-Like Shape Descriptor Based on IDSC for Object Recognition

This article presents an effective shape descriptor with a property of fast matching. This descriptor, called IDSC-wFW (a weighted Fourier and wavelet-like descriptor based on inner distance shape context), first rewrites shape histograms of IDSC descriptors, changing the histogram belonging to a point to the histogram belonging to a field, and sets the histogram of a field as a one-dimensional signal, then transforms this one-dimensional signal by using a Fourier transform and a transform similar to Haar wavelet. Finally, the two transform results are linearly combined to form a new descriptor. This new descriptor requires only a distance-based measure method during the matching stage. Experimental results on three well-known databases show that this new descriptor not only obtains accurate retrieval results but also runs fast.

GNSS Trajectory Anomaly Detection Using Similarity Comparison Methods for Pedestrian Navigation

The urban setting is a challenging environment for GNSS receivers. Multipath and other anomalies typically increase the positioning error of the receiver. Moreover, the error estimate of the position is often unreliable. In this study, we detect GNSS trajectory anomalies by using similarity comparison methods between a pedestrian dead reckoning trajectory, recorded using a foot-mounted inertial measurement unit, and the corresponding GNSS trajectory. During a normal walk, the foot-mounted inertial dead reckoning setup is trustworthy up to a few tens of meters. Thus, the differing GNSS trajectory can be detected using form similarity comparison methods. Of the eight tested methods, the Hausdorff distance (HD) and the accumulated distance difference (ADD) give slightly more consistent detection results compared to the rest.

Orientation Histogram-Based Center-Surround Interaction: An Integration Approach for Contour Detection

Contour is a critical feature for image description and object recognition in many computer vision tasks. However, detection of object contour remains a challenging problem because of disturbances from texture edges. This letter proposes a scheme to handle texture edges by implementing contour integration. The proposed scheme integrates structural segments into contours while inhibiting texture edges with the help of the orientation histogram-based center-surround interaction model. In the model, local edges within surroundings exert a modulatory effect on central contour cues based on the co-occurrence statistics of local edges described by the divergence of orientation histograms in the local region. We evaluate the proposed scheme on two well-known challenging boundary detection data sets (RuG and BSDS500). The experiments demonstrate that our scheme achieves a high [Formula: see text]-measure of up to 0.74. Results show that our scheme achieves integrating accurate contour while eliminating most of texture edges, a novel approach to long-range feature analysis.

A Novel Medical Freehand Sketch 3D Model Retrieval Method by Dimensionality Reduction and Feature Vector Transformation

To assist physicians to quickly find the required 3D model from the mass medical model, we propose a novel retrieval method, called DRFVT, which combines the characteristics of dimensionality reduction (DR) and feature vector transformation (FVT) method. The DR method reduces the dimensionality of feature vector; only the top M low frequency Discrete Fourier Transform coefficients are retained. The FVT method does the transformation of the original feature vector and generates a new feature vector to solve the problem of noise sensitivity. The experiment results demonstrate that the DRFVT method achieves more effective and efficient retrieval results than other proposed methods.

A modified shape context method for shape based object retrieval

The complexity in shape context method and its simplification is addressed. A novel, but simple approach to design shape context method including Fourier Transform for the object recognition is described. Relevance of shape context, an important descriptor for the recognition process is detailed. Inclusion of information regarding all the contour points (with respect to a reference point) in computing the distribution is discussed. Role of similarity checking the procedure details regarding the computation of matching errors through the alignment transform are discussed. Present case of shape context (for each point with respect to the centroid) descriptor is testified for its invariance to translation, rotation and scaling operations. Euclidean distance is used during the similarity matching. Modified shape context based descriptor is experimented over three standard databases. The results evidence the relative efficiency of the modified shape context based descriptor than that reported for other descriptor of concurrent interests.

Hierarchical String Cuts: A Translation, Rotation, Scale and Mirror Invariant Descriptor for Fast Shape Retrieval

This paper presents a novel approach for both fast and accurately retrieving similar shapes. A hierarchical string cuts (HSC) method is proposed to partition a shape into multiple level curve segments of different lengths from a point moving around the contour to describe the shape gradually and completely from the global information to the finest details. At each hierarchical level, the curve segments are cut by strings to extract features that characterize the geometric and distribution properties in that particular level of details. The translation, rotation, scale and mirror invariant HSC descriptor enables a fast metric based matching to achieve the desired high accuracy. Encouraging experimental results on four databases demonstrated that the proposed method can consistently achieve higher (or similar) retrieval accuracies than the state-of-the-art benchmarks with a more than 120 times faster speed. This may suggest a new way of developing shape retrieval techniques in which a high accuracy can be achieved by a fast metric matching algorithm without using the time-consuming correspondence optimisation strategy.

Ventral-stream-like shape representation: from pixel intensity values to trainable object-selective COSFIRE models

The remarkable abilities of the primate visual system have inspired the construction of computational models of some visual neurons. We propose a trainable hierarchical object recognition model, which we call S-COSFIRE (S stands for Shape and COSFIRE stands for Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses) and use it to localize and recognize objects of interests embedded in complex scenes. It is inspired by the visual processing in the ventral stream (V1/V2 → V4 → TEO). Recognition and localization of objects embedded in complex scenes is important for many computer vision applications. Most existing methods require prior segmentation of the objects from the background which on its turn requires recognition. An S-COSFIRE filter is automatically configured to be selective for an arrangement of contour-based features that belong to a prototype shape specified by an example. The configuration comprises selecting relevant vertex detectors and determining certain blur and shift parameters. The response is computed as the weighted geometric mean of the blurred and shifted responses of the selected vertex detectors. S-COSFIRE filters share similar properties with some neurons in inferotemporal cortex, which provided inspiration for this work. We demonstrate the effectiveness of S-COSFIRE filters in two applications: letter and keyword spotting in handwritten manuscripts and object spotting in complex scenes for the computer vision system of a domestic robot. S-COSFIRE filters are effective to recognize and localize (deformable) objects in images of complex scenes without requiring prior segmentation. They are versatile trainable shape detectors, conceptually simple and easy to implement. The presented hierarchical shape representation contributes to a better understanding of the brain and to more robust computer vision algorithms.

Efficient processing of fluorescence images using directional multiscale representations

Recent advances in high-resolution fluorescence microscopy have enabled the systematic study of morphological changes in large populations of cells induced by chemical and genetic perturbations, facilitating the discovery of signaling pathways underlying diseases and the development of new pharmacological treatments. In these studies, though, due to the complexity of the data, quantification and analysis of morphological features are for the vast majority handled manually, slowing significantly data processing and limiting often the information gained to a descriptive level. Thus, there is an urgent need for developing highly efficient automated analysis and processing tools for fluorescent images. In this paper, we present the application of a method based on the shearlet representation for confocal image analysis of neurons. The shearlet representation is a newly emerged method designed to combine multiscale data analysis with superior directional sensitivity, making this approach particularly effective for the representation of objects defined over a wide range of scales and with highly anisotropic features. Here, we apply the shearlet representation to problems of soma detection of neurons in culture and extraction of geometrical features of neuronal processes in brain tissue, and propose it as a new framework for large-scale fluorescent image analysis of biomedical data.

Trainable COSFIRE filters for keypoint detection and pattern recognition

BACKGROUND

Keypoint detection is important for many computer vision applications. Existing methods suffer from insufficient selectivity regarding the shape properties of features and are vulnerable to contrast variations and to the presence of noise or texture.

METHODS

We propose a trainable filter which we call Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses (COSFIRE) and use for keypoint detection and pattern recognition. It is automatically configured to be selective for a local contour pattern specified by an example. The configuration comprises selecting given channels of a bank of Gabor filters and determining certain blur and shift parameters. A COSFIRE filter response is computed as the weighted geometric mean of the blurred and shifted responses of the selected Gabor filters. It shares similar properties with some shape-selective neurons in visual cortex, which provided inspiration for this work.

RESULTS

We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filters in three applications: the detection of retinal vascular bifurcations (DRIVE dataset: 98.50 percent recall, 96.09 percent precision), the recognition of handwritten digits (MNIST dataset: 99.48 percent correct classification), and the detection and recognition of traffic signs in complex scenes (100 percent recall and precision).

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed COSFIRE filters are conceptually simple and easy to implement. They are versatile keypoint detectors and are highly effective in practical computer vision applications.

Co-transduction for shape retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new shape/object retrieval algorithm, namely, co-transduction. The performance of a retrieval system is critically decided by the accuracy of adopted similarity measures (distances or metrics). In shape/object retrieval, ideally, intraclass objects should have smaller distances than interclass objects. However, it is a difficult task to design an ideal metric to account for the large intraclass variation. Different types of measures may focus on different aspects of the objects: for example, measures computed based on contours and skeletons are often complementary to each other. Our goal is to develop an algorithm to fuse different similarity measures for robust shape retrieval through a semisupervised learning framework. We name our method co-transduction, which is inspired by the co-training algorithm. Given two similarity measures and a query shape, the algorithm iteratively retrieves the most similar shapes using one measure and assigns them to a pool for the other measure to do a re-ranking, and vice versa. Using co-transduction, we achieved an improved result of 97.72% (bull's-eye measure) on the MPEG-7 data set over the state-of-the-art performance. We also present an algorithm called tri-transduction to fuse multiple-input similarities, and it achieved 99.06% on the MPEG-7 data set. Our algorithm is general, and it can be directly applied on input similarity measures/metrics; it is not limited to object shape retrieval and can be applied to other tasks for ranking/retrieval.

RETRIEVAL FROM SHAPE DATABASES USING CHANCE PROBABILITY FUNCTIONS AND FIXED CORRESPONDENCE

Similarity-based retrieval from shape databases typically employs a pairwise shape matcher and one or more indexing techniques. In this paper, we focus specifically on the design of a pairwise matcher for retrieval of 2-D shape contours. In the past, the matchers used for the one-to-many problem of shape retrieval were often designed for the problem of matching an isolated pair of shapes. This approach fails to exploit two characteristics of the one-to-many matching problem that distinguish it from the one-to-one matching problem. First, the output of shape retrieval systems tends to be dominated by matches to relatively similar shapes. In this paper, we demonstrate that by not expending computational resources on unneeded accuracy of matching, both the speed and the accuracy of retrieval can be increased. Second, the shape database is a large statistical sample of the population of shapes. We introduce a probabilistic model for exploiting that statistical knowledge to further increase retrieval accuracy. The model has several benefits: (1) It does not require class labels on the database shapes, thus supporting unlabeled retrieval. (2) It does not require feature independence. (3) It is parameter-free. (4) It has a fast runtime implementation. The probabilistic model is general and thus potentially applicable to other one-to-many matching problems.

EFFECT OF HIGH CURVATURE POINT DELETION ON THE PERFORMANCE OF TWO CONTOUR BASED SHAPE RECOGNITION ALGORITHMS

Psychophysical researches on the human visual system have shown that the points of high curvature on the contour of an object play an important role in the recognition process. Inspired by these studies we propose: (i) a novel algorithm to select points of high curvature on the contour of an object which can be used to construct a recognizable polygonal approximation, (ii) a test which evaluates the effect of deletion of contour segments containing such points on the performance of contour based object recognition algorithms. We use complete contour representations of objects as a reference (training) set. Incomplete contour representations of the same objects are used as a test set. The performance of an algorithm is reported using the recognition rate as a function of the percentage of contour retained. We consider two types of contour incompleteness obtained by deletion of contour segments of high or low curvature. We illustrate the test procedure using two shape recognition algorithms that deploy a shape context and a distance multiset as local shape descriptors. Both algorithms qualitatively mimic human visual perception in that the deletion of segments of high curvature has a stronger performance degradation effect than the deletion of other parts of the contour. This effect is more pronounced in the performance of the shape context method.

Supervoxel-based segmentation of mitochondria in em image stacks with learned shape features

It is becoming increasingly clear that mitochondria play an important role in neural function. Recent studies show mitochondrial morphology to be crucial to cellular physiology and synaptic function and a link between mitochondrial defects and neuro-degenerative diseases is strongly suspected. Electron microscopy (EM), with its very high resolution in all three directions, is one of the key tools to look more closely into these issues but the huge amounts of data it produces make automated analysis necessary. State-of-the-art computer vision algorithms designed to operate on natural 2-D images tend to perform poorly when applied to EM data for a number of reasons. First, the sheer size of a typical EM volume renders most modern segmentation schemes intractable. Furthermore, most approaches ignore important shape cues, relying only on local statistics that easily become confused when confronted with noise and textures inherent in the data. Finally, the conventional assumption that strong image gradients always correspond to object boundaries is violated by the clutter of distracting membranes. In this work, we propose an automated graph partitioning scheme that addresses these issues. It reduces the computational complexity by operating on supervoxels instead of voxels, incorporates shape features capable of describing the 3-D shape of the target objects, and learns to recognize the distinctive appearance of true boundaries. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is able to segment mitochondria at a performance level close to that of a human annotator, and outperforms a state-of-the-art 3-D segmentation technique.

CONTOUR BASED MULTI-ROI MULTI-QUALITY ROI CODING FOR STILL IMAGE

Region-of-interest (ROI) image coding is one of the new features included in the JPEG2000 image coding standard. Two methods are defined in the standard: the Maxshift method and the generic scaling based method. In this paper, a new region-of-interest coding method called Contour-based Multi-ROI Multi-quality Image Coding (CMM) is proposed. Unlike other existing methods, the CMM method takes the contour and texture of the whole image as a special ROI, which makes the visually most important parts (in both ROI and Background) to be coded first. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous ROI coding schemes in the overall ROI coding performance.

Binary partition trees for object detection

This paper discusses the use of Binary Partition Trees (BPTs) for object detection. BPTs are hierarchical region-based representations of images. They define a reduced set of regions that covers the image support and that spans various levels of resolution. They are attractive for object detection as they tremendously reduce the search space. In this paper, several issues related to the use of BPT for object detection are studied. Concerning the tree construction, we analyze the compromise between computational complexity reduction and accuracy. This will lead us to define two parts in the BPT: one providing accuracy and one representing the search space for the object detection task. Then we analyze and objectively compare various similarity measures for the tree construction. We conclude that different similarity criteria should be used for the part providing accuracy in the BPT and for the part defining the search space and specific criteria are proposed for each case. Then we discuss the object detection strategy based on BPT. The notion of node extension is proposed and discussed. Finally, several object detection examples illustrating the generality of the approach and its efficiency are reported.

Shape representation by a network of V4-like cells

Cells in extrastriate visual cortex have been reported to be selective for various configurations of local contour shape [Pasupathy, A., & Connor, C. E. (2001). Shape representation in area V4: Position-specific tuning for boundary conformation. The Journal of Neurophysiology, 86 (5), 2505-2519; Hegdé, J., & Van Essen, D. C. (2003). Strategies of shape representation in macaque visual area V2. Visual Neuroscience, 20 (3), 313-328]. Specifically, Pasupathy and Connor found that in area V4 most cells are strongly responsive to a particular local contour conformation located at a specific position on the object's boundary. We used a population of "V4-like cells"-units sensitive to multiple shape features modeled after V4 cell behavior-to generate representations of different shapes. Standard classification algorithms (earth mover's distance, support vector machines) applied to this population representation demonstrate high recognition accuracies classifying handwritten digits in the MNIST database and objects in the MPEG-7 Shape Silhouette database. We compare the performance of the V4-like unit representation to the "shape context" representation of Belongie et al. [Belongie, S., Malik, J., & Puzicha, J. (2002). Shape matching and object recognition using shape contexts. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24 (24), 509-522]. Results show roughly comparable recognition accuracies using the two representations when tested on portions of the MNIST database. We analyze the relative contributions of various V4-like feature sensitivities to recognition accuracy and robustness to noise - feature sensitivities include curvature magnitude, direction of curvature, global orientation of the contour segment, distance of the contour segment from object center, and modulatory effect of adjacent contour regions. Among these, local curvature appears to be the most informative variable for shape recognition. Our results support the hypothesis that V4 cells function as robust shape descriptors in the early stages of object recognition.

An efficient Earth Mover's Distance algorithm for robust histogram comparison

We propose EMD-L1: a fast and exact algorithm for computing the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) between a pair of histograms. The efficiency of the new algorithm enables its application to problems that were previously prohibitive due to high time complexities. The proposed EMD-L1 significantly simplifies the original linear programming formulation of EMD. Exploiting the L1 metric structure, the number of unknown variables in EMD-L1 is reduced to O(N) from O(N2) of the original EMD for a histogram with N bins. In addition, the number of constraints is reduced by half and the objective function of the linear program is simplified. Formally, without any approximation, we prove that the EMD-L1 formulation is equivalent to the original EMD with a L1 ground distance. To perform the EMD-L1 computation, we propose an efficient tree-based algorithm, Tree-EMD. Tree-EMD exploits the fact that a basic feasible solution of the simplex algorithm-based solver forms a spanning tree when we interpret EMD-L1 as a network flow optimization problem. We empirically show that this new algorithm has an average time complexity of O(N2), which significantly improves the best reported supercubic complexity of the original EMD. The accuracy of the proposed methods is evaluated by experiments for two computation-intensive problems: shape recognition and interest point matching using multidimensional histogram-based local features. For shape recognition, EMD-L1 is applied to compare shape contexts on the widely tested MPEG7 shape data set, as well as an articulated shape data set. For interest point matching, SIFT, shape context and spin image are tested on both synthetic and real image pairs with large geometrical deformation, illumination change, and heavy intensity noise. The results demonstrate that our EMD-L1-based solutions outperform previously reported state-of-the-art features and distance measures in solving the two tasks.

Shape classification using the inner-distance

Part structure and articulation are of fundamental importance in computer and human vision. We propose using the inner-distance to build shape descriptors that are robust to articulation and capture part structure. The inner-distance is defined as the length of the shortest path between landmark points within the shape silhouette. We show that it is articulation insensitive and more effective at capturing part structures than the Euclidean distance. This suggests that the inner-distance can be used as a replacement for the Euclidean distance to build more accurate descriptors for complex shapes, especially for those with articulated parts. In addition, texture information along the shortest path can be used to further improve shape classification. With this idea, we propose three approaches to using the inner-distance. The first method combines the inner-distance and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to build articulation invariant signatures for articulated shapes. The second method uses the inner-distance to build a new shape descriptor based on shape contexts. The third one extends the second one by considering the texture information along shortest paths. The proposed approaches have been tested on a variety of shape databases, including an articulated shape data set, MPEG7 CE-Shape-1, Kimia silhouettes, the ETH-80 data set, two leaf data sets, and a human motion silhouette data set. In all the experiments, our methods demonstrate effective performance compared with other algorithms.

Robust contour matching via the order-preserving assignment problem

A common approach to determining corresponding points on two shapes is to compute the cost of each possible pairing of points and solve the assignment problem (weighted bipartite matching) for the resulting cost matrix. We consider the problem of solving for point correspondences when the shapes of interest are each defined by a single, closed contour. A modification of the standard assignment problem is proposed whereby the correspondences are required to preserve the ordering of the points induced from the shapes' contours. Enforcement of this constraint leads to significantly improved correspondences. Robustness with respect to outliers and shape irregularity is obtained by required only a fraction of feature points to be matched. Furthermore, the minimum matching size may be specified in advance. We present efficient dynamic programming algorithms to solve the proposed optimization problem. Experiments on the Brown and MPEG-7 shape databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method relative to the standard assignment problem.

Shape representation and recognition through morphological curvature scale spaces

A multiscale, morphological method for the purpose of shape-based object recognition is presented. A connected operator similar to the morphological hat-transform is defined, and two scale-space representations are built, using the curvature function as the underlying one-dimensional signal. Each peak and valley of the curvature is extracted and described by its maximum and average heights and by its extent and represents an entry in the top or bottom hat-transform scale spaces. We demonstrate object recognition based on hat-transform scale spaces for three large data sets, a set of diatom contours, the set of silhouettes from the MPEG-7 database and the set of two-dimensional views of three-dimensional objects from the COIL-20 database. Our approach outperforms other methods for which comparative results exist.

Robustness of shape descriptors to incomplete contour representations

With inspiration from psychophysical researches of the human visual system, we propose a novel aspect and a method for performance evaluation of contour-based shape recognition algorithms regarding their robustness to incompleteness of contours. We use complete contour representations of objects as a reference (training) set. Incomplete contour representations of the same objects are used as a test set. The performance of an algorithm is reported using the recognition rate as a function of the percentage of contour retained. We call this evaluation procedure the ICR test. We consider three types of contour incompleteness, viz. segment-wise contour deletion, occlusion, and random pixel depletion. As an illustration, the robustness of two shape recognition algorithms to contour incompleteness is evaluated. These algorithms use a shape context and a distance multiset as local shape descriptors. Qualitatively, both algorithms mimic human visual perception in the sense that recognition performance monotonously increases with the degree of completeness and that they perform best in the case of random depletion and worst in the case of occluded contours. The distance multiset method performs better than the shape context method in this test framework.

WARP: accurate retrieval of shapes using phase of fourier descriptors and time warping distance

Effective and efficient retrieval of similar shapes from large image databases is still a challenging problem in spite of the high relevance that shape information can have in describing image contents. In this paper, we propose a novel Fourier-based approach, called WARP, for matching and retrieving similar shapes. The unique characteristics of WARP are the exploitation of the phase of Fourier coefficients and the use of the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance to compare shape descriptors. While phase information provides a more accurate description of object boundaries than using only the amplitude of Fourier coefficients, the DTW distance permits us to accurately match images even in the presence of (limited) phase shiftings. In terms of classical precision/recall measures, we experimentally demonstrate that WARP can gain, say, up to 35 percent in precision at a 20 percent recall level with respect to Fourier-based techniques that use neither phase nor DTW distance.

Contour detection based on nonclassical receptive field inhibition

We propose a biologically motivated method, called nonclassical receptive field (non-CRF) inhibition (more generally, surround inhibition or suppression), to improve contour detection in machine vision. Non-CRF inhibition is exhibited by 80% of the orientation-selective neurons in the primary visual cortex of monkeys and has been shown to influence human visual perception as well. Essentially, the response of an edge detector at a certain point is suppressed by the responses of the operator in the region outside the supported area. We combine classical edge detection with isotropic and anisotropic inhibition, both of which have counterparts in biology. We also use a biologically motivated method (the Gabor energy operator) for edge detection. The resulting operator responds strongly to isolated lines, edges, and contours, but exhibits weak or no response to edges that are part of texture. We use natural images with associated ground truth contour maps to assess the performance of the proposed operator for detecting contours while suppressing texture edges. Our method enhances contour detection in cluttered visual scenes more effectively than classical edge detectors used in machine vision (Canny edge detector). Therefore, the proposed operator is more useful for contour-based object recognition tasks, such as shape comparison, than traditional edge detectors, which do not distinguish between contour and texture edges. Traditional edge detection algorithms can, however, also be extended with surround suppression. This study contributes also to the understanding of inhibitory mechanisms in biology.