FORMS: A Flexible Object Recognition and Modelling System

Abstract. We describe a flexible object recognition and modelling system (FORMS) which represents and recognizes animate objects from their silhouettes. This consists of a model for generating the shapes of animate objects which gives a formalism for solving the inverse problem of object recognition. We model all objects at three levels of complexity: (i) the primitives, (ii) the mid-grained shapes, which are deformations of the primitives, and (iii) objects constructed by using a grammar to join mid-grained shapes together. The deformations of the primitives can be characterized by principal component analysis or modal analysis. When doing recognition the representations of these objects are obtained in a bottom-up manner from their silhouettes by a novel method for skeleton extraction and part segmentation based on deformable circles. These representations are then matched to a database of prototypical objects to obtain a set of candidate interpretations. These interpretations are ve...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Song Chun Zhu, Alan L. Yuille
• Keywords: Animate Objects, Computer Vision, ICCV 1995, Mid-grained Shapes, Object Recognition