Recognition of occluded shapes using size functions

Abstract

The robustness against occlusions and the ability to perform not only global matching, but also partial matching are investigated in computer vision in order to evaluate the performance of shape descriptors. In this paper we consider the size function shape descriptor, and we illustrate some results about size functions of occluded shapes. Theoretical results indicate that size functions are able to detect a partial matching between shapes by showing a common subset of cornerpoints. Experiments are presented which outline the potential of the proposed approach in recognition tasks in the presence of occlusions. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.