Recognizing visual categories with symbol-relational grammars and Bayesian networks

Abstract

A novel proposal for a compositional model for object recognition is presented. The proposed method is based on visual grammars and Bayesian networks. An object is modeled as a hierarchy of features and spatial relationships. The grammar is learned automatically from examples. This representation is automatically transformed into a Bayesian network. Thus, recognition is based on probabilistic inference in the Bayesian network representation. Preliminary results in recognition of natural objects are presented. The main contribution of this work is a general methodology for building object recognition systems which combines the expressivity of a grammar with the robustness of probabilistic inference.