Object Recognition using Local Affine Frames on Distinguished Regions

A novel approach to appearance based object recognition is introduced. The proposed method, based on matching of local image features, reliably recognises objects under very different viewing conditions. First, distinguished regions of data-dependent shape are robustly detected. On these regions, local affine frames are established using several affine invariant constructions. Direct comparison of photometrically normalised colour intensities in local, geometrically aligned frames results in a matching scheme that is invariant to piecewise-affine image deformations, but still remains very discriminative. The potential of the approach is experimentally verified on COIL-100 and SOIL-47 – publicly available image databases. On SOIL-47, 100 % recognition rate is achieved for single training view per object. On COIL-100, 99.9% recognition rate is obtained for 18 training views per object. Robustness to severe occlusions is demonstrated by only a moderate decrease of recognition performance in an experiment where half of each test image is erased.