Hierarchical vibrations for part-based recognition of complex objects

We propose a technique for the recognition and segmentation of complex shapes in 2D images using a hierarchy of finite element vibration modes in an evolutionary shape search. The different levels of the shape hierarchy can influence each other, which can be exploited in top-down part-based image analysis. Our method overcomes drawbacks of existing structural approaches, which cannot uniformly encode shape variation and co-variation, or rely on training. We present results demonstrating that by utilizing a quality-of-fit function the model explicitly recognizes missing parts of a complex shape, thus allowing for categorization between shape classes. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.