Partially Occluded Object Recognition Using Statistical Models

In this paper, we present a new Bayesian framework for partially occluded object recognition based on matching extracted local features on a one-to-one basis with object features. We introduce two different statistical models for occlusion: one model assumes that each feature in the model can be occluded independent of whether any other features are occluded, whereas the second model uses spatially correlated occlusion to represent the extent of occlusion. Using these models, the object recognition problem reduces to finding the object hypothesis with largest generalized likelihood. We develop fast algorithms for finding the optimal one-to-one correspondence between scene features and object features to compute the generalized likelihoods under both models. We conduct experiments illustrating the differences between the two occlusion models using different quantitative metrics. We also evaluate the recognition performance of our algorithms using examples extracted from object silhouettes and synthetic aperture radar imagery, and illustrate the performance advantages of our approach over alternative algorithms.