A FRAMEWORK FOR ACTIVELY SELECTING VIEWPOINTS IN OBJECT RECOGNITION

Object recognition problems in computer vision are often based on single image data processing. In various applications this processing can be extended to a complete sequence of images, usually received passively. In contrast, we propose a method for active object recognition, where a camera is selectively moved around a considered object. Doing so, we aim at reliable classification results with a clearly reduced amount of necessary views by optimizing the camera movement for the access of new viewpoints (viewpoint selection). Therefore, the optimization criterion is the gain of class discriminative information when observing the appropriate next image. We show how to apply an unsupervised reinforcement learning algorithm to that problem. Specifically, we focus on the modeling of continuous states, continuous actions and supporting rewards for an optimized recognition. We also present an algorithm for the sequential fusion of gathered image information and we combine all these components into a single framework. The experimental evaluations are split into results for synthetic and real objects with one- or two-dimensional camera actions, respectively. This allows the systematic evaluation of the theoretical correctness as well as the practical applicability of the proposed method. Our experiments showed that the proposed combined viewpoint selection and viewpoint fusion approach is able to significantly improve the recognition rates compared to passive object recognition with randomly chosen views.