DETECTION OF TEXTURE-LESS OBJECTS BY LINE-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for tackling the problem of scalable object instance detection in the presence of clutter and occlusions. It gathers together advantages in respect of the state-of-the-art object detection approaches, being at the same time able to scale favorably with the number of models, computationally efficient and suited to texture-less objects as well. The proposed method has the following advantages: a) generality – it works for both texture-less and textured objects, b) scalability – it scales sub-linearly with the number of objects stored in the object database, and c) computational efficiency – it runs in near real-time. In contrast to the traditional affine-invariant detectors/descriptors which are local and not discriminative for texture-less objects, our method is based on line segments around which it computes semi-global descriptor by encoding gradient information in scale and rotation invariant manner. It relies on both texture and shape information and is, therefore, suited for both textured and texture-less objects. The descriptor is integrated into efficient object detection procedure which exploits the fact that the line segment determines scale, orientation and position of an object, by its two endpoints. This is used to construct several effective techniques for object hypotheses generation, scoring and multiple object reasoning; which are integrated in the proposed object detection procedure. Thanks to its ability to detect objects even if only one correct line match is found, our method allows detection of the objects under heavy clutter and occlusions. Extensive evaluation on several public benchmark datasets for texture-less and textured object detection, demonstrates its scalability and high effectiveness.