Automatic extraction and recognition of shoe logos with a wide variety of appearance

A logo is a symbolic presentation that is designed not only to identify a product manufacturer but also to attract the attention of shoppers. Shoe logos are a challenging subject for automatic extraction and recognition using image analysis techniques because they have characteristics that distinguish them from those of other products, that is, there is much variation in the appearance of shoe logos. In this paper, we propose an automatic extraction and recognition method for shoe logos with a wide variety of appearanee using a limited number training samples. The proposed method employs maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) for the initial region extraction, an iterative algorithm for region grouping, and gradient features and a support vector machine for logo recognition. The results of performance evaluation experiments using a logo dataset that consists of a wide variety of appearance show that the proposed method achieves promising performance for both logo extraction and recognition.