Transinformation for active object recognition

This article develops an analogy between object recognition and the transmission of information through a channel based on the statistical representation of the appearances of 3D objects. This analogy provides a means to quantitatively evaluate the contribution of individual receptive field vectors, and to predict the performance of the object recognition process. Transinformation also provides a quantitative measure of the discrimination provided by each viewpoint, thus permitting the determination of the most discriminant viewpoints. As an application, the article develops an active object recognition algorithm which is able to resolve ambiguities inherent in a single-view recognition algorithm.