MSER-Vertical Sobel for Vehicle Logo Detection

Detecting a vehicle logo is the first step before realizing the identity of the logo. However, the detection of logos can pose difficulties due to various factors, including logo variations, differing scales and orientations, background interference, varying lighting conditions, and partial obstruction. This paper presents a vehicle logo detection method using hand-crafted features. We used a combination of Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) and Vertical Sobel. We combine vertical Sobel with MSER to overcome MSER's limitation in recognizing objects of different sizes. These two features are merged using a closing morphology operation to form blobs selected as logo candidate areas. Moreover, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is implemented to choose a logo area by analyzing each candidate's Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG). The proposed method was compared with other methods by implementing them on the same dataset. The significant advantage of using MSER-Vertical Sobel is its fast computation time. It is faster than other approaches that use non-handcrafted features. The test results show that the MSER-Vertical Sobel can achieve high accuracy and the fastest computation time.