Title: Improving motion-based object detection by incorporating object-specific knowledge

Authors: Alexander Bachmann, Thao Dang

Addresses: Institute for Measurement and Control, University of Karlsruhe (TH), 76 185 Karlsruhe, Germany. ' Institute for Measurement and Control, University of Karlsruhe (TH), 76 185 Karlsruhe, Germany

Abstract: In this contribution, we describe an object detection method that jointly considers low-level features and higher-level object knowledge. The method partitions a stereo image sequence into its most prominent moving groups with similar 3-dimensional (3D) motion and of consistent object-specific appearance. Image segmentation is performed by a Bayesian Maximum a Posteriori estimator assigning the most probable motion profile to each image point. The motion profiles of the elaborated motion models are iteratively refined by an object tracking procedure. Additionally, the probability of salient points to belong to an object category is considered in the probabilistic framework. Our expectation on spatial continuity of objects is expressed in a Markov Random Field (MRF) model.

Keywords: stereo vision; image segmentation; Markov random field; MRF; object classification; object appearance; motion estimation; object detection; moving objects; object recognition; driver assistance systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2008.018258

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2008 Vol.2 No.2, pp.258 - 276

Published online: 13 May 2008 *

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