Object Identification and Categorization with Visual Context: Hierarchical Graphical Model-based Approaches

The goal of object recognition is to label objects from images and to estimate the poses of the labeled objects. The field of object recognition has seen tremendous progress with successful applications in some specific domains such as face recognition. However, the current state-of-the-art methods show unsatisfactory results for more general object domains in complex natural environments with visual ambiguities. In this dissertation, we aim to enhance the object identification and categorization with theguide of visual context and graphical model. In this work, we propose a general framework for the cooperative object identification and object categorization. Examplars used in identification provide useful information of similarity in categorization. Conversely, novel objects are rejected in identification but the proposed object categorization can label the novel objects and segment them out for database update in identification. This work can be helpful to the engineers in artificial intelligence and machine vision.