Is Rotation a Nuisance in Shape Recognition Qiuhong Ke, Yi Li qiuhong.ke@nicta.com.au, yi.li@cecs.anu.edu.au
Rotation
in closed contour recognition is a puzzling nuisance in most
algorithms. In this paper we address three fundamental issues brought
by rotation in shapes: 1) is alignment among shapes necessary? If the
answer is “no”, 2) how to exploit information in different rotations?
and 3) how to use rotation unaware local features for rotation aware shape recognition?
We
argue that the origin of these issues is the use of hand crafted
rotation-unfriendly features and measurements. Therefore our goal is to
learn a set of hierarchical features that describe all rotated versions
of a shape as a class, with the capability of distinguishing different
such classes. We propose to rotate shapes as many times as possible as
training samples, and learn the hierarchical feature representation by
effectively adopting a convolutional neural network. We further show
that our method is very efficient because the network responses of all
possible shifted versions of the same shape can be computed effectively
by re-using information in the overlapping areas. We tested the
algorithm on three real datasets: Swedish Leaves dataset, ETH-80 Shape,
and a subset of the recently collected Leafsnap dataset. Our approach
used the curvature scale space and outperformed the state of the art. Presentation poster