Object detection by global contour shape

Abstract

We present a method for object detection based on global shape. A distance measure for elastic shape matching is derived, which is invariant to scale and rotation, and robust against nonparametric deformations. Starting from an over-segmentation of the image, the space of potential object boundaries is explored to find boundaries, which have high similarity with the shape template of the object class to be detected. An extensive experimental evaluation is presented. The approach achieves a remarkable detection rate of 91% at 0.2 false positives per image on a challenging data set.