A distance measure and a feature likelihood map concept for scale-invariant model matching

This paper presents two approaches for evaluating multi-scale feature-based object models. Within the first approach, a scale-invariant distance measure is proposed for comparing two image representations in terms of multi-scale features. Based on this measure, the maximisation of the likelihood of parameterised feature models allows for simultaneous model selection and parameter estimation. The idea of the second approach is to avoid an explicit feature extraction step and to evaluate models using a function defined directly from the image data. For this purpose, we propose the concept of a feature likelihood map, which is a function normalised to the interval [0, 1], and that approximates the likelihood of image features at all points in scale-space. To illustrate the applicability of both methods, we consider the area of hand gesture analysis and show how the proposed evaluation schemes can be integrated within a particle filtering approach for performing simultaneous tracking and recognition of hand models under variations in the position, orientation, size and posture of the hand. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, and that real time performance can be obtained by pyramid implementations of the proposed concepts.