Color-blob-based COSFIRE filters for object recognition*

- We propose novel color-blob-based COSFIRE filters.
- They are effective for recognizing also objects with diffuse region boundaries.
- Such a filter models (a part of) an object by a specific arrangement of color blobs.
- The blobs contain information about the sizes and colors of the interior of regions.
- We achieve high recognition rates: GTSRB (98.94%) and butterfly (89.02%) data sets.

Most object recognition methods rely on contour-defined features obtained by edge detection or region segmentation. They are not robust to diffuse region boundaries. Furthermore, such methods do not exploit region color information. We propose color-blob-based COSFIRE (Combination of Shifted Filter Responses) filters to be selective for combinations of diffuse circular regions (blobs) in specific mutual spatial arrangements. Such a filter combines the responses of a certain selection of Difference-of-Gaussians filters, essentially blob detectors, of different scales, in certain channels of a color space, and at certain relative positions to each other. Its parameters are determined/learned in an automatic configuration process that analyzes the properties of a given prototype object of interest. We use these filters to compute features that are effective for the recognition of the prototype objects. We form feature vectors that we use with an SVM classifier. We evaluate the proposed method on a traffic sign (GTSRB) and a butterfly data sets. For the GTSRB data set we achieve a recognition rate of 98.94%, which is slightly higher than human performance and for the butterfly data set we achieve 89.02%. The proposed color-blob-based COSFIRE filters are very effective and outperform the contour-based COSFIRE filters. A COSFIRE filter is trainable, it can be configured with a single prototype pattern and it does not require domain knowledge.

Graphical Abstract332