Object Categorization Based on Biologically Inspired Features Using a Hierarchical Categorization System*

The computerized modeling of cognitive visual information has been a research field of great interest in the past several decades. The research field is interesting not only from a biological perspective, but also from an engineering point of view when systems are developed that aim to achieve similar goals as biological cognitive systems. This paper briefly describes a general framework for the extraction and systematic storage of low-level visual features, and demonstrates its applicability in image categorization using a linear categorization algorithm originally developed for the characterization of text documents. The performance of the algorithm together with the newly developed feature array was evaluated using the Caltech 101 database. Extremely high (95% and higher) success rates were achieved when distinguishing between pairs of categories using independent test images. Efforts were made to scale up the number of categories using a hierarchical, branch-and-bound decision tree, with limited success.