Pose recognition of articulated target based on ladar range image with elastic shape analysis

• Elastic shape analysis at arbitrary azimuth angles.
• Three kinds of moments are applied to compare the performance of pose recognition.
• Three kinds of invariants of elastic shape curves are analyzed.

Elastic shape analysis is introduced for pose recognition of articulated target which is based on small samples of ladar range images. Shape deformations caused by poses changes represented as closed elastic curves given by the square-root velocity function geodesics are used to quantify shape differences and the Karcher mean is used to build a model library. Three kinds of moments – Hu moment invariants, affine moment invariants, and Zernike moment invariants based on support vector machines (SVMs) – are applied to evaluate this approach. The experiment results show that no matter what the azimuth angles of the testing samples are, this approach is capable of achieving a high recognition rate using only 3 model samples with different carrier to noise ratios (CNR); the performance of this approach is much better than that of three kinds of moments based on SVM, especially under high noise conditions.