Multilevel evidence fusion for the recognition of three-dimensional objects. An overview of computer vision research at IBM T.J. Watson

Abstract

We describe the research activities of the Exploratory Computer Vision Group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center; this is a follow-up of the work reported previously. The focus of the ongoing work is the development of an experimental vision system for recognition of 3D objects. The thrust of the development of the vision system is to investigate techniques that may lead to a system that scales with the size of the problem; here, by the size of the problem, we mean the complexity of the scene - the number of object in the scene - and, the number of objects in the database - i.e., the number of objects that the system can recognize. Fusion is a recuring theme in our research. E.g., fusion of evidence about different features extracted from the data; fusion of information obtained at different points in the image; fusion of information extracted from high and low-resolution images. Therefore, rather than focussing on a particular aspect of our work, we present an overview of the work.