Deformable structural models

A hierarchical framework for the recognition of complex deformable shapes is developed. In extension to traditional approaches an additional layer of control is introduced to guide the local search for subshapes. This is realized by incorporating knowledge about their spatial relationships. A new technique of expectation maps is applied to allow simultaneous shape searches to influence each other. Furthermore, these maps are used to assess spatial coherence among shapes. Thus, the occurrence of well matched shapes at some places in the image may suggest searches for related shapes at other positions. An application to classify species in ant image databases shows promising initial results.