Sequential Monte Carlo for Bayesian matching of objects with occlusions

We consider the problem of locating instances of a known object in a novel scene by matching the fiducial features of the object. The appearance of the features and the shape of the object are modeled separately and combined in a Bayesian framework. In this paper, we present a novel matching scheme based on sequential Monte Carlo, in which the features are matched sequentially, utilizing the information about the locations of previously matched features to constrain the task. The particle representation of hypotheses about the object position allow matching in multimodal and cluttered environments, where batch algorithms may have convergence difficulties. The proposed method requires no initialization or predetermined matching order, as the sequence can be started from any feature. We also utilize a Bayesian model to deal with features that are not detected due to occlusions or abnormal appearance. In our experiments, the proposed matching system shows promising results, with performance equal to batch approaches when the target distribution is unimodal, while surpassing traditional methods under multimodal conditions. Using the occlusion model, the object can be localized from only a few visible features, with the nonvisible parts predicted from the conditional prior model.