From skeletons to bone graphs: Medial abstraction for object recognition

Medial descriptions, such as shock graphs, have gained significant momentum in the shape-based object recognition community due to their invariance to translation, rotation, scale and articulation and their ability to cope with moderate amounts of within-class deformation. While they attempt to decompose a shape into a set of parts, this decomposition can suffer from ligature-induced instability. In particular, the addition of even a small part can have a dramatic impact on the representation in the vicinity of its attachment. We present an algorithm for identifying and representing the ligature structure, and restoring the non-ligature structures that remain. This leads to a bone graph, a new medial shape abstraction that captures a more intuitive notion of an objectpsilas parts than a skeleton or a shock graph, and offers improved stability and within-class deformation invariance. We demonstrate these advantages by comparing the use of bone graphs to shock graphs in a set of view-based object recognition and pose estimation trials.