Exploiting feature dynamics for active object recognition

This paper describes a new approach to object recognition for active vision systems that integrates information across multiple observations of an object. The approach exploits the order relationship between successive frames to derive a classifier based on the characteristic motion of local features across visual sweeps. This motion model reveals structural information about the object that can be exploited for recognition. The main contribution of this paper is a recognition system that extends invariant local features (shape contexts) into the time domain by integration of a motion model. Evaluations on one standardized and one custom collected dataset from the humanoid robot in our laboratory demonstrate that the motion model allows higher-quality hypotheses about object categories quicker than a baseline system that treats object views as unordered streams of images.