Appearance-based object recognition using multiple views

Object recognition from a single view fails when the available features are not sufficient to determine the identity of a single object, either because of similarity with another object or because of feature corruption due to clutter and occlusion. Active object recognition systems have addressed this problem successfully, but they require complicated systems with adjustable viewpoints that are not always available. In this paper we investigate the performance gain available by combining the results of a single view object recognition system applied to imagery obtained from multiple fixed cameras. In particular, we address performance in cluttered scenes with varying degrees of information about relative camera pose. We argue that a property common to many computer vision recognition systems, which we term a weak target error, is responsible for two interesting limitations of multi-view performance enhancement: the lack of significant improvement in systems whose single-view performance is weak, and the plateauing of performance improvement as additional multi-view constraints are added.