Sub-manifold distance based object recognition in clutter

Object recognition is challenging problem in computer vision due to appearance variation and presence of visual clutter and occlusions. Recently manifolds are thought to be fundamental for visual perception, and manifold learning algorithms are developed for discovering intrinsical features. Selective visual attention mechanism provides tools to reduce computation cost and avoid the influence of clutter background. In this paper, we described a new object recognition method, the submanifold distance (SMD) algorithm, which is induced by the visual attention mechanism to provide complex object recognition. Experiments with airport remote sensing images illustrated that our proposed algorithm can recognize complex objects accurately, robustly and quickly.