A study on object recognition using morphological shape decomposition

Mathematical morphology based on set theory has been applied to various areas in image processing. Pitas proposed a object recognition algorithm using Morphological Shape Decomposition(MSD), and a new representation scheme called Morphological Shape Representation(MSR). The Pitas's algorithm is a simple and adequate approach to recognize objects that are rotated 45 degree-units with respect to the model object. However, this recognition scheme fails in case of random rotation. This disadvantage may be compensated by defining small angle increments. However, this solution may greatly increase computational complexity because the smaller the step makes more number of rotations to be necessary. In this paper, we propose a new method for object recognition based on MSD. The first step of our method decomposes a binary shape into a union of simple binary shapes, and then a new tree structure is constructed which ran represent the relations of binary shapes in an object. finally, we obtain the feature informations invariant to the rotation, translation, and scaling from the tree and calculate matching scores using efficient matching measure. Because our method does not need to rotate the object to be tested, it could be more efficient than Pitas's one. MSR has an intricate structure so that it might be difficult to calculate matching scores even for a little complex object. But our tree has simpler structure than MSR, and easier to calculated the matchng score. We experimented 20 test images scaled, rotated, and translated versions of five kinds of automobile images. The simulation result using octagonal structure elements shows 95% correct recognition rate. The experimental results using approximated circular structure elements are examined. Also, the effect of noise on MSR scheme is considered.