Bag of shape descriptor using unsupervised deep learning for non-rigid shape recognition

Abstract

Highly discriminative feature expression for non-rigid shape recognition is an important and challenging task, which requires both abstract and robust shape descriptors. However, the majority of existing low-level descriptors are designed via hand-crafted, which are sensitive to local changes and larger deformation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a bag of shape descriptor based on unsupervised deep learning and Bag of Words (BoW) for shape recognition. Different from existing pipelines, our method is specially designed to learn high-level and hierarchical shape features from multi-scale context structures. It effectively overcomes obstacles, such as irregular topology, orientation ambiguity, and rigid or non-rigid transformation in the hierarchical learning of contour fragments. Specifically, by adopting an improved decomposing strategy, the shape can be decomposed to a series of valuable contour fragments, results in local to global feature learning. An unsupervised learning framework is also applied to the contour fragment for its feature expression based on the context structure and SSAE (Stack Sparse Auto Encode). In the process of shape representation, a high-level shape dictionary is learned by K-clustering to achieve discriminative feature coding. In addition, to achieve a compact and simplified shape representation, SPM (Spatial Pyramid Matching) is adopted by max-pooling, which effectively incorporates spatial layout information of the given shape. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public shape datasets comparing with the latest approaches. Our method also obtains high performance under the noisy and occlusion condition.