Real-time framework for tensor-based image enhancement for object classification

Abstract

In many practical situations visual pattern recognition is vastly burdened by low quality of input images due to noise, geometrical distortions, as well as low quality of the acquisition hardware. However, although there are techniques of image quality improvements, such as nonlinear filtering, there are only few attempts reported in the literature that try to build these enhancement methods into a complete chain for multi-dimensional object recognition such as color video or hyperspectral images. In this work we propose a joint multilinear signal filtering and classification system built upon the multi-dimensional (tensor) approach. Tensor filtering is performed by the multi-dimensional input signal projection into the tensor subspace spanned by the best-rank tensor decomposition method. On the other hand, object classification is done by construction of the tensor sub-space constructed based on the Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition method applied to the prototype patters. In the experiments we show that the proposed chain allows high object recognition accuracy in the real-time even from the poor quality prototypes. Even more importantly, the proposed framework allows unified classification of signals of any dimensions, such as color images or video sequences which are exemplars of 3D and 4D tensors, respectively. The paper discussed also some practical issues related to implementation of the key components of the proposed system.