Image recognition
The classical problem in computer vision, image processing and machine vision is that of determining whether or not the image data contains some specific object, feature, or activity. This task can normally be solved robustly and without effort by a human, but is still not satisfactorily solved in computer vision for the general case: arbitrary objects in arbitrary situations. The existing methods for dealing with this problem can at best solve it only for specific objects, such as simple geometric objects (e.g., polyhedrons), human faces, printed or hand-written characters, or vehicles, and in specific situations, typically described in terms of well-defined illumination, background, and pose of the object relative to the camera.
Different varieties of the recognition problem are described in the literature:
- Recognition: one or several pre-specified or learned objects or object classes can be recognized, usually together with their 2D positions in the image or 3D poses in the scene.
- Identification: An individual instance of an object is recognized. Examples: identification of a specific person's face or fingerprint, or identification of a specific vehicle.
- Detection: the image data is scanned for a specific condition. Examples: detection of possible abnormal cells or tissues in medical images or detection of a vehicle in an automatic road toll system. Detection based on relatively simple and fast computations is sometimes used for finding smaller regions of interesting image data which can be further analyzed by more computationally demanding techniques to produce a correct interpretation.
Several specialized tasks based on recognition exist, such as:
- Content-based image retrieval: finding all images in a larger set of images which have a specific content. The content can be specified in different ways, for example in terms of similarity relative a target image (give me all images similar to image X), or in terms of high-level search criteria given as text input (give me all images which contains many houses, are taken during winter, and have no cars in them).
- Pose estimation: estimating the position or orientation of a specific object relative to the camera. An example application for this technique would be assisting a robot arm in retrieving objects from a conveyor belt in an assembly line situation.
- Optical character recognition (or OCR): identifyingcharacters in images of printed or handwritten text, usually with a view to encoding the text in a format more amenable to editing or indexing (e.g. ASCII).
Other terms that are likely to be used are;
image recognition algorithms, database image recognition, image pattern recognition, blurry image recognition, comparsion for image recognition algorithms.