HoG based two-directional Dynamic Time Warping for handwritten word spotting

Face Recognition plays a very important role in numerous occasions based on visual security in recent days. The current methods of face recognition are to extract the different features of different faces to distinguish from others, so feature extraction has become a vital step in face recognition. For this reason, this paper presents a new fusion of local difference binary (LDB) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) for face recognition. We use LDB descriptor to extract the local pattern features of a face image. At the same time, the edge features of the original image are extracted by using HOG descriptor. The proposed new fusion of features improves the shortcomings of the low accuracy and avoids the problems that the dimension of the general fusion of features is too high. The experimental results on ORL and Yale face database verify the validity of the proposed fusion of features.

Face recognition is widely used in computer vision and in many other biometric applications where security is a major concern. The most common problem in recognizing a face arises due to pose variations, different illumination conditions and so on. The main focus of this paper is to recognize whether a given face input corresponds to a registered person in the database. Face recognition is done using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) technique in AT & T database with an inclusion of a real time subject to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. The feature vectors generated by HOG descriptor are used to train Support Vector Machines (SVM) and results are verified against a given test input. The proposed method checks whether a test image in different pose and lighting conditions is matched correctly with trained images of the facial database. The results of the proposed approach show minimal false positives and improved detection accuracy.

Maximum Curvature Method (MCM) is one of the promising methods for finger vein verification. MCM scans the curvature of the vein image profiles within a finger for feature extraction. However, the quality of the image can be poor due to variations in illumination and sensor conditions. Furthermore, traditional MCM matching of the vein pattern requires extensive processing time. To address these limitations, we propose an integrated Enhanced Maximum Curvature (EMC) method with Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor for finger vein verification. Unlike MCM, EMC incorporates an enhancement mechanism to extract small vein delineation that is hardly visible in the extracted vein patterns. Next, HOG is applied instead of image binarization to convert a two-dimensional vein image into a one-dimensional feature vector for efficient matching. The HOG descriptor is able to characterize the local spatial representation of a finger vein by capturing the gradient information effectively. The proposed method is evaluated based on two datasets namely the PKU Finger Vein Database (V4) and SDUMLA-HMT finger vein database. Experiments show promising verification results with equal error rates as low as 0.33 % for DB1 and 0.14 % for DB2 respectively, when EMC+HOG+SVM is applied.

Due to the advancements in digital technologies and social networking, image collections are growing exponentially. The important aim in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is to reduce the semantic gap issue that improves the performance of image retrieval. In this paper, the objective is achieved by introducing effective visual words fusion technique based on speeded-up robust features (SURF) and histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) feature descriptors. HOG is used to extract global features, whereas SURF is used for the extraction of local features. Global features are preferred for large-scale image retrieval, whereas local features perform better on those systems that support semantic queries with close visual appearance. Moreover, SURF is scale and rotation-invariant as compared to HOG descriptor and it works better for low illumination. On the contrary, HOG performs better for scene-recognition- or activity-recognition-based applications. In the proposed technique, visual words fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors is carried which performed better than features fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors as well as state-of-the-art CBIR techniques. The proposed technique based on visual words fusion gives classification accuracy of 98.40% using support vector machine while image retrieval accuracy of 80.61%. Qualitative and quantitative analyses performed on four standard image collections namely, Corel-1000, Corel-1500, Corel-5000, and Caltech-256 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique based on visual words fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors.

This paper presents a spatial layout recovery approach from single omnidirectional images. Vertical structures in the scene are extracted via classification from heterogeneous features computed at the superpixel level. Vertical surfaces are further classified according to their main orientation by fusing oriented line features, floor-wall boundary features and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) with a Random Forest classifier. Oriented line features are used to build an orientation map that considers the main vanishing points. The floor-wall boundary feature attempts to reconstruct the scene shape as if it were observed from a bird's-eye view. Finally, the HOG descriptors are aggregated per superpixel and summarize the gradient distribution at homogeneous appearance regions. Compared to existing methods in the literature which rely only on corners or lines, our method gains statistical support from multiple cues aggregated per superpixel which provide more robustness against noise, occlusion, and clutter.

The aim of our work is to investigate the use of two powerful feature descriptor known as Zernike moments and histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) for facial images extracted from a video sequence uttered ten times by four speakers where MLP neural network classifier is used to identify the correct speaker. We've demonstrated good recognition rate obtained for both Zernike moments and HOG descriptors.

Semi-autonomous operation of intelligent vehicles may require that such platforms maintain a basic situational awareness with respect to people, other vehicles and their intent. These vehicles should be able to operate safely among people and other vehicles, and be able to perceive threats and respond accordingly. A key requirement is the ability to detect people and vehicles from a moving platform. We have developed one such algorithm using video cameras mounted on the vehicle. Our person detection algorithms model the shape and appearance of the person instead of modeling the background. This algorithm uses histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), which model shape and appearance using image edge histograms. These HOG descriptors are computed on an exhaustive set of image windows, which are then classified as person/non-person using a support vector machine classifier. The image windows are computed using camera calibration, which provides approximate size of people with respect to their location in the imagery. The algorithm is flexible and has been trained for different domains such as urban, rural and wooded scenes. We have designed a sensor platform that can be mounted on a moving vehicle to collect video data of pedestrians. Using manually annotated ground-truth data we have evaluated the person detection algorithm in terms of true positive and false positive rates. This paper provides a detailed overview of the algorithm, describes the experiments conducted and reports on algorithmic performance.

The problem of detecting objects in images is solved by training the classifier by the descriptors constructed based on the local Radon transform of the gradient field of the image. The space of the Radon transform is considered as the Hough space accumulator in which projections are constructed. The set of local projections forms a descriptor of the region related to the object that is a generalization of the known histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) descriptor. The issues of the effect of the approximation of the Radon transform contribution function, the form of local normalization, and the number of directions in the projection histograms on the results of detecting pedestrians are investigated. The results produced by the proposed descriptor are compared with the results obtained using the HOG descriptor and convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on the ResNext and MobileNet architectures on the INRIA and CityScapes databases.

Many computer-vision and machine-learning applications in robotics, mobile, wearable devices, and automotive domains are constrained by their real-time performance requirements. This paper reports a dual-feature-based object recognition coprocessor that exploits both histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and Haar-like descriptors with a cell-based parallel sliding-window recognition mechanism. The feature extraction circuitry for HOG and Haar-like descriptors is implemented by a pixel-based pipelined architecture, which synchronizes to the pixel frequency from the image sensor. After extracting each cell feature vector, a cell-based sliding window scheme enables parallelized recognition for all windows, which contain this cell. The nearest neighbor search classifier is, respectively, applied to the HOG and Haar-like feature space. The complementary aspects of the two feature domains enable a hardware-friendly implementation of the binary classification for pedestrian detection with improved accuracy. A proof-of-concept prototype chip fabricated in a 65-nm SOI CMOS, having thin gate oxide and buried oxide layers (SOTB CMOS), with 3.22-mm2 core area achieves an energy efficiency of 1.52 nJ/pixel and a processing speed of 30 fps for $1024\times 1616$ -pixel image frames at 200-MHz recognition working frequency and 1-V supply voltage. Furthermore, multiple chips can implement image scaling, since the designed chip has image-size flexibility attributable to the pixel-based architecture.

Malware is one of the major threats on internet whose count is increasing rapidly every year in millions. Most of the time similar malware files are modified for creation of new variants and most of the existing technique are obfuscated. So, malware visualization using image helps to overcome this problem. Motivated by the visual similarities of malware, this paper presents the malware family classification using some texture-based features. HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient), LBP (Local Binary Pattern) and GIST features are used as feature descriptor. We have performed our experiment on 6370 samples of 15 different families. We have observed the highest accuracy of 98.73% using HOG descriptors by SVM classifier. This method shows better results than existing malware classification approaches.

The classification of benign and malignant lung nodules has great significance for the early detection of lung cancer, since early diagnosis of nodules can greatly increase patient survival. In this paper, we propose a novel classification method for lung nodules based on hybrid features from computed tomography (CT) images. The method fused 3D deep dual path network (DPN) features, local binary pattern (LBP)-based texture features and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)-based shape features to characterize lung nodules. DPN is a convolutional neural network which integrates the advantages of aggregated residual transformations (ResNeXt) for feature reuse and a densely convolutional network (DenseNet) for exploring new features. LBP is a prominent feature descriptor for texture classification, when combining with the HOG descriptor, it can improve the classification performance considerably. To differentiate malignant nodules from benign ones, a gradient boosting machine (GBM) algorithm is employed. We evaluated the proposed method on the publicly available LUng Nodule Analysis 2016 (LUNA16) dataset with 1004 nodules, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.9687 and accuracy of 93.78%. The promising results demonstrate that our method has strong robustness on the classification of nodule patterns by virtue of the joint use of texture features, shape features and 3D deep DPN features. The method has the potential to help radiologists to interpret diagnostic data and make decisions in clinical practice.

Rotation invariant HOG for object localization in web images

Extraction of global face appearance and local interior differences is essential for any face recognition application. This paper presents a novel framework for face recognition by combining two effective descriptors namely, Zernike moments (ZM) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG). ZMs are global descriptors that are invariant to image rotation, noise and scale. HOGs capture local details and are robust to illumination changes. Fusion of these two descriptors combines the merits of both local and global approaches and is effective against diverse variations present in face images. Further, as the processing time of HOG features is high owing to its large dimensionality, so, the study proposes to improve its performance by selecting only most discriminative HOG features (named discriminative HOG (DHOG)) for performing recognition. Efficacy of the proposed methods (DHOG, [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]) is tested on ORL, Yale and FERET databases. DHOG provides an improvement of 3% to 5% over the existing HOG approach. Recognition results achieved by [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are up to 15% and 18% higher respectively than those obtained with these descriptors individually. Performance is also analyzed on LFW face database and compared with recent and state-of-the-art methods.

Signature, a form of handwritten depiction, has been and is still widely used as a proof of the writer's identity/intent in human society. Online signatures represents the dynamic process of handwriting as a sequence of feature vectors along time. Dynamic time warping (DTW) has been popularly adopted to compare sequence data. A basic problem in using DTW for signature verification is how to estimate the difference between the feature vectors. Most previous researches made use of Euclidean distance (ED) for this problem. However, ED treats each feature equally and cannot take account of the correlations between features. To overcome this problem, this paper proposed Mahalanobis distance (MD) for signature verification. One key question is how to estimate covariance matrix in MD calculation. We formulate this problem in a learning framework and introduce two criterion for estimating the matrix. The first criteria aims at minimizing the signature difference for the same writer, while the second criteria try to maximize the signature difference between different writers while minimize the within-writer signature difference. We carried out experiments on the MCYT biometric database. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed MD based method achieved better results than ED based method.

This paper presents a new algorithm to better classify objects in videos. In our case, the objects are cars, vans, and people on the roads. First, in order to extract the moving objects more precisely, we have proposed a method for foreground extraction based on the contour differences between the video frame and the background image. Second, after we got the integrated moving object, we have proposed a new algorithm to extract better features from the object. The new algorithm is based on two extended Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor. We have improved HOG in two aspects: (a) selecting the gradient information from the moving objects and discarding the background gradient; (b) weighting every bin of gradient orientation histogram according to their significance within predefined area, in order to emphasize the important gradient information. We obtained Contour-Difference HOG (CD-HOG) from the first extension and Local-Main-Gradient-Orientation HOG (LMGO-HOG) from the second extended HOG. These extensions can cope with the cluttered background and make the features more distinguishable. Each of the extended HOG descriptors can produce a satisfying performance separately and an even better one if they are applied in cascade. From extensive evaluations, we showed the wonderful performance of our algorithm, and the accuracy rate of 94.04% can be achieved in some cases.