Abstract

This thesis presents a multiscale framework for the construction of affine invariant pattern recognition and registration methods. The idea in the introduced approach is to extend the given pattern to a set of affine covariant versions, each carrying slightly different information, and then to apply known affine invariants to each of them separately. The key part of the framework is the construction of the affine covariant set, and this is done by combining several scaled representations of the original pattern. The advantages compared to previous approaches include the possibility of many variations and the inclusion of spatial information on the patterns in the features.

The application of the multiscale framework is demonstrated by constructing several new affine invariant methods using different preprocessing techniques, combination schemes, and final recognition and registration approaches. The techniques introduced are briefly described from the perspective of the multiscale framework, and further treatment and properties are presented in the corresponding original publications. The theoretical discussion is supported by several experiments where the new methods are compared to existing approaches.

In this thesis the patterns are assumed to be gray scale images, since this is the main application where affine relations arise. Nevertheless, multiscale methods can also be applied to other kinds of patterns where an affine relation is present.

An additional application of one multiscale based technique in convexity measurements is introduced. The method, called multiscale autoconvolution, can be used to build a convexity measure which is a descriptor of object shape. The proposed measure has two special features compared to existing approaches. It can be applied directly to gray scale images approximating binary objects, and it can be easily modified to produce a number of measures. The new measure is shown to be straightforward to evaluate for a given shape, and it performs well in the applications, as demonstrated by the experiments in the original paper.