10

An Overview of Advances of Pattern

Recognition Systems in Computer Vision
Kidiyo Kpalma and Joseph Ronsin
IETR (Institut d'Electronique et de Tlcommunications de Rennes)
UMR CNRS 6164
Groupe Image et Tldtection
Institut National des Sciences Appliques (INSA) de Rennes

Open Access Database www.i-techonline.com

1. Introduction
First of all, let's give a tentative answer to the following question: what is pattern
recognition (PR)? Among all the possible existing answers, that which we consider being
the best adapted to the situation and to the concern of this chapter is: "pattern recognition is
the scientific discipline of machine learning (or artificial intelligence) that aims at classifying
data (patterns) into a number of categories or classes". But what is a pattern?
In 1985, Satoshi Watanabe (Watanabe, 1985) defined a pattern as "the opposite of chaos; it is
an entity, vaguely defined, that could be given a name." In other words, a pattern can be any
entity of interest which one needs to recognise and/or identify: it is so worthy that one
would like to know its name (its identity). Examples of patterns are: a pixel in an image, a
2D or 3D shape, a typewritten or handwritten character, the gait of an individual, a gesture,
a fingerprint, a footprint, a human face, the voice of an individual, a speech signal, ECG
time series, a building, a shape of an animal.
A pattern recognition system (PRS) is an automatic system that aims at classifying the input
pattern into a specific class. It proceeds into two successive tasks: (1) the analysis (or
description) that extracts the characteristics from the pattern being studied and (2) the
classification (or recognition) that enables us to recognise an object (or a pattern) by using
some characteristics derived from the first task.
The classification scheme is usually based on the availability of the training set that is a set
of patterns already having been classified. This learning strategy is termed as supervised
learning in opposition to the unsupervised learning. A learning strategy is said to be
unsupervised if for the system is not given an a priori information about classes; it
establishes the classes itself based on the regularities of the features. Features are those
measurements which are extracted from a pattern to represent it in the features space. In
other words, pattern analysis enables us to use some features to describe and represent it
instead of using the pattern itself. Also called characteristics, attributes or signatures the
recognition efficiency and reliability are dependent on their choice.
Pattern recognition constitutes an important tool in various application domains, but
unfortunately, that is not always an easy task to carry out. Commonly, one can encounter
four major methodologies in PRSs; which are: statistical approach, syntactic approach,
Source: Vision Systems: Segmentation and Pattern Recognition, ISBN 987-3-902613-05-9,
Edited by: Goro Obinata and Ashish Dutta, pp.546, I-Tech, Vienna, Austria, June 2007

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template matching, neural networks. In this chapter, our remarks and details will be
directed, mainly, towards systems based on the statistical approach since it is the more
commonly used in practice.
1.1 Statistical approach
Typically, statistical PRSs are based on statistics and probabilities. In these systems, features
are converted to numbers which are placed into a vector to represent the pattern. This
approach is most intensively used in practice because it is the simplest to handle.
In this approach, patterns to be classified are represented by a set of features defining a
specific multidimensional vector: by doing so, each pattern is represented by a point in the
multidimensional features space. To compare patterns, this approach uses measures by
observing distances between points in this statistical space. For more details and deeper
considerations on this approach, one can refer to (Jain, 2000) that presents a review of
statistical pattern recognition approaches.
1.2 Syntactic approach
Also called structural PRSs, these systems are based on the relation between features. In this
approach, patterns are represented by structures which can take into account more complex
relations between features than numerical feature vectors used in statistical PRSs
(Venguerov & Cunningham, 1998). Patterns are described in hierarchical structure
composed of sub-structures composed themselves of smaller sub-structures.
As explained in (Sonka et al., 1993), the shape is represented with a set of predefined
primitives called the codebook and the primitives are called codewords. For example, given
the codewords on the left of figure 1, the shape on the right of the figure can be represented
as the following string S, when starting from the pointed codeword on the figure:
S=dbabcbabdbabcbab

(1)

The system parses the set of extracted features using a kind of predefined grammar. If the
whole features extracted from a pattern can be parsed to the grammar then the system has
recognised the pattern. Unfortunately, grammar-based syntactic pattern recognition is
generally very difficult to handle.
a
a
b

b
d

b
b

c
d
c

b
c

d
a

b
Starting codeword

Fig. 1. Example of syntactic description features

1.3 Template matching
Template matching approach is widely used in image processing to localize and identify
shapes in an image. In this approach, one looks for parts in an image which match a

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template (or model). In visual pattern recognition, one compares the template function to
the input image by maximising the spatial cross-correlation or by minimising a distance:
that provides the matching rate.
The strategy of this approach is: for each possible position (in the image), each possible
rotation, or each other geometric transformation of the template, compare each pixels
neighbourhood to this template. After computing the matching rate for each possibility,
select the largest one, that exceeds a predefined threshold. It is a very expensive operation
while dealing with big templates and/or large sets of images (Brunelli & Poggio, 1997 ;
Roberts & Everson, 2001 ; Cole et al., 2004). Figures 2 illustrate a pattern recognition based
on the template matching approach. Figure 2.a is the input image I, Fig.1.b represents two
templates (K representing letter 'K' and P letter 'P'). Figures 2.c and 2.d represent,
respectively, the normalized cross-correlation of I with K and the normalized crosscorrelation of I with P. On these two images, the cross-correlation peaks surrounded by a
circle indicate the location of the most matching letter in the input image. On figure 2.e, we
have superposed the templates on the input image, accordingly to the coordinates of
corresponding correlation peaks. For this study, we didn't take the rotation and the scaling
into account: from the result, it clearly appears that this approach retrieves only the shape
that matches perfectly the model (size and rotation). This explains why only one 'K' (the
rotated one) and only one 'P' (the down-scaled one) are recognised.

b)

a)

c)

d)

e)

Fig. 2. Illustration of the template matching method

1.4 Neural networks
Typically, an artificial neural network (ANN) is a self-adaptive trainable process that is able
to learn to resolve complex problems based on available knowledge. A set of available data
is supplied to the system so that it finds the most adapted function among an allowed class
of functions that matches the input.
An ANN-based system simulates how the biological brain works: it is composed of
interconnected processing elements (PE) that simulate neurones. Using this interconnection
(or synapse), each neurone (or PE) can pass information to another. As can be seen on figure
3, these interconnections are not necessarily binary (on or off) but they may have varying
weights defined by the weight matrix W: the weight applied to a connection results from the
learning process and indicates the importance of the contribution of the preceding neurone

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in the information being passed to the following neurone. Figure 3 shows a simple neural
network representing the Perceptron as defined by Frank Rosenblatt in 1957. On this
example, the output Outj (j=1 or 2) is defined by a weighted combination of the inputs. In
the reference (Abdi, 1994), the author presents a nice introduction to ANNs.
Besides these approaches, one can encounter other methodologies like those based on fuzzyset theoretic, genetic algorithms. In some applications, hybrid methodologies combine
different aspects of these approaches to design more complex PRSs. In (Liu et al., 2006), the
authors present an overview of pattern recognition approaches and the classification of their
associated applications.

In1
w12

w11
Out1

w21
In2
w22
w31

Out2
w32

In3
Input
layer

Output
layer

Fig. 3. Example of neural network

In the remainder of this chapter, we will develop three sections. First, we present a generic
scheme of a pattern recognition system. Then we give an overview of the advances of
different PRSs and some examples of their applications. Last, as an illustration, we present a
specific application example based on our MSGPR (Multi-Scale curve smoothing for
Generalised Pattern Recognition) description method. As presented further, MSGPR is a
multi-scale method we have developed for describing planar objects by analysing their
boundary.

2. A generic scheme of a pattern recognition system

From now, our concerns will be primarily focused on PRSs in computer vision. Commonly,
in this field, the input is one or more images and the output is one or more images with
eventually, some semantic and/or textual entities.
In figure 4, we represent a generic scheme of a (statistical) PRS. This figure summarises the
principal aspects of a PRS in computer vision. On this figure the two successive tasks can be
observed: on one hand, the analysis/description task (see n on figure 4) and on the other
hand the classification/recognition task (see o on figure 4).
After features are extracted, the features selection that may follow aims at reducing the
number of features to be provided to the classification process. Features that are likely to

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improve discrimination are retained and the others are discarded. During this processing,
higher level features can be derived by combining and/or transforming low level features,
e.g. by applying the so called independent component analysis (ICA) (Roberts & Everson,
2001): this operation thus leads to the reduction of the dimension of the feature space.
These features must be as discriminative as possible to reduce false alarms due to
misclassification during the second task. Efficient features must also present some essential
properties such as:

translation invariance: whichever be the location of the pattern, it must give exactly the
same features,

rotation invariance: extracted features must not vary with the rotation of the pattern,

scale invariance: scale changing must not affect the extracted features,

noise resistance: features must be as robust as possible against noise i.e. they must be
the same whichever be the strength of the noise that affects the pattern,

statistically independent: two features must be statistically independent,

compact. The number of retained features is not too large. It must also be fast in
extraction time and in matching,

reliable: as long as one deals with the same pattern, the extracted features must remain
the same.

Image
sensor

Analysis/Description
Features
extraction

Models
Features
database

Features
selection

Off-line
Learning

Images
database

Similarity measure
(matching)

Interpretation

Classification/Recognition

Fig. 4. A generic PRS scheme

During the classification task, the system uses the features extracted in the analysis stage
from each of the patterns to compare. As illustrated on figure 4, features are extracted from
the patterns of the database during an off-line learning processing. This enables to create
features database before each query occurs: by proceeding this way, one doesn't need to
compute features of models at each query. To compare two patterns, the system uses a
metric that measures a kind of distance (the similarity or the dissimilarity) to assess how
similar are two patterns: it is an expression of the distance between the points representing
the two patterns in the features space. This procedure gives the similarity index or similarity
score between two patterns. In some cases (probably the most natural way), the similarity
index is given in terms of a rate varying from 0% for totally different patterns to 100% for
perfectly similar patterns (Kpalma & Ronsin, 2006). Some commonly used metrics are
Minkowski distance, cosine distance, Hausdorff distance, Mahalanobis Distance (Veltkamp

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& Hagedoorn, 2001 ; Zhang, 2002) or city block distance and Euclidian distance that are
particular Minkowski distances. The following paragraph illustrates formalism of some of
them.
Let VA(a1, a2,, aN) and VB(b1, b2,, bN) be the features vectors representing patterns A and
B in an N-dimensional features space ; examples of distances are defined by the following
expressions.
City block distance (d1)
N

d1 (VA , VB ) = a i b i

(2)

i =1

Euclidian distance (d2)

N

d 2 ( VA , VB ) =

(a i b i )2

(3)

i =1

Cosine distance (d3)

N

d 2 (VA , VB ) = 1 cos() = 1

a i bi

VA VBT
VA VB

=1

(4)

i =1

i =1

i =1

(a i )2 (b i )2

where is the angle between the two vectors VA and VB.

Figure 5 shows an example of three vectors V, U and W represented in 2D space. As it can
be seen on this example the value of the similarity/dissimilarity depends on the used
distance (metric). In the tables on this figure, d3 gives the same distance between U and W,
on one hand, and between V and W, on the other hand, (d3(U,W)= d3(V,W)=0.15) but it
gives 0 distance between U and V. This leads to confusions, because a distance of 0 that also
means vectors equality, may lead to the decision that the patterns to be compared are the
same. A particular attention must be paid while choosing a distance. In (Kpalma & Ronsin,
2006) we have proposed a cosine-based distance that enables to remove the ambiguity of the
distance between collinear vectors. Since the obtained distance varies from a metric to
another, one must be very careful and be sure to use the same metric during all the
procedure.
d1

3.50

4.50

7.00

U=(4.5, 6.0)T

V
V=(6.0, 8.0)T

W=(5.0, 2.0)T

d2

d3

2.50

4.03

0.15

6.08

0.15

V
0

Fig. 5. Examples of similarity measures between two vectors depending on the chosen metric

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3. Pattern recognition applications and an overview of advances

Pattern recognition is studied in many fields, including psychology, ethnology, forensics,
marketing, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, agriculture, computer science, data mining,
document classification, multimedia, biometrics, surveillance, medical imaging,
bioinformatics and internet search. Pattern recognition helps to resolve various problems
such as: optical character recognition (OCR), zip-code recognition, bank check recognition,
industrial parts inspection, speech recognition, document recognition, face recognition, gait
recognition or gesture recognition, fingerprint recognition, image indexing or retrieval,
image segmentation (by pixels classification)...
In (Pal & Pal, 2002) number of experts address the problem of pattern recognition and
present basic concepts involved. One can find the evolution of pattern recognition ; this
enables the reader to establish a categorisation of the existing PRSs according to the used
methodology and the application.
In (Kuncheva, 2004), the author addresses the non-trivial concept of forgetting in the
challenging field of machine learning in non-stationary changing environments. This point
of view is essential in on-line diagnosis when using medical imaging: indeed while dealing
with PR in real world, the pattern being studied is subject to variation with respect to time.
A possible solution is to continuously update the classifier. By doing so, the classifier must
be able to "forget" the outdated knowledge. The idea behind this concept is to design an
adaptive training system that is able to self-adapt itself accordingly to the changing of the
pattern being studied.
Pattern recognition is also applied in more complex fields like data mining (DM) also called
knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD). This emerging topic includes the process of
automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. As
defined in (Frawley et al., 1992), the DM "is the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously
unknown, and potentially useful information from data. Given a set of facts (data) F, a
language L, and some measure of certainty C, we define a pattern as a statement S in L that
describes relationships among a subset FS of F with a certainty c, such that S is simpler (in
some sense) than the enumeration of all facts in FS. A pattern that is interesting (according to
a user-imposed interest measure) and certain enough (again according to the users criteria)
is called knowledge. The output of a program that monitors the set of facts in a database and
produces patterns in this sense is discovered knowledge".
3.1 Pattern recognition in robotics
The applications of PRSs in robotics are permanent. More recently, Mario E. Munich and his
co-authors (Munich et al., 2006) have presented a summary on this subject. In this paper,
they show that recent advances in computer vision have given rise to a robust and invariant
visual pattern recognition technology based on extracting a set of characteristic features
from an image. With visual pattern recognition systems, a robot may acquire the ability to
explore its environment without user intervention ; it may be able to build a reliable map of
the environment and localize itself in the map: this will help the robot achieve full
autonomy. Examples of robots using visual pattern recognition approaches are the Sonys
AIBO ERS-7, Yaskawas SmartPal, and Phillips iCat.
In robotics, visual servoing or visual tracking is of high interest. For example visual tracking
allows, robots to extract themselves the content of the observed scene as a human observer
can do it by changing his different perspectives and scales of observation. Franois

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Chaumette (Chaumette, 1994), has addressed the problem and proposed some solutions in a
closed loop system based on vision-based task. In (Chaumette, 2004), he proposes various
visual features based on the image moments to characterise planar objects in YLVXDOVHUYRLQJ
VFKHPHV
3.2 Pattern recognition in biometrics
The biometric authentication takes increasing place in various applications ranging from
personal applications like access control to governmental applications like biometric
passport and fight against terrorism. In this applications domain, one measures and
analyses human physical (or physiological or biometric) and behavioural characteristics for
authentication (or recognition) purposes. Examples of biometric characteristics include
fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, facial patterns and hand geometry measurement, DNA
(Deoxyribonucleic acid). Examples of biometric behavioural characteristics include
signature, gait and typing patterns. This helps to identify individual people in forensics
applications.
Reference (Jain et al., 2004a) is an interesting starting point to pattern recognition
approaches and systems in biometrics. This paper gives a brief overview of the field of
biometrics and summarizes some of its advantages, disadvantages, strengths, limitations,
and related privacy concerns. In (Jain et al., 2004b), the authors also address the problem of
the accuracy of the authentication and that of the individual's right to the security, to the
privacy and to the anonymity.
The reader is encouraged to have a look on the article presented in (Jain & Pankanti, 2006).
The authors of this article address a problem of identity steeling through a true story and
then they present some current or forthcoming systems based on biometric PRSs that will
help prevent identity steeling.
3.3 Content-based image retrieval
Content-based image retrieval systems aim at automatically describing images by using
their own content: the colour, the texture and the shape or their combination. As explained
in (Sikora, 2001; Bober, 2001), image retrieval has became an active research and
development domain since the early 1970s. During the last decade the research on image
retrieval became of high importance. The most frequent and common means for image
retrieval is to index them with text keywords. If this technique seems to be simple, it
becomes rapidly laborious and fastidious while facing large volumes of images. On the
other hand, images are rich in content so, to overcome difficulties due to the huge data
volume, the content-based image retrieval emerged as a promising mean for retrieving
images and browsing large images databases
With the simultaneous rapid growth of computer systems and the growing huge availability
of digital data, such pattern recognition systems become increasingly necessary to help
browse databases and find the desired information within a reasonable time limit.
Accordingly to this observation, systems like CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval), QBIC
(Query By Image Content), QBE (Query By Example) need more attention and take more
and more place in the concerns of the researchers (Mokhtarian et al., 1996 ; Trimeche et al.,
2000 ; Veltkamp & Tanase, 2001 ; Veltkamp & Hagedoorn, 2001). With query by example,
the user supplies a query image and the PRS finds images of the database that are most

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similar to it based on various low-level features like colour, texture or shape. With query by
sketch, the user draws roughly the image he is looking for and the PRS locates images of the
database that match the best the sketch. In the reference (Veltkamp & Tanase, 2001), are
reported various CBIR systems. After a brief description of CBIR system, the authors present
different kinds of existing systems along with the features involved.
In the context of image indexing, CBIR systems use content information as summarised in
figure 6. An image can then be described by using features derived from colour, texture,
shape or a combination of those features.

Input
image

Shape

Colour

Texture

Fig. 6. Content-based image description features

3.3.1 Colour-based features
Colour features are based on colour distribution inside the image. There are many
approaches to define colour-based features: dominant colour, colour histogram or colour
space. Various colour representation space exist: red-green-blue (RGB) space, huesaturation-value (HSV) space or those based on the international commission on
illumination (or CIE: commission internationale de l'clairage) CIELUV space, CIELAB space,
CIEXYZ space. From these representations, features are defined based on the colour
histograms. There are different types of colour histograms depending on how the colour
space is partitioned. The fixed binning for all images based on scalar linear quantisation, the
adaptive binning based on an adaptive quantisation and the clustered binning based on the
concept of vector quantisation. Some particular distances between histograms or main
modes of histograms are used to measure the similarity/dissimilarity between colour
histograms: Euclidian distance, histogram quadratic distance, histogram intersection
distance (Smith & Chang, 1996), Jeffrey divergence, Kullback-Leibler divergence earth
mover's distance. In the current description of the colour within MPEg-7, the following
colour spaces are supported: RGB, YCrCb, HSV, hue-min-max-difference (HMMD), Linear
transformation matrix with reference to RGB and monochrome (Martinez, 2004).

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3.3.2 Texture-based features

For each pixel of the image, one can determine the histogram of grey levels in predefined
neighbouring region centred on that pixel. Distribution of pairs of grey levels for a given
spatial relation on pixels can be observed in co-occurrence matrix M(i,j) (Haralick, 1973).
Examples of various grey level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) features defined by Haralick
are based on these co-occurrence matrices. In Table 1, by considering a textured image with
grey levels ranging from 0 to L-1, we present some of these texture features.
L 1 L 1

ASM =

Angular Second Moment

i =0

M(i, j)2
j=0

L 1 L 1

C=

Contrast

i =0

(i j) 2 M(i, j)
j=0

L 1 L 1

IDM =

Inverse Difference Moment

i =0

j=0

L 1 L 1

H=

Homogeneity

i =0

M(i, j)

1 + (i j) 2
M(i, j)

1+ i j
j=0

L 1 L 1

E = M (i, j ) ln( M (i, j ))

Entropy

i =0 j =0

Table 1. Example of textures features

3.3.3 Shape-based features
There are many approaches (Coster & Chermant, 1985 ; Kpalma, 1994 ; Sossa, 2000), to
estimates some properties of the shapes. We present, below, some samples of these
properties. Figure 7 shows various shapes and the corresponding measures of their
properties.
The elongation (EL) indicates how long is the pattern relatively to its width. It is defined by
the following expression:
EL = 100

m
M

(5)

m and M being, respectively, the smallest and the largest eigenvalues of the inertia matrix
of the shape. Also called elongation factor or elongation coefficient, this parameter varies
from 0% for long but thick shapes to 100% for isotropic shape (see Fig. 7.e and Fig. 7.f).
The compactness (CO) measures how branchy or how tortuous is the shape. For a given 2D
shape, let A be the enclosed area and P the perimeter ; the compactness is defined by:
CO = 100

4A
P2

(6)

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The compactness varies from 0% for very branchy or very tortuous shapes to 100% for
compact shapes like a circle (see Fig. 7.a and Fig. 7.c).
The mass deficit coefficient (MD) measures the area variation between the shape and the
minimum enclosing circle centred on the centre of gravity of the shape. For a shape with
area A, let SC be the area of the circumscribed circle, then the mass deficit area is defined as
follows:
MD = 100

SC A
SC

(7)

The mass excess coefficient (ME) measures the area variation between the shape and the
maximum enclosed circle centred on the centre of gravity of the shape. For a shape with
area A, let SI be the area of the inscribed circle, then the mass deficit area is defined as
follows:
ME = 100

A SI
A

(8)

The two previous parameters, give another estimation of the compactness: they vary from
0% for compact shapes (e.g. a circle) to 100% for spread out tortuous patterns (see Fig. 7.a
and Fig. 7.d)
The isotropic factor (IF) tells how isotropic is the pattern: it indicates how regular is the
shape around its centre of gravity. For a given 2D shape, let Rm be its minimal radius and RM
its maximal radius then the IF parameter is defined by:
IF = 100

Rm
RM

(9)

The isotropic factor varies from 0% for anisotropic shapes to 100% for isotropic shapes like a
circle (see Fig. 7.a and Fig. 7.d).

EL=100.0%
CO=100.0%
MD= 0.0%
ME= 0.0%
IF=100.0%
a)

EL=100.0%
CO= 59.6%
MD= 11.6%
ME= 4.3%
IF= 92.0%
b)

EL=100.0%
CO= 64.5%
MD= 3.8%
ME= 10.9%
IF= 92.6%
c)

EL=100.0%
CO= 9.8%
MD= 50.2%
ME= 77.3%
IF= 33.7%
d)

EL=
CO=
MD=
ME=
IF=

44.4%
75.4%
41.2%
47.6%
55.5%
e)

EL=100.0%
CO= 78.5%
MD= 36.3%
ME= 21.4%
IF= 70.7%
f)

Fig. 7. Various shapes and examples of shape-based features

In the context of shape description, D. Zhang summarized very well the situation (Zhang &
Lu, 2004). Figure 8 shows the flowchart of shape description approaches in a pattern
recognition system. Typically, there are two kinds of approaches in shape description: the
contour-based approach and the region-based one.

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Shape description

Region-based features

Global

Structural

Contour-based features

Structural

Area

Compactness

Compactness

Convex Hull

Eccentricity

Media Axis

Euler Number

Global

Core

B-Spline
Chain code
Invariants
Polygons

Geometric
Moments
Legendre
Moments
Shape Matrix
Zernike Moments

Eccentricity
Circularity
Elastic matching
Elongation
Fourier
descriptors
Scale space
descriptors
Wavelet
descriptors

Fig. 8. A classification of shape description approaches

Contour-based approach
Contour-based approaches extract shape features from the only contour in two possible
ways: structural or global. In the structural approach, the contour is divided into subsections to generate strings or trees according to a particular syntax. The similarity between
two shapes is then measured by matching their strings or their trees.
While dealing with the contour in the global way, an appropriate technique is used to
extract primitive features from the integral contour: eccentricity, perimeter, circularity
From these basic features, one defines a multidimensional vector representing the shape in
the features space. From this representation, the similarity measure or the matching of two
shapes is done by directly measuring a specific distance between their feature vectors.
For contour-based shape description, MPEG-7 working group (Bober, 2001 ; Martinez, 2004)
has selected the so-called Curvature Scale-Space (CSS) representation which is proved to
capture perceptually meaningful features of the shape (Mokhtarian et al., 1996 ; Matusiak &
Daoudi, 1998 ; Lindenberg, 1998 ; Mokhtarian & Bober, 2003).
A CSS image, represented on figure 9, is a multi-scale organization of the invariant local
features of a 2-D contour: it consists of the curvature zero-crossing points recovered from
the contour at multiple scales of resolution. The features extracted from the CSS image
consist of the coordinates of the peaks of the CSS image. Scale decreasing is obtained
through progressive low-pass filtering by convolutions of a parametric representation of the

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181

contour data with Gaussian filters of increasing width. This representation carries a number
of important properties, such as:

it captures very well characteristic features of the shape, enabling similarity-based

retrieval,

it reflects properties of the perception of human visual system and offers good
generalization,

it is robust to non-rigid motion,

it is robust to partial occlusion of the shape,

it is robust to perspective transformations, which result from the changes of the camera
parameters and are common in images and video,

it is compact.
Some of the above properties of this descriptor are illustrated in figure 11, each frame
containing very similar images according to CSS, based on the actual retrieval results from
the MPEG-7 shape database. In figure 9, we represent two shapes and their corresponding
CSS images. On the CSS images (bottom row) we have superposed the peaks points that are
used to generate features (Mokhtarian & Bober, 2003).

Fig. 9. Example of contours (top row) and the corresponding CSS image with the peaks
points (bottom row)
Region-based approach
In region-based approaches, all pixels surrounded by the shape boundary are taken into
account to generate the shape descriptor. Like in the case of contour-based approaches, we
encounter the same two different ways in region-based shape description: global and
structural one. In the structural approach, the shape is decomposed into sub-regions to
generate a tree to represent the shape. In the global way, one computes some characteristic
features to generate a vector to represent the shape. Common global features derived from a
region-based approach are: geometrical moment invariants, shape matrix, area,
compactness, eccentricity, Euler number, geometric moments, Legendre moments, Zernike
moments For region-based shape description, the MPEG-7 working group (Bober, 2001 ;
Martinez, 2004) has selected the angular radial transform (ART). It is a moment-based
approach for a 2D region-based shape description. In (Ricard et al., 2005) the authors
proposed a generalization of the ART approach to describe 2D and 3D shapes for contentbased image retrieval purpose.

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The contour-based approaches are more appealing than region-based approaches because
they involve less computation complexity, than the region-based ones, with enough
discriminating efficiency. It is also demonstrated that characteristic information about a
shape lie essentially on its contour features. The main drawback of contour-based
descriptors is that they are more subject to noise and variations than region-based ones.
Figure 10 shows examples of shapes and illustrates situations for which the contour-based
or the region-based descriptors are most suitable.
A shape may consist of just one single region (see Fig.10.a-c) or a set of several regions as
well as regions with some holes inside them as illustrated in figures 10.d-f. Since the regionbased descriptors make use of all pixels constituting the shape, they can describe any kind
of shapes. They are more suitable than the contour-based descriptors to handle complex
shape consisting of holes in the object or several disjoint regions (see Fig.10.d-f) in a single
descriptor. Indeed, for contour-based descriptors, these shapes consist not of a single
contour but of multiple contours leading, thus, to multiple descriptors.

(a)

(b)

(d)

(g)

(e)

(h)

(c)

(f)

(i)

Fig. 10. Examples of various shapes

Figures 10.g-i show very similar shapes from images of a same cup. They only differ by the
handle: shape 10.g has a crack at the lower handle while the handle in 10.i is filled. When
comparing these shapes:

the region-based shape descriptor will consider 10.g and 10.h similar but different from
10.i,

the contour-based shape descriptor will consider 10.h and 10.i similar but different from
10.g.
As illustrated by MPEG-7 (Martinez, 2004), a challenge for a pattern descriptor is to enable
the recognition of a pattern even if it has undergone various deformations namely partial
occultation (Fig.11.a) and non-rigid deformation (Fig. 11.b).
Figure 11.a, according to (Martinez, 2004), illustrates the robustness to partial occultation:
indeed, in this figure, one can note that the tails or the legs of the horses are sometimes
occulted but they are recognised to be from the same class. As presented in (Mokhtarian,
1997 ; Petrakis, 2002) , this is possible because of the ability of the descriptor to handle local
properties. On figure 11.c are represented various shapes that are classified in the same class
based on the visual perceptual similarity

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(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 11. a) robustness to partial occlusion, b) robustness to non-rigid deformation, c)

perceptual similarity among different shapes
The choice of a description method will depend on the application so, sometimes, one needs
to make a compromise. Nevertheless, MPEG-7 has set some essential principles to evaluate
the suitability of shape descriptor: retrieval accuracy, compactness, generics, low
computation complexity, robustness and the ability to represent a shape in hierarchical way:
from coarse to fine representation.
3.4 An overview of the advances in pattern recognition
Remco C. Veltkamp and Mirela Tanase presented in (Veltkamp & Tanase, 2000) a large
panel of CBIR systems. Various approaches of the state of the art in content-based image
retrieval and video retrieval are explored along with the features used in each approach,
they also describe the matching functions used. This overview enables to confirm, as it was
said before, that commonly designed CBIR systems are generally based on visual features
such as colour, texture and shape.
In (Iqbal & Aggarwal, 2002) is presented CIRES (Content-based Image REtrieval System), an
online system for retrieval in image libraries. It is done to extend the retrieval paradigm,
which was mostly limited to colour and texture analyses, by using image structure. Image
structure was extracted via hierarchical perceptual grouping principles.
In (Mittal, 2006) the author presents an overview of the content-based retrieval along with
different strategies in terms of syntactic and semantic indexing for retrieval. After an
analysis of the matching techniques used and the learning methods the author addresses
some directions for future research in the content-based retrieval domain.
Recently, N. Snavely and co-authors (Snavely et al., 2006) have presented a system that
consists of 3D image-based modelling and representation of an unorganised images taken
by different cameras in different conditions. The challenging aim of the system is to use the
content-based information to browse an image database and reply to questions like:

"where was I? Tell me where I was when I took this picture"

"what am I looking at? Tell me about objects visible in this image by transferring
annotations from similar images"
To do this, they used the SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) keypoints detector that
was shown to be transformation invariant (Lowe, 2004).
Among the various forthcoming systems, we can encounter MPEG-7. Formally named
"Multimedia Content Description Interface", MPEG-7 aims at managing data in the way that
content information can be retrieved easily. It is under development by the Moving Picture

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Coding Experts Group (MPEG) that is a working group of ISO/IEC() standards

organization. It is in charge of the development of international standards for video and/or
audio compression, decompression, processing and representation. This group has also
developed well-known standards that are MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. MPEG-1,

MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 also make content available but MPEG-7 enables to find the desired
content. MPEG-7 visual description tools consist of basic structures and descriptors that
cover basic visual features: colour, texture, shape, motion, localization. Each category
consists of elementary and sophisticated descriptors (Sikora, 2001; Bober, 2001). One must

note that MPEG-7 addresses many different applications in various environments, thus it
needs to provide a standard flexible and extensible framework for describing audio-visual
data.
4. Application example based on the MSGPR method
In (Kpalma & Ronsin, 2006) we have presented an original pattern description approach
based on the multi-scale analysis of the contour of planar objects. This proposed approach
summarises the different presented considerations in this chapter. It is well known that
some objects, especially natural ones, exist with a more or less large range of scales; and that
the aspect of the object can change from one scale to another. Without a priori information
about the distance of observation inside a given scene, an interesting challenge can be to
find an object without any precision about its scale of observation. Faced with this situation,
it is very difficult to significantly describe a pattern using only one meaningful scale. To
overcome this problem, increasingly more pattern description techniques are based on
multi-scale or multiresolution representation methods (Lindeberg, 1998). Within this
context, methods based on the pattern itself (Torres-Mndez et al., 2000 ; Kadyrov & Petrou,
2001 ; Belongie et al., 2002 ; Grigorescu & Petkov, 2003) exist as well as methods based on
pattern contour behaviour (Matusiak & Daoudi, 1998 ; Roh & Kweon, 1998 ; Wang et al.,
1999 ; Latecki et al., 2000).
This study deals exclusively with methods based on the pattern contour. Called MSGPR (A
Multi-Scale curve smoothing for Generalised Pattern Recognition) this scale-space
(Mokhtarian et al., 1996 ; Matusiak & Daoudi, 1998 ; Wang et al., 1999 ; Mokhtarian & Bober,
2003) method is based on multi-scale smoothing of a planar pattern contour. This method is
totally translation and rotation insensitive and as showed in the initial studies it is also
robust against scale change for a large range of scaling and resistant to additive noise.
4.1 Description of the MSGPR method
The framework of the MSGPR can be broken down into four main stages as follows (see
Fig.12):
1. the input contour is separated into two parameterised functions,
2. both functions are low-pass filtered (smoothed),
3. scale adjustment is then applied to both filtered functions so that the corresponding
smoothed contour has the same scale as the input one,

()

ISO/IEC stands for International Standards Organization/International Electro-technical

Committee.

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4.

finally, the intersection points map (IPM) is generated by detecting the intersection
points of the input contour and the smoothed scale-adjusted one.

g(,u) X(,u)

x(u)

XGC(,u)

y(u)

Input contour

YGC(,u)

g(,u)

Contour
separation

Y(,u)

Filtering

Scale adjustment

u
Intersection points map function

Fig. 12. MSGPR description scheme

4.1.1 Coordinate separation
The input contour is represented by a series of points defined by their (x,y) coordinates.
First, the input contour is separated into two functions x(u) and y(u) which are functions of
the normalised curvilinear u parameter that varies from 0 to 2 relative to the curve length.
Each point of the curve is then represented by its parameterised coordinates ( x (u ), y( u )) .
4.1.2 Curve smoothing
Functions x(u) and y(u) are then gradually smoothed by decreasing the filter bandwidth.
Similarly to the curvature scale space (CSS) method (Mokhtarian et al., 1996 ; Matusiak &
Daoudi, 1998 ; Wang et al., 1999 ; Mokhtarian & Bober, 2003) or other scale-space methods,
smoothing is based on the Gaussian filters g(,u) with standard deviation :

g (, u ) =
The

filtered

functions

are

then

1
2
given

u2
2 2

by:

(10)

X(, u ) = g (, u ) x (u )

and

Y(, u ) = g (, u ) y(u ) so that each ( x ( u ), y( u )) point on the input contour leads to the
( X (, u ), Y (, u )) point on the output smoothed contour.
Since the bandwidth is conversely proportional to , it is clear that the bandwidth decreases
as increases. Thus the filter cuts increasingly lower so that the output functions move
towards their mean values when tends towards infinity.

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Vision Systems - Segmentation and Pattern Recognition

4.1.3 Scale adjustment

After low-pass filtering, the scale adjustment system stretches the output contour so that it
reaches the same scale as the input one and so that both contours intersect at certain points.
Figure 13 shows an example of a contour and two smoothed ones (=30 and =180) after
they have been scale-adjusted. The input contour C0 and smoothed scale-adjusted contours
CGC() are now on the same scale so that they can intersect.

Original
contour C0

Smoothed scale-adjusted
contour CGC(=30)

Smoothed scale-adjusted
contour CGC(=180)

Fig. 13. Example of a contour and two smoothed scale-adjusted ones (=30 and =180)
4.1.4 Definition of the IPM function
By increasing , the output contour moves towards a convex curve that has some intersection
points with the input contour. By marking these intersection points for each , we obtain the
intersection points map (IPM) function defined below which characterises the pattern.
After the scale adjustment system, the IPM function is generated as follows. For each
value, we define a function which is an image in the scale-space (u,) plane so that (see
Fig.14):

IPM ( u , ) = 0 (black) if the ( x ( u ), y( u )) point is an intersection point between the

original curve and the filtered scale-adjusted one,

IPM (u , ) = 1 (white) if point ( x ( u ), y( u )) is not an intersection point.

Figure 14 shows examples of contours (left column) and the corresponding IPM functions
(right column). On this figure, intersection points are indicated by (1) through (6) or (8), for
the contour in Fig.14.a or for that in Fig.14.c, respectively. On the right column, one can see
the marks corresponding to those intersection points in the IPM representation. As can be
seen on this figure, the IPM function is characteristic of the contour it is derived from.
(1)

(3)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(2)
(1)
(6)

(4)

(5)

a)
(3)

b)
(2)

(4)

(1)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(1) (2)

(3) (4) (5) (6)

(8)

c)

Fig. 14. Example of the IPM function

d)

(7) (8)

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An Overview of Advances of Pattern Recognition Systems in Computer Vision

4.1.5 Features definition and selection

After generating the IPM function, the following stage, but not the least one is features
definition and selection. In (Kpalma & Ronsin, 2006) we used the circular distance between
IPM points at various scale values. To extract these characteristic features, we first set the
scale parameter to 0 value (e.g. 0 = 180). Then, for each pattern:

we consider the IPM points at the set 0 and select two consecutive pa and pb points
which are, circularly, the furthest apart in the IPM function as illustrated in figure 15,

we determine the circular distance between both points to produce the first d1
component of the V0 features vector,

the next components of V0 are distances coming after d1:

V = (V0, V1,, VM-1)

(11)

To benefit from multi-scale information of the IPM function, we can define a set of M values
of (0, 1, ...,M-1) and determine the Vi feature vectors (i=0, 1, 2,, M-1) corresponding
to the i scales. The global V features vector is then produced by a concatenation of the
individual Vi scale vectors as follows:
V = (V0, V1,, VM-1)

p2=pb

p3

p 2 p3 p4

1=30

d6

d4

d2
0

(12)

d3

p4

p5

p2=pb

d5

p5

p7

p6

p1=pa

d1

p1=pa

p6

Fig. 15. Example of the IPM function

4.1.6 Similarity measure
To measure the matching rate between two VA and VB attribute vectors associated to two
patterns, we define a similarity function as follows:
SimScore(VA , VB ) = 50(1 + cos( ))

Min ( VA , VB )
Max ( VA , VB )

(13)

where is the angle between both vectors and where . indicates the module of a vector.
This function ranges from 0% for very different vectors to 100% for perfectly matching
vectors.

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4.2 Application to car plate character recognition

In this section, we present a system we have developed to illustrate pattern recognition
systems. This application can be classified into the group of the contour-based statistical
approaches. Our application illustrates an automatic reading of the number plates by using
their digital images. Applying the IPM-based features we carry out the automatic
recognition of the characters of the number plate. Figure 16 shows two images of plates
written with different fonts: the difference appears more clearly for digit '3' out of the two
plates.

a)

b)

Fig. 16. Examples of number plates images

4.2.1 Character recognition procedure
Input image: car number plate (colour
or greylevel)

Edge detection

(I)

Contours extraction

(II)

IPM function generation

and features extraction

(III)

Off-line
learning

MSGPR

IPM-based
features
database

Similarity computation

Retrieved letter and the

corresponding similarity

'3' (79%)

Fig. 16. An overview of an automatic number plate reading system.

The recognition procedure is carried out into three stages as depicted in figure 17:

(I) edge (or contours) detection that will enable to obtain contours delimiting each
character in the image (Fig. 18.a et Fig. 18.b). One must note that this stage is very
important in our process, because, the effectiveness of character recognition will
depend on it.

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(II) contour extraction: in this stage, one considers only the external (or the outer)
boundary (Fig. 18.c), because only these contours are taken into account. As for the
stage (I), one must pay particular care to the extraction of the characters so that they
are continuous and closed, without self-intersection.
(III) character recognition: at this last stage, we apply our IPM-based description
approach to extract the features and to integrate them into the identification process
to measure the similarity score between each extracted character and the models of
the data base. In this application, the similarity measure is based on the SimScore
function defined by equation (13).
4.4.2 Experimental results
Figures 18.a and 18.b represent the output images of the edge detection when applied to
images corresponding to figure 16. The figure 18.c presents the set of the extracted
characters from figures 18.a and 18.b. On figure 18.d we present a sample set of characters of
the database: this base consists of the character set "bold.chr" of Borland.

a)

b)

c)

d)

Fig. 18. a) and b) detected edges - c) extracted contours from a) and b) - d) examples of the
content of the database.
It must be noted that in this study, the database is composed of only one font while the
query characters come from two different fonts. In order to improve the identification
results, a possible solution would be to integrate in the database, all the possible fonts used
to create car plates. Figures 19 show some results obtained from the input images presented
on figure 16. On these figures, we represent some results of character recognition: on each
figure, the contour on the upper left corner represents the query contour. Following
contours in left-to-right and top-to-down scanning, represent eight retrieved contours which
give the highest similarity scores.
As can be seen on these figures, the identification of different characters is effective enough:
for each query, the identified character (the most similar: the character next to the query in
figures 19.a-d) is exactly the required character. Thus, for the query '3', we identify the letter
'3' with a similarity score of 79%. Table 2 summarises the three highest similarity scores for
the contours presented on figure 19. For the contour '9' as a query, we retrieved the digit '9'
with a similarity score up to 96% followed by the digit '6' with a similarity score of 79%. One
can notice that the contour '6' of the used font is not other than the contour '9' which
underwent a rotation of 180: this explains that the digit '6' occupies the second position

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Vision Systems - Segmentation and Pattern Recognition

during the retrieval process. In the same way, the topological similarity between the digit '5'
and the letter 'S' or between the digit '8' and the letter 'B' results in the appearance of 'S' and
'B', respectively, into the second position in the retrieval ranging. In spite of this topological
similarity, specific properties of each character lead to sufficiently important variations of
similarity scores to avoid mistakes.

a)

b)

d)

c)

Fig. 19. Examples of the recognition output

Query

Retrieved character (Similarity score)

'3'

'3' (79%)

'C' (62%)

'E' (56%)

'5'

'5' (72%)

'S' (58%)

'6' (55%)

'8'

'8' (91%)

'B' (63%)

'1' (61%)

'9'

'9' (96%)

'6' (79%)

'K' (76%)

Table 2. Retrieved characters and the corresponding similarity scores.

5. Conclusion
As mentioned before, pattern recognition does not appear as a new problem. A lot of studies
have been performed on this scientific field and a lot of works are currently developed.
Pattern recognition is a wide topic in machine learning. It aims to classify a pattern into one
of a number of classes. It appears in various fields like psychology, agriculture, computer
vision, robotics , biometrics With technological improvements and growing performances
of computer science, its application field has no real limitation. In this context, a challenge
consists of finding some suitable description features since commonly, the pattern to be
classified must be represented by a set of features characterising it. These features must have
discriminative properties: efficient features must be affined transformations insensitive.
They must be robust against noise and against elastic deformations due, e.g., to movement
in pictures.
Through the application example based on our MSGPR method, we have illustrated various
aspects of a PRS. With this example, we have illustrated the description task that enabled us
to extract multi-scale features from the generated IPM function. By using theses features in
the classification task, we identified the letters from a car number plate so that we
automatically retrieved the license number of a vehicle.

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191

The research topic of pattern recognition is under continuous development and in perpetual
progress. With the large volumes of digital images, the challenge for pattern recognition in
computer vision is now the development of a CBIR-like system: system that is able to
retrieve useful information by using the only content of the input image. With the growing
huge availability of digital images, pattern recognition takes more and more place in our
daily life to help us find the desired information in a reasonable time limit, while browsing
large databases.
Pattern recognition is integrated into the forthcoming standard MPEG-7 via indexing
approaches. Such standardization does not bring restriction to a domain: it gives synergy of
best actors mixing challenge and cooperation. And moreover international standardization
occurs as a requirement from different applications so it meets all conditions for large
diffusion. Standards use the possibilities of last technological developments, and drive
strong investments and focus research on the concerned domain. As it has been observed,
for example, for coding when it was integrated inside different MPEG standards, the
integration of pattern recognition inside MPEG-7 will boost its last developments.

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Vision Systems: Segmentation and Pattern Recognition

Edited by Goro Obinata and Ashish Dutta

ISBN 978-3-902613-05-9
Hard cover, 536 pages

Publisher I-Tech Education and Publishing

Published online 01, June, 2007

Published in print edition June, 2007

Research in computer vision has exponentially increased in the last two decades due to the availability of

cheap cameras and fast processors. This increase has also been accompanied by a blurring of the boundaries
between the different applications of vision, making it truly interdisciplinary. In this book we have attempted to
put together state-of-the-art research and developments in segmentation and pattern recognition. The first
nine chapters on segmentation deal with advanced algorithms and models, and various applications of
segmentation in robot path planning, human face tracking, etc. The later chapters are devoted to pattern

recognition and covers diverse topics ranging from biological image analysis, remote sensing, text recognition,
advanced filter design for data analysis, etc.

How to reference

In order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following:
Kidiyo Kpalma and Joseph Ronsin (2007). An Overview of Advances of Pattern Recognition Systems in

Computer Vision, Vision Systems: Segmentation and Pattern Recognition, Goro Obinata and Ashish Dutta
(Ed.), ISBN: 978-3-902613-05-9, InTech, Available from:

http://www.intechopen.com/books/vision_systems_segmentation_and_pattern_recognition/an_overview_of_ad
vances_of_pattern_recognition_systems_in_computer_vision

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