EAGER: A New Framework for Balancing Deformability and Discriminability in Computer Vision

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Deformability and discriminability are often two "conflicting" factors in computer vision problems such as shape matching and object recognition. For example, it has been observed that strong deformation invariant descriptors often suffer from low discriminative powers for category recognition. This EAGER project explores a new framework for balancing deformability and discriminability for computer vision tasks. The framework uniformly embeds an object, which can be a 2D shape, a point set, an image, a 3D volume or a surface, in a high dimensional space named aspect space. The embedding parameter is then used to control the degree of deformation insensitivity. Both the theoretic and application sides of the proposed framework are investigated. Based on the framework, the project aims to develop three additional research goals: robust shape matching methods by selecting deformability adaptively, robust point set registration methods by dealing with articulation in the framework, and robust image matching by extracting features in the embedded aspect space. These goals are planned to be evaluated on real applications including silhouette-based foliage data retrieval, 3D marker matching in computer-based physical therapy, and image-based disease screening. The project aims to bridge the two main problems, handling deformation and improving discriminability, which relate to many subfields inside and outside computer vision. The interdisciplinary applications are expected to generate significant contributions to various fields including biodiversity studies, biomedical study, etc. The research results, including code and data, are made public available through the project website.