Shock-based Indexing into Large Shape Databases

Thomas Sebastian, Philip Klein, Benjamin Kimia

Abstract

This paper examines issues arising in applying a previously developed
edit-distance shock graph matching technique to indexing into
large shape databases.  This approach compares the shock
graph topology and attributes to produce a similarity metric,
and results in 100% recognition rate in  querying a database of
approximately 200 shapes. However, indexing into a significantly
larger database is faced with both the lack of a suitable  database,
and more significantly with the expense related to computing the
metric. We have thus  (i) gathered shapes from a variety of sources to create
a database of over 1000 shapes from forty categories as a stage towards
developing an approach for indexing into a much larger database; (ii) developed
coarse-scale approximate similarly measure which relies
on the shock graph topology and a very coarse sampling of link
attributes. We show that  this is a good first-order approximation of
the similarly metric and is two orders of magnitude more efficient to
compute. An interesting outcome of using this efficient but approximate
similarity measure is that the approximation naturally demands a
notion of categories to give high precision; (iii) developed an
exemplar-based indexing scheme which discards a large number of
non-matching shapes solely based on distance to exemplars, coarse
scale representatives of each category.  The use of a coarse-scale
matching measure in conjunction with a coarse-scale sampling of the
database leads to a significant reduction in the computational effort
without discarding correct matches, thus paving the way for indexing
into databases of tens of  thousands of shapes.

Reference

@inproceedings{Sebastian:ECCV2002,
  author = {Thomas B. Sebastian and Philip N. Klein and Benjamin B. Kimia},
  title = {Shock-based Indexing into Large Shape Databases},
  pages = {Part III:731-746},
  year = {2002},
}
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