REAL-TIME OBJECT DETECTION USING DISTANCE TRANSFORMS
Dariu M. Gavrila, Philomin · 1998
This paper presents an efficient shape-based object detection method using Distance Transforms (DTs). The proposed method extends previous DT-based matching techniques by using multiple features and a template hierarchy associated with a coarse-to-fine search over the template transformation parameters. Significant speed-up factors are typically obtained when comparing the proposed hierarchical method with an equivalent brute-force technique; wehave measured speed-up gains in the order of two magnitudes. This brings a number of template matching applications which previously required special-purpose correlation hardware onto the realm of the ubiquitous PC. We present results on real-time traffic sign detection to illustrate our approach.