Force Field Energy Functionals for Image Feature Extraction
David John Hurley, Mark S. Nixon, J.N. Carter · 1999
The overall objective in de®ning feature space is to reduce the dimensionality of pattern space yet maintaining discriminatory power for classi®cation and invariant description.To meet this objective, in the context of ear biometrics, a novel force ®eld transformation has been developed in which the image is treated as an array of Gaussian attractors that act as the source of a force ®eld.The directional properties of the force ®eld are exploited to automatically locate the extrema of a small number of potential energy wells and associated potential channels.These form the basis of the ear description.This has been applied to a small database of ears and initial results show that the new approach has suitable performance attributes and shows promising results in automatic ear recognition.