Opportunistic sensing for object recognition — A unified formulation for dynamic sensor selection and feature extraction

A novel problem of object recognition with dynamically allocated sensing resources is considered in this paper. We call this problem opportunistic sensing since prior knowledge about the correlation between class label and signal distribution is exploited as early as in data acquisition. Two forms of sensing parameters - discrete sensor index and continuous linear measurement vector - are optimized within the same maximum negative entropy framework. The computationally intractable expected entropy is approximated using unscented transform for Gaussian models, and we solve the problem using a gradient-based method. Our formulation is theoretically shown to be closely related to the maximum mutual information criterion for sensor selection and linear feature extraction techniques such as PCA, LDA, and CCA. The proposed approach is validated on multi-view vehicle classification and face recognition datasets, and remarkable improvement over baseline methods is demonstrated in the experiments.