Object Identification and Search: Animate Vision Alternatives to Image Interpretation

We are accustomed to thinking of the task of vision as being the construction of a detailed representation of the physical world. However, a paradigm that we term animate vision argues that vision is more readily understood in the context of the tasks that the system is engaged in, and that these tasks may not require elaborate categorical representations of the 3-D world. As an example, we show how the general problem of image interpretation can be replaced in many cases by a combination of two simpler problems, identification and search. Both tasks use multidimensional color histograms to represent the model and images. Color histograms are shown to permit efficent matching and a sufficiently rich representation to distinguish among a large number of objects.