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This paper presents a detailed description and a comparative analysis of the algorithms used to determine the position and orientation of an object in real-time. The exemplary object, a freely moving gold-fish in an aquarium, provides "real-world" motion, with definable characteristics of motion (the fish never swims upside-down) and the complexities of a non-rigid body. For simplicity of implementation, and since a restricted and stationary viewing domain exists (fish-tank), we reduced the problem of obtaining 3D correspondence information to trivial alignment calculations by using two cameras orthogonally viewing the object. We applied symbolic processing techniques to recognize the 3-D orientation of a moving object of known identity in real-time. Assuming motion, each new frame (sensed by the two cameras) provides images of the object's profile which has most likely undergone translation, rotation, scaling and/or bending of the non-rigid object since the previous frame. We developed an expert system which uses heuristics of the object's motion behavior in the form of rules and information obtained via low-level image processing (like numerical inertial axis calculations) to dynamically estimate the object's orientation. An inference engine provides these estimates at frame rates of up to 10 per second (which is essentially real-time). The advantages of the rule-based approach to orientation recognition will be compared other pattern recognition techniques. Our results of an investigation of statistical pattern recognition, neural networks, and procedural techniques for orientation recognition will be included. We implemented the algorithms in a rapid-prototyping environment, the TI-Ezplorer, equipped with an Odyssey and custom imaging hardware. A brief overview of the workstation is included to clarify one motivation for our choice of algorithms. These algorithms exploit two facets of the prototype image processing and understanding workstation - both low-level (segmentation) and high-level (rule-based recognition) vision capabilities.
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