|
Haar-like features are digital image features used in object recognition. They owe their name to their intuitive similarity with Haar wavelets and were used in the first real-time face detector.〔Viola and Jones, "Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features", Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2001〕 Historically, working with only image intensities (i.e., the RGB pixel values at each and every pixel of image) made the task of feature calculation computationally expensive. A publication by Papageorgiou et al.〔Papageorgiou, Oren and Poggio, "A general framework for object detection", International Conference on Computer Vision, 1998.〕 discussed working with an alternate feature set based on Haar wavelets instead of the usual image intensities. Viola and Jones〔Viola and Jones, "Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features", Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2001〕 adapted the idea of using Haar wavelets and developed the so-called Haar-like features. A Haar-like feature considers adjacent rectangular regions at a specific location in a detection window, sums up the pixel intensities in each region and calculates the difference between these sums. This difference is then used to categorize subsections of an image. For example, let us say we have an image database with human faces. It is a common observation that among all faces the region of the eyes is darker than the region of the cheeks. Therefore a common haar feature for face detection is a set of two adjacent rectangles that lie above the eye and the cheek region. The position of these rectangles is defined relative to a detection window that acts like a bounding box to the target object (the face in this case). In the detection phase of the Viola–Jones object detection framework, a window of the target size is moved over the input image, and for each subsection of the image the Haar-like feature is calculated. This difference is then compared to a learned threshold that separates non-objects from objects. Because such a Haar-like feature is only a weak learner or classifier (its detection quality is slightly better than random guessing) a large number of Haar-like features are necessary to describe an object with sufficient accuracy. In the Viola–Jones object detection framework, the Haar-like features are therefore organized in something called a ''classifier cascade'' to form a strong learner or classifier. The key advantage of a Haar-like feature over most other features is its calculation speed. Due to the use of ''integral images'', a Haar-like feature of any size can be calculated in constant time (approximately 60 microprocessor instructions for a 2-rectangle feature). == Rectangular Haar-like features == A simple rectangular Haar-like feature can be defined as the difference of the sum of pixels of areas inside the rectangle, which can be at any position and scale within the original image. This modified feature set is called ''2-rectangle feature''. Viola and Jones also defined 3-rectangle features and 4-rectangle features. The values indicate certain characteristics of a particular area of the image. Each feature type can indicate the existence (or absence) of certain characteristics in the image, such as edges or changes in texture. For example, a 2-rectangle feature can indicate where the border lies between a dark region and a light region. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Haar-like features」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|