The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 06, 2004
Filed:
Dec. 10, 1999
Alison Joan Lennon, Balmain, AU;
Jing Wu, Carlingford, AU;
Canon Kabushiki Kaisha, Tokyo, JP;
Abstract
The method first segments both images into homogeneous regions ( A) and assigns ( A) semantic labels (such as “sky”, “cloud”, “water”, “foliage” etc) to the homogeneous regions to describe the content of the regions using a probabilistic method. This process also results in each assigned label for a region having an associated probability value expressing the confidence level of the label being correctly assigned The method then computes ( ) a distance metric which averages over all corresponding pixels in the two images a value which is the product of a predetermined semantic difference between the assigned labels at the corresponding pixels and a weighting function which is derived from the associated probability values of the labels for each of the corresponding pixels. The semantic difference reflects similarities between the labels. For example, the semantic difference of the label pair “sky” and “foliage” is higher than the semantic difference between the more similar “sky” and “cloud” label pair. The method then compares ( ) the distance metric value with a predetermined threshold value in order to determine the similarity of the images.