Self-driving cars use images from on-board cameras to navigate through cities. Research at West Virginia University could help solve a problem for those autonomous vehicles—recognizing the same image in different pictures.
Victor Fragoso, an assistant professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at WVU, said a computers inability to identify the same object in two different pictures is a fundamental problem in the field of computer vision.
“Humans have the ability to recognize the same object in different images, which allows them to understand and navigate through the three-dimensional structure of the world. This same task, however, does not come so easily to computers,” Fragoso said. “Computers need to understand a scene through an image, which is represented as a squared grid of numbers.”
Fragoso’s research, which is being funded by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation, will measure the confidence the computer has when it determines that two objects with different viewpoints are present in one same scene.