<title>FFT-descriptors for shape recognition of military vehicles</title>

Abstract

An accurate method to detect and classify military vehicles based on the recognition of shapes is presented in this work. FFT-Descriptors are used to generate a scale, translation and rotation invariant characterization of the shape of such an object. By interpreting the boundary pixels of an object as complex numbers it is possible to calculate an FFT-Descriptor based on the spectrum of a Fast Fourier Transform of these numbers. It is shown that by using this characterization it is possible to match such representations with models in a database of known vehicles and thereby gaining a highly robust and fault tolerant object classification. By selecting a specific number of components of a FFT-Descriptor the classification process can by tailored to different needs of recognition accuracy, allowed shape deviation and classification speed.