Cattle Brand Image Retrieval Energy and Environment Workshop 2009

Waldemar Villamayor Venialbo Centro Paraguayo de Informaciones Astronmicas o E-mail: wvilla@cpia.org Horacio Legal Facultad Politcnica Departamento de Investigacin y Postgrado e o Universidad Nacional de Asuncin o E-mail: hlegal@pol.una.py SUMMARY
The aim of this research project is to develop a method to detect similar logos in a cattle brand database, preventing the registration of new brands that could be confused with existing ones. The cattle brands we deal with are sketches handwritten with a digital pen within a limited rectangular region. These sketches are composed by one or more isolated draws: letter, number, symbol, etc.; many times these symbols appears overlapped. The proposed method is divided in four stages: 1) image preparation; 2) stroke segmentation; 3) feature extraction; and 4) retrieval. The first three steps applies to query and database images; the pre-processing of database images may be done a priori to populate a knowledge base that will be queried at the retrieval stage. The query and database images are 8-bit grayscale images (256 gray levels). Brand sketches are composed of dark curves of the same thickness on a clear background. To have a workable image we do some normalization during the preparation stage, this normalization consist in the binarization of the images resulting plain black and white bitmaps. Then we proceed segmenting the strokes contained in the images. At this stage we segregate each continuous curve that composes the brand logo. The segmentation method is an implementation of the orientation space technique described in [2] and [1]. The feature extraction stage is done using an implementation of the multiscale autoconvolution method described in [3] and [4], which provides numerical descriptors for some combination of the components in the logo brand; such combination is done providing that the spatial distribution of the component strokes is not affected. These descriptorswhich are invariant to affine transformationare then interpreted in the retrieval stage to determine a similarity measure between two images. Such measure is obtained in a way that not only complete similar brands but subsets of a brand could be detected.

References
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