Seeing Behind Occlusions

The location of objects in images is difficult owing to the view variance of geometric features but can be determined by developing viewinsensitive descriptions of the intensities local to image points. Viewinsensitive descriptions are achieved in this work by describing points in terms of the responses of steerable filters at multiple scales. Owing to the use of multiple scales, the vector for each point is, for all practical purposes, unique, and thus can be easily matched to other instances of the point in other images. We show that this method can be extended to handle the case where the area near a point of interest is partially occluded. The method uses a description of the occluder in the form of a template that can be obtained easily via active vision systems using a method such as disparity filtering.