PROCESS FOR AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF SIMILAR IMAGES

摘要

The patent application introduces a process for automatic detection of similar images. The images are acquired with an acquisition device, e.g. a camera, or TV card. The acquired image is stored into the PC RAM. Each acquired image is transformed into a monochromatic one (5). From the image pixels on the net of the monochromatic image the embedded convex envelopes (6) are defined which are uniquely defining the image content. The process of generating embedded convex envelopes according to the invention is fast and is performed in linear time requirement which means that the required time is linear dependent on the number of the image pixels. The similarity between the images is determined by way of the properties vector (27) which is resulting from the convex envelopes. If such features are applied in a similarity test this shows that the pixels from external envelopes have a more significant impact on the similarity level than the internal ones. Therefore, the vector elements are normalized: the regression line (28) is calculated and subtracted from the original properties vector (29). The similarity of the adjusted properties vectors is assessed by the correlation factor (31) method.