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Blob Alignment in the Model Domain

Since faces have a common general structure, it is advantageous to align the blobs in the model domain to insure that they are always at the same position in the faces, either all at the left eye or all at the chin etc. This is achieved by connections between the layers and leads to the term instead of in Equation 1. If the model blobs were to run independently, the image layer would get input from all face parts at the same time, and the blob there would have a hard time to align with a model blob, and it would be very uncertain whether it would be the correct one. The cooperation between the models and the image would depend more on accidental alignment than on the similarity between the models and the image, and it would then be very likely that the wrong model was picked up as the recognition result. One alternative is to let the models inhibit each other such that only one model can have a blob at a time. The models then would share time to match onto the image, and the best fitting one would get most of the time. This would probably be the appropriate setup if the models were very different and without a common structure, as it is for general objects. The disadvantage is that the system needs much more time to decide which model to accept, because the relative layer activities in the beginning depend much more on chance than in the other setup.


next up previous
Next: Maximum versus Sum Up: The System Previous: Bidirectional Connections