A comparison of probabilistic, possibilistic and evidence theoretic fusion schemes for active object recognition

One major goal of active object recognition systems is to extract useful information from multiple measurements. We compare three frameworks for information fusion and view-planning using different uncertainty calculi: probability theory, possibility theory and Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. The system dynamically repositions the camera to capture additional views in order to improve the classification result obtained from a single view. The active recognition problem can be tackled successfully by all the considered approaches with sometimes only slight differences in performance. Extensive experiments confirm that recognition rates can be improved considerably by performing active steps. Random selection of the next action is much less efficient than planning, both in recognition rate and in the average number of steps required for recognition. As long as the rate of wrong object-pose classifications stays low the probabilistic implementation always outperforms the other approaches. If the outlier rate increases averaging fusion schemes outperform conjunctive approaches for information integration. We use an appearance based object representation, namely the parametric eigenspace, but the planning algorithm is actually independent of the details of the specific object recognition environment.