Using self-organizing maps to learn geometric hash functions for model-based object recognition

A major problem associated with geometric hashing and methods which have emerged from it is the nonuniform distribution of invariants over the hash space. In this paper, a new approach is proposed based on an elastic hash table. We proceed by distributing the hash bins over the invariants. The key idea is to associate the hash bins with the output nodes of a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) neural network which is trained using the invariants as training examples. In this way, the location of a hash bin in the space of invariants is determined by the weight vector of the node associated with the hash bin. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it is a process that adapts to the invariants through learning. Hence, it makes absolutely no assumptions about the statistical characteristics of the invariants and the geometric hash function is actually computed through learning. Furthermore, SOFM's topology preserving property ensures that the computed geometric hash function should be well behaved.