William Jernigan

He/him

Education: Bachelor of Science in computer engineering (December 2012)

McNair Project: Object Recognition by Shape (2011)

Mentor: David Gustafson, Ph.D.

The field of computer vision depends on object recognition in its various applications. In this research, we wrote code that tries to identify objects by the characteristic shape of the object. We made the decision to identify one object, a bottle, in images. First, edge detection is used to find the outline of the possible object. Then, the code follows the detected edge to find the outline of the object. A descriptor of the shape of the outline is constructed and compared with defined descriptors to determine if a bottle is present. The code returns whether or not a bottle is identified, as well as an image of the edge detection.

During testing, we used images with increasing complexity and documented the performance of the code. The test images varied in multiple ways, including orientation of the bottle. The work in this project may be expanded in further work to other types of objects.