Patent ID: 11861870
Assignee: THE BOEING COMPANY
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  B | IPC B  G

Claim 18:
19. A computer-readable storage medium that is non-transitory and has computer-readable program code stored therein that, in response to execution by processing circuitry, causes an apparatus to at least:
receive points of an image that are spatially arranged to represent objects depicted in the image, the points corresponding to pixels of a digital image, or data points of a point cloud;
perform a greedy nearest-neighbor (GNN) cluster analysis of the image to group the points of the image, the GNN cluster analysis including the apparatus caused to:
group the points into a plurality of local GNN clusters, from a greedy analysis of the points using a k-d tree in which the points are organized in a k-dimensional space; and
extend the plurality of local GNN clusters into a plurality of global GNN clusters, and including for a pair of local GNN clusters, applying the pair to nested conditions by which similarity of the local GNN clusters is evaluated according to defined similarity criteria, and the local GNN clusters are merged into a global GNN cluster when each of the defined similarity criteria is evaluated to true, and passed as global GNN clusters when any of the defined similarity criteria is evaluated to false; and

detect the objects depicted in the image based on the global GNN clusters; and
wherein the apparatus caused to extend the plurality of local GNN clusters includes the apparatus caused to:
merge pairs of the local GNN clusters when each of the defined similarity criteria is evaluated true, and thereby produce a set of merged pairs of local GNN clusters; and
iterate through the set of merged pairs to further merge any intersecting pair of the merged pairs into a respective global GNN cluster.