Patent ID: 6952496

Claim:
A computer-implemented process for identifying a person or object in an image of a scene, said process comprising using a computer to perform the following process actions: creating model histograms of people and objects that it is desired to identify in said image of the scene; segmenting said image to extract regions which correspond to at least one person or object whose identity it is desired to determine; for each region extracted from the image, computing a histogram for the extracted region, and respectively producing an indicator of the degree of similarity between the extracted region histogram and each of said model histograms; forming exclusive combinations of said degree of similarity indicators wherein each combination is made up of one indicator associated with each extracted region of the image and each indicator in the combination is derived from a different model histogram; computing a combined degree of similarity value for each of said indicator combinations; identifying the largest combined degree of similarity value; and designating each extracted region having a histogram associated with an individual one of the indicators used to compute the identified largest combined degree of similarity value which exceeds a prescribed threshold as corresponding to the person or object associated with the model histogram used in part to compute the individual one of the indicators.