Patent ID: 6882746

Claim:
A method of generating a normalized bitmap representation of the shape of a visual object in an image comprising the steps of: segmenting the image to generate a segmentation map of visual objects; identifying samples from the segmentation map belonging to a visual object of interest; identifying the largest connected blob to form an un-normalized bitmap; and normalizing the un-normalized bitmap to form a normalized bitmap representation, wherein said normalizing step additionally comprises the steps of: estimating a mean and covariance for each valid sample in the un-normalized bitmap; computing a principal direction for the un-normalized bitmap based upon the mean and covariance as eigenvectors of a covariance matrix; and back projecting the un-normalized bitmap as a function of the mean and eigenvectors to normalize the un-normalized bitmap for translation, rotation and scale so that after normalization the normalized bitmap representation has a standard height and is oriented such that the principal direction is along a vertical direction.