Apparatus and methods for identification of a coded pattern visible to a computerized imaging apparatus while invisible or inconspicuous to human eyes. A pattern and/or marking may serve to indicate identity of an object, and/or the relative position of the pattern to a viewer. While some solutions exist for identifying patterns (for example, QR codes), they may be visually obtrusive to a human observer due to visual clutter. In exemplary implementations, apparatus and methods are capable of generating patterns with sufficient structure to be used for either discrimination or some aspect of localization, while incorporating spectral properties that are more aesthetically acceptable such as being: a) imperceptible or subtle to the human observer and/or b) aligned to an existing acceptable visual form, such as a logo. In one variant, a viewer comprises an imaging system comprised as a processor and laser scanner, or camera, or moving photodiode.

A method of controlling a mobile robot includes a first basic learning process of generating a first basic map based on environment information acquired in a traveling process, a second basic learning process of generating a second basic map based on environment information acquired in a separate traveling process, and a merging process of merging the first basic map and the second basic map to generate a merged map.

A method and apparatus for performing gesture recognition. In one embodiment of the invention, the method includes the steps of receiving one or more raw frames from one or more cameras, each of the one or more raw frames representing a time sequence of images, determining one or more regions of the one or more received raw frames that comprise highly textured regions, segmenting the one or more determined highly textured regions in accordance textured features thereof to determine one or more segments thereof, determining one or more regions of the one or more received raw frames that comprise other than highly textured regions, and segmenting the one or more determined other than highly textured regions in accordance with color thereof to determine one or more segments thereof. One or more of the segments are then tracked through the one or more raw frames representing he time sequence of images.

A distributed, cross reality system efficiently and accurately compares location information that includes image frames. Each of the frames may be represented as a numeric descriptor that enables identification of frames with similar content. The resolution of the descriptors may vary for different computing devices in the distributed system based on degree of ambiguity in image comparisons and/or computing resources for the device. A descriptor computed for a cloud-based component operating on maps of large areas that can result in ambiguous identification of multiple image frames may use high resolution descriptors. High resolution descriptors reduce computationally intensive disambiguation processing. A portable device, which is more likely to operate on smaller maps and less likely to have the computational resources to compute a high resolution descriptor, may use a lower resolution descriptor.

Approaches are described for shape-based graphics search. Each graphics object of a set of graphics objects is analyzed. The analyzing includes determining an outline of the graphics object from graphics data that forms the graphics object. The outline of the graphics object is sampled resulting in sampled points that capture the outline of the graphics object. A shape descriptor of the graphics object is determined which captures local and global geometric properties of the sampled points. Search results of a search query are determined based on a comparison between a shape descriptor of a user identified graphics object and the shape descriptor of at least one graphics object of the set of graphics objects. At least one of the search results can be presented on a user device associated with the search query.

Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for adding new features to a network service. A method includes receiving an image depicting an object of interest. A category set is determined for the object of interest and an image signature is generated for the image. Using the category set and the image signature, the method identifies a set of publications within a publication database and assigns a rank to each publication. The method causes presentation of the ranked list of publications at a computing device from which the image was received.

The present disclosure relates to the technical field of image processing, and in particular to an image description generation method, apparatus and system, and a medium and an electronic device. The method comprises: acquiring one or more image region features in a target image, and obtaining a current input vector by performing a mean pooling on the image region features; obtaining respective outer product vectors of the image region features by respectively linearly fusing the current input vector and each of the image region features; calculating, based on the respective outer product vectors of the image region features, an attention distribution of the image region features in a spatial dimension and an attention distribution of the image region features in a channel dimension; and generating an image description of the target image based on the attention distribution of the image region features in the spatial dimension and the attention distribution of the image region features in the channel dimension.

A system for analyzing screenshots can include a computing device including a processor coupled to a memory and a display screen configured to display content. The system can include an application stored on the memory and executable by the processor. The application can include a screenshot receiver configured to access, from storage to which a screenshot of the content displayed on the display screen captured using a screenshot function of the computing device is stored, the screenshot including an image and a predetermined marker. The application can include a marker detector configured to detect the predetermined marker included in the screenshot. The application can include a link identifier configured to identify, using the predetermined marker, a link to a resource mapped to the image included in the screenshot, the resource accessible by the computing device via the link.

A distributed, cross reality system efficiently and accurately compares location information that includes image frames. Each of the frames may be represented as a numeric descriptor that enables identification of frames with similar content. The resolution of the descriptors may vary for different computing devices in the distributed system based on degree of ambiguity in image comparisons and/or computing resources for the device. A descriptor computed for a cloud-based component operating on maps of large areas that can result in ambiguous identification of multiple image frames may use high resolution descriptors. High resolution descriptors reduce computationally intensive disambiguation processing. A portable device, which is more likely to operate on smaller maps and less likely to have the computational resources to compute a high resolution descriptor, may use a lower resolution descriptor.

Exemplary embodiments relate to a method for unlocking a mobile device using authentication based on ear recognition including obtaining an image of a target showing at least part of the target's body in a lock state, extracting a set of ear features of the target from the image of the target, when the image of the target includes at least part of the target's ear, and determining if the extracted set of ear features of the target satisfies a preset condition, and a mobile device performing the same.