Learning to generate novel views of objects for class recognition

Multi-view object class recognition can be achieved using existing approaches for single-view object class recognition, by treating different views as entirely independent classes. This strategy requires a large amount of training data for many viewpoints, which can be costly to obtain. We describe a method for constructing a weak three-dimensional model from as few as two views of an object of the target class, and using that model to transform images of objects from one view to several other views, effectively multiplying their value for class recognition. Our approach can be coupled with any 2D image-based recognition system. We show that automatically transformed images dramatically decrease the data requirements for multi-view object class recognition. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.