View independent vehicle make and model recognition with virtual frontal view

This paper proposes a novel view independent vehicle make and model recognition method (VMMR). Our system identifies the make and model from the variety of viewpoints while the conventional methods for VMMR work only for the fixed frontal or rear images. In addition, it needs only the 2D images not CAD data for database. To solve the alignment issue, our method uses SIFT, that has scale and rotation invariance. For the view independent recognition, it creates less distorted frontal view images by view morphing or homography matrix calculated by the position of the license plate and extracts the keypoints from them. Our method enables to recognize up to 60-degree angle with high accuracy due to the less distorted virtual frontal images.