Abstract: A direction-recognizing apparatus has a photographing unit, an image database, an image-recognizing unit, and a direction-recognizing unit. The database stores registered images and direction-data items associated with the registered images. The image-recognizing unit receives an input image and compares the input image with the registered images stored in the database. The image-recognizing unit selects one registered image that is identical or similar to the input image. The direction-recognizing unit recognizes a direction from the direction data associated with the registered image selected by the image-recognizing unit. The database may store N direction-data items associated with N surface segments SN of the circumferential surface of a pole 100. If so, the images registered in the database represent direction-recognition regions ASN that are larger than the N surface segments SN.

Abstract: An object detector, an object detecting method and a robot can reduce diction errors of detecting wrong objects without increasing the volume of the computational operation to be performed to detect the right object. A face detector 101 comprises a face detecting section 110 that operates like a conventional face detecting section and is adapted to roughly select face candidates from an input image by template matching and detect face candidates by means of a support vector machine for face recognition, a non-face judging section 120 that detects non-face candidates that are judged to be non-faces and removes them from the face candidates selected by the face detecting section 110 and a skin tracker section 114 for tracking a face region after the non-face judgment.

Abstract: The invention relates to an image coding apparatus which can improve the picture quality of an image. A quantization scale arithmetic operation section 43 calculates a coefficient of a quantization index based on a variance of values of a motion vector residual outputted from a motion vector residual variable buffer section 72 and an activity outputted from an activity buffer section 73. The quantization scale arithmetic operation section 43 calculates a quantization scale based on the coefficient of the quantization index calculated thereby and the quantization index outputted from the quantization index arithmetic operation section 42. The present invention can be applied to an image coding apparatus of the MPEG system.

Abstract: The invention relates to an image coding apparatus which can improve the picture quality of an image. A quantization index arithmetic operation section 42 calculates, based on motion vector residuals of macro block and the sum total of the motion vector residual outputted from a motion vector residual buffer section 72, a weighted average of the motion vector residual. The quantization index arithmetic operation section 42 calculates, based on the value of activity of the macro block and the sum total of the activity outputted from an activity buffer section 73, a weighted average of the activity. The quantization index arithmetic operation section 42 calculates a quantization index based on the weighted average of the vector residual or the weighted average of the activity. The present invention can be applied to an image coding apparatus of the MPEG system.