Cognitively Economical Heuristic for Multiple Sequence Alignment under Uncertainties

This paper introduces a heuristic for multiple sequence alignment aimed at improving real-time object recognition in short video streams with uncertainties. It builds upon the idea of the progressive alignment but is cognitively economical to the extent that the underlying edit distance approach is adapted to account for human working memory limitations. Thus, the proposed heuristic procedure has a reduced computational complexity compared to optimal multiple sequence alignment. On the other hand, its relevance was experimentally confirmed. An extrinsic evaluation conducted in real-life settings demonstrated a significant improvement in number recognition accuracy in short video streams under uncertainties caused by noise and incompleteness. The second line of evaluation demonstrated that the proposed heuristic outperforms humans in the post-processing of recognition hypotheses. This indicates that it may be combined with state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, which are typically not tailored to the task of object sequence recognition from a limited number of frames of incomplete data recorded in a dynamic scene situation.