Is "in which" relevant here?

Question

I am writing the following sentence.

In contrast to the object modeling, (ABC et al., 2009) present an approach for urban object recognition using shape knowledge in which a set of features describing the object shape and their spatial context are introduced in order to classify objects.

I am not sure whether I used the correct clause to get the clear meaning of the sentence. Is "in which" correct in this case?

Answer 1

"in which" sounds perfectly natural here.

However, here are a couple things to look at.

• What/Who is the subject doing the presenting?
• "the object shape" vs. "the object's shape" (general vs specific)
• "their" vs. "its" (one object shape vs many object shapes)
• "in order" (ambiguous: "to be able to" vs. "in a particular sorted order")

In accordance with the above, I would rephrase it as:

In contrast to the object modeling, ABC et al. (2009) presents^* an approach for urban object recognition using shape knowledge in which a set of features describing the object's shape and spatial context are introduced to classify objects.

^* Present and presents would both be okay here. I am American and I favor presents; a British English speaker might favor present.