Mosaics from arbitrary stereo video sequences

lthough mosaics are well established as a compact and non-redundant representation of image sequences, their application still suffers from restrictions of the camera motion or has to deal with parallax errors. We present an approach that allows construction of mosaics from arbitrary motion of a head-mounted camera pair. As there are no parallax errors when creating mosaics from planar objects, our approach first decomposes the scene into planar sub-scenes from stereo vision and creates a mosaic for each plane individually. The power of the presented mosaicing technique is evaluated in an office scenario, including the analysis of the parallax error

A cognitive vision system for action recognition in office environments

The emerging cognitive vision paradigm is concerned with vision systems that evaluate, gather and integrate con- textual knowledge for visual analysis. In reasoning about events and structures, cognitive vision systems should rely on multiple computations in order to perform robustly even in noisy domains. Action recognition in an unconstrained office environment thus provides an excellent testbed for re- search on cognitive computer vision. In this contribution, we present a system that consists of several computational modules for object and action recognition. It applies atten- tion mechanisms, visual learning and contextual as well as probabilistic reasoning to fuse individual results and verify their consistency. Database technologies are used for infor- mation storage and an XML based communication frame- work integrates all modules into a consistent architecture