A Primal-Dual Framework for Real-Time Dense RGB-D Scene Flow

This paper presents the first method to compute dense scene flow in real-time for RGB-D cameras. It is based on a variational formulation where brightness constancy and geometric consistency are imposed. Accounting for the depth data provided by RGB-D cameras, regularization of the flow field is imposed on the 3D surface (or set of surfaces) of the observed scene instead of on the image plane, leading to more geometrically consistent results. The minimization problem is efficiently solved by a primal-dual algorithm which is implemented on a GPU, achieving a previously unseen temporal performance. Several tests have been conducted to compare our approach with a state-of-the-art work (RGB-D flow) where quantitative and qualitative results are evaluated. Moreover, an additional set of experiments have been carried out to show the applicability of our work to estimate motion in realtime. Results demonstrate the accuracy of our approach, which outperforms the RGB-D flow, and which is able to estimate heterogeneous and non-rigid motions at a high frame rate.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Research supported by the Spanish Government under project DPI1011-25483 and the Spanish grant program FPI-MICINN 2012

Multi-Scale 3D Scene Flow from Binocular Stereo Sequences

Scene flow methods estimate the three-dimensional motion field for points in the world, using multi-camera video data. Such methods combine multi-view reconstruction with motion estimation. This paper describes an alternative formulation for dense scene flow estimation that provides reliable results using only two cameras by fusing stereo and optical flow estimation into a single coherent framework. Internally, the proposed algorithm generates probability distributions for optical flow and disparity. Taking into account the uncertainty in the intermediate stages allows for more reliable estimation of the 3D scene flow than previous methods allow. To handle the aperture problems inherent in the estimation of optical flow and disparity, a multi-scale method along with a novel region-based technique is used within a regularized solution. This combined approach both preserves discontinuities and prevents over-regularization – two problems commonly associated with the basic multi-scale approaches. Experiments with synthetic and real test data demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach.National Science Foundation (CNS-0202067, IIS-0208876); Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108

DroTrack: High-speed Drone-based Object Tracking Under Uncertainty

We present DroTrack, a high-speed visual single-object tracking framework for drone-captured video sequences. Most of the existing object tracking methods are designed to tackle well-known challenges, such as occlusion and cluttered backgrounds. The complex motion of drones, i.e., multiple degrees of freedom in three-dimensional space, causes high uncertainty. The uncertainty problem leads to inaccurate location predictions and fuzziness in scale estimations. DroTrack solves such issues by discovering the dependency between object representation and motion geometry. We implement an effective object segmentation based on Fuzzy C Means (FCM). We incorporate the spatial information into the membership function to cluster the most discriminative segments. We then enhance the object segmentation by using a pre-trained Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. DroTrack also leverages the geometrical angular motion to estimate a reliable object scale. We discuss the experimental results and performance evaluation using two datasets of 51,462 drone-captured frames. The combination of the FCM segmentation and the angular scaling increased DroTrack precision by up to $9\%$ and decreased the centre location error by $162$ pixels on average. DroTrack outperforms all the high-speed trackers and achieves comparable results in comparison to deep learning trackers. DroTrack offers high frame rates up to 1000 frame per second (fps) with the best location precision, more than a set of state-of-the-art real-time trackers.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, FUZZ-IEEE 202

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Fields in Video

We introduce RIANN (Ring Intersection Approximate Nearest Neighbor search), an algorithm for matching patches of a video to a set of reference patches in real-time. For each query, RIANN finds potential matches by intersecting rings around key points in appearance space. Its search complexity is reversely correlated to the amount of temporal change, making it a good fit for videos, where typically most patches change slowly with time. Experiments show that RIANN is up to two orders of magnitude faster than previous ANN methods, and is the only solution that operates in real-time. We further demonstrate how RIANN can be used for real-time video processing and provide examples for a range of real-time video applications, including colorization, denoising, and several artistic effects.Comment: A CVPR 2015 oral pape

Recursive Motion and Structure Estimation with Complete Error Characterization

We present an algorithm that perfom recursive estimation of ego-motion andambient structure from a stream of monocular Perspective images of a number of feature points. The algorithm is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that integrates over time the instantaneous motion and structure measurements computed by a 2-perspective-views step. Key features of our filter are (I) global observability of the model, (2) complete on-line characterization of the uncertainty of the measurements provided by the two-views step. The filter is thus guaranteed to be well-behaved regardless of the particular motion undergone by the observel: Regions of motion space that do not allow recovery of structure (e.g. pure rotation) may be crossed while maintaining good estimates of structure and motion; whenever reliable measurements are available they are exploited. The algorithm works well for arbitrary motions with minimal smoothness assumptions and no ad hoc tuning. Simulations are presented that illustrate these characteristics