Hybrid Evolutionary Shape Manipulation for Efficient Hull Form Design Optimisation

‘Eco-friendly shipping’ and fuel efficiency are gaining much attention in the maritime industry due to increasingly stringent environmental regulations and volatile fuel prices. The shape of hull affects the overall performance in efficiency and stability of ships. Despite the advantages of simulation-based design, the application of a formal optimisation process in actual ship design work is limited. A hybrid approach which integrates a morphing technique into a multi-objective genetic algorithm to automate and optimise the hull form design is developed. It is envisioned that the proposed hybrid approach will improve the hydrodynamic performance as well as overall efficiency of the design process

A Global Nearest-Neighbour Depth Estimation-based Automatic 2D-to-3D Image and Video Conversion

The proposed work is to present a new method based on the radically different approach of learning the 2D-to-3D conversion from examples. It is based on lobally estimating the entire depth map of a query image directly from a repository of 3D images (image depth pairs or stereo pairs) using a nearest-neighbour regression type idea

Depth-Assisted Semantic Segmentation, Image Enhancement and Parametric Modeling

This dissertation addresses the problem of employing 3D depth information on solving a number of traditional challenging computer vision/graphics problems. Humans have the abilities of perceiving the depth information in 3D world, which enable humans to reconstruct layouts, recognize objects and understand the geometric space and semantic meanings of the visual world. Therefore it is significant to explore how the 3D depth information can be utilized by computer vision systems to mimic such abilities of humans. This dissertation aims at employing 3D depth information to solve vision/graphics problems in the following aspects: scene understanding, image enhancements and 3D reconstruction and modeling. In addressing scene understanding problem, we present a framework for semantic segmentation and object recognition on urban video sequence only using dense depth maps recovered from the video. Five view-independent 3D features that vary with object class are extracted from dense depth maps and used for segmenting and recognizing different object classes in street scene images. We demonstrate a scene parsing algorithm that uses only dense 3D depth information to outperform using sparse 3D or 2D appearance features. In addressing image enhancement problem, we present a framework to overcome the imperfections of personal photographs of tourist sites using the rich information provided by large-scale internet photo collections (IPCs). By augmenting personal 2D images with 3D information reconstructed from IPCs, we address a number of traditionally challenging image enhancement techniques and achieve high-quality results using simple and robust algorithms. In addressing 3D reconstruction and modeling problem, we focus on parametric modeling of flower petals, the most distinctive part of a plant. The complex structure, severe occlusions and wide variations make the reconstruction of their 3D models a challenging task. We overcome these challenges by combining data driven modeling techniques with domain knowledge from botany. Taking a 3D point cloud of an input flower scanned from a single view, each segmented petal is fitted with a scale-invariant morphable petal shape model, which is constructed from individually scanned 3D exemplar petals. Novel constraints based on botany studies are incorporated into the fitting process for realistically reconstructing occluded regions and maintaining correct 3D spatial relations. The main contribution of the dissertation is in the intelligent usage of 3D depth information on solving traditional challenging vision/graphics problems. By developing some advanced algorithms either automatically or with minimum user interaction, the goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that computed 3D depth behind the multiple images contains rich information of the visual world and therefore can be intelligently utilized to recognize/ understand semantic meanings of scenes, efficiently enhance and augment single 2D images, and reconstruct high-quality 3D models

A Global Nearest-Neighbour Depth Estimation-based Automatic 2D-to-3D Image and Video Conversion

The proposed work is to present a new method based on the radically different approach of learning the 2D-to-3D conversion from examples. It is based on lobally estimating the entire depth map of a query image directly from a repository of 3D images (image depth pairs or stereo pairs) using a nearest-neighbour regression type idea

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Capturing the sporting heroes of our past by extracting 3D movements from legacy video content

Sports are a key part of cultural identity, and it is necessary to preserve them as important intangible Cultural Heritage, especially the human motion techniques specific to individual sports. In this paper we present a method for extracting 3D athlete motion from video broadcast sources, providing an important tool for preserving the heritage represented by these movements. Broadcast videos include camera motion, multiple player interaction, occlusions and noise, presenting significant challenges to solve the reconstruction. The approach requires initial definition of some key-frames and setting of 2D key-points in those frames manually. Thereafter an automatic process estimates the poses and positions of the players in the key-frames, and in the frames between key-frames, taking into account collisions with the environment and human kinematic constraints. Initial results are extremely promising and this data could be used to analyze the sport's evolution over time, or even to generate animations for interactive applications