Mean-shift analysis for image and video applications

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this thesis, image and video analysis algorithms are developed. Tracking moving objects in video have important applications ranging from CCTV (Closed Circuit Television Systems) to infrared cameras. In current CCTV systems, 80% of the time, it is impossible to recognize suspects from the recorded scenes. Therefore, it is very important to get a close shot of a person so that his or her face is recognizable. To take high-resolution pictures of moving objects, a pan-tiltzoom camera should automatically follow moving objects and record them. In this thesis, a mean-shift based moving object tracking algorithm is developed. In ordinary mean-shift tracking algorithm a color histogram or a probability density function (pdf) estimated from image pixels is used to represent the moving object. In our case, a joint-probability density function is used to represent the object. The joint-pdf is estimated from the object pixels and their wavelet transform coefficients. In this way, relations between neighboring pixels, edge and texture information of the moving object are also represented because wavelet coefficients are obtained after high-pass filtering. Due to this reason the new tracking algorithm is more robust than ordinary mean-shift tracking using only color information. A new content based image retrieval (CBIR) system is also developed in this thesis. The CBIR system is based on mean-shift analysis using a joint-pdf. In this system, the user selects a window in an image or an entire image and queries similar images stored in a database. The selected region is represented using a joint-pdf estimated from image pixels and their wavelet transform coefficients. The retrieval algorithm is more reliable compared to other CBIR systems using only color information or only edge or texture information because the jointpdf based approach represents both texture, edge and color information. The proposed method is also computationally efficient compared to sliding-window based retrieval systems because the joint-pdfs are compared in non-overlapping windows. Whenever there is a reasonable amount of match between the queried window and the original image window then a mean-shift analysis is started.Cüce, Halil İbrahimM.S

Hausdorff-Distance Enhanced Matching of Scale Invariant Feature Transform Descriptors in Context of Image Querying

Reliable and effective matching of visual descriptors is a key step for many vision applications, e.g. image retrieval. In this paper, we propose to integrate the Hausdorff distance matching together with our pairing algorithm, in order to obtain a robust while computationally efficient process of matching feature descriptors for image-to-image querying in standards datasets. For this purpose, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors have been matched using our presented algorithm, followed by the computation of our related similarity measure. This approach has shown excellent performance in both retrieval accuracy and speed

Unsupervised Object Discovery and Localization in the Wild: Part-based Matching with Bottom-up Region Proposals

This paper addresses unsupervised discovery and localization of dominant objects from a noisy image collection with multiple object classes. The setting of this problem is fully unsupervised, without even image-level annotations or any assumption of a single dominant class. This is far more general than typical colocalization, cosegmentation, or weakly-supervised localization tasks. We tackle the discovery and localization problem using a part-based region matching approach: We use off-the-shelf region proposals to form a set of candidate bounding boxes for objects and object parts. These regions are efficiently matched across images using a probabilistic Hough transform that evaluates the confidence for each candidate correspondence considering both appearance and spatial consistency. Dominant objects are discovered and localized by comparing the scores of candidate regions and selecting those that stand out over other regions containing them. Extensive experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the current state of the art in colocalization, and achieves robust object discovery in challenging mixed-class datasets.Comment: CVPR 201

Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval

Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

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

Deformable Prototypes for Encoding Shape Categories in Image Databases

We describe a method for shape-based image database search that uses deformable prototypes to represent categories. Rather than directly comparing a candidate shape with all shape entries in the database, shapes are compared in terms of the types of nonrigid deformations (differences) that relate them to a small subset of representative prototypes. To solve the shape correspondence and alignment problem, we employ the technique of modal matching, an information-preserving shape decomposition for matching, describing, and comparing shapes despite sensor variations and nonrigid deformations. In modal matching, shape is decomposed into an ordered basis of orthogonal principal components. We demonstrate the utility of this approach for shape comparison in 2-D image databases.Office of Naval Research (Young Investigator Award N00014-06-1-0661