Object Detection using Dimensionality Reduction on Image Descriptors

The aim of object detection is to recognize objects in a visual scene. Performing reliable object detection is becoming increasingly important in the fields of computer vision and robotics. Various applications of object detection include video surveillance, traffic monitoring, digital libraries, navigation, human computer interaction, etc. The challenges involved with detecting real world objects include the multitude of colors, textures, sizes, and cluttered or complex backgrounds making objects difficult to detect. This thesis contributes to the exploration of various dimensionality reduction techniques on descriptors for establishing an object detection system that achieves the best trade-offs between performance and speed. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and other histogram-based descriptors were used as an input to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to achieve good classification performance. Binary descriptors were considered as a computationally efficient alternative to HOG. It was determined that single local binary descriptors in combination with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier don\u27t work as well as histograms of features for object detection. Thus, histogram of binary descriptors features were explored as a viable alternative and the results were found to be comparable to those of the popular Histogram of Oriented Gradients descriptor. Histogram-based descriptors can be high dimensional and working with large amounts of data can be computationally expensive and slow. Thus, various dimensionality reduction techniques were considered, such as principal component analysis (PCA), which is the most widely used technique, random projections, which is data independent and fast to compute, unsupervised locality preserving projections (LPP), and supervised locality preserving projections (SLPP), which incorporate non-linear reduction techniques. The classification system was tested on eye detection as well as different object classes. The eye database was created using BioID and FERET databases. Additionally, the CalTech-101 data set, which has 101 object categories, was used to evaluate the system. The results showed that the reduced-dimensionality descriptors based on SLPP gave improved classification performance with fewer computations

Fast and Accurate Algorithm for Eye Localization for Gaze Tracking in Low Resolution Images

Iris centre localization in low-resolution visible images is a challenging problem in computer vision community due to noise, shadows, occlusions, pose variations, eye blinks, etc. This paper proposes an efficient method for determining iris centre in low-resolution images in the visible spectrum. Even low-cost consumer-grade webcams can be used for gaze tracking without any additional hardware. A two-stage algorithm is proposed for iris centre localization. The proposed method uses geometrical characteristics of the eye. In the first stage, a fast convolution based approach is used for obtaining the coarse location of iris centre (IC). The IC location is further refined in the second stage using boundary tracing and ellipse fitting. The algorithm has been evaluated in public databases like BioID, Gi4E and is found to outperform the state of the art methods.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, IET Computer Vision, 201

Visual focus of attention estimation using eye center localization

Estimating people visual focus of attention (VFOA) plays a crucial role in various practical systems such as human-robot interaction. It is challenging to extract the cue of the VFOA of a person due to the difficulty of recognizing gaze directionality. In this paper, we propose an improved integrodifferential approach to represent gaze via efficiently and accurately localizing the eye center in lower resolution image. The proposed method takes advantage of the drastic intensity changes between the iris and the sclera and the grayscale of the eye center as well. The number of kernels is optimized to convolute the original eye region image, and the eye center is located via searching the maximum ratio derivative of the neighbor curve magnitudes in the convolution image. Experimental results confirm that the algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of computational cost, accuracy, and robustness to illumination changes

Visual focus of attention estimation using eye center localization

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