Automatic camera selection for activity monitoring in a multi-camera system for tennis

In professional tennis training matches, the coach needs to be able to view play from the most appropriate angle in order to monitor players' activities. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a system for automatic camera selection from a network of synchronised cameras within a tennis sporting arena. This work combines synchronised video streams from multiple cameras into a single summary video suitable for critical review by both tennis players and coaches. Using an overhead camera view, our system automatically determines the 2D tennis-court calibration resulting in a mapping that relates a player's position in the overhead camera to their position and size in another camera view in the network. This allows the system to determine the appearance of a player in each of the other cameras and thereby choose the best view for each player via a novel technique. The video summaries are evaluated in end-user studies and shown to provide an efficient means of multi-stream visualisation for tennis player activity monitoring

RGB-D-based Action Recognition Datasets: A Survey

Human action recognition from RGB-D (Red, Green, Blue and Depth) data has attracted increasing attention since the first work reported in 2010. Over this period, many benchmark datasets have been created to facilitate the development and evaluation of new algorithms. This raises the question of which dataset to select and how to use it in providing a fair and objective comparative evaluation against state-of-the-art methods. To address this issue, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the most commonly used action recognition related RGB-D video datasets, including 27 single-view datasets, 10 multi-view datasets, and 7 multi-person datasets. The detailed information and analysis of these datasets is a useful resource in guiding insightful selection of datasets for future research. In addition, the issues with current algorithm evaluation vis-\'{a}-vis limitations of the available datasets and evaluation protocols are also highlighted; resulting in a number of recommendations for collection of new datasets and use of evaluation protocols

Fast human behavior analysis for scene understanding

Human behavior analysis has become an active topic of great interest and relevance for a number of applications and areas of research. The research in recent years has been considerably driven by the growing level of criminal behavior in large urban areas and increase of terroristic actions. Also, accurate behavior studies have been applied to sports analysis systems and are emerging in healthcare. When compared to conventional action recognition used in security applications, human behavior analysis techniques designed for embedded applications should satisfy the following technical requirements: (1) Behavior analysis should provide scalable and robust results; (2) High-processing efficiency to achieve (near) real-time operation with low-cost hardware; (3) Extensibility for multiple-camera setup including 3-D modeling to facilitate human behavior understanding and description in various events. The key to our problem statement is that we intend to improve behavior analysis performance while preserving the efficiency of the designed techniques, to allow implementation in embedded environments. More specifically, we look into (1) fast multi-level algorithms incorporating specific domain knowledge, and (2) 3-D configuration techniques for overall enhanced performance. If possible, we explore the performance of the current behavior-analysis techniques for improving accuracy and scalability. To fulfill the above technical requirements and tackle the research problems, we propose a flexible behavior-analysis framework consisting of three processing-layers: (1) pixel-based processing (background modeling with pixel labeling), (2) object-based modeling (human detection, tracking and posture analysis), and (3) event-based analysis (semantic event understanding). In Chapter 3, we specifically contribute to the analysis of individual human behavior. A novel body representation is proposed for posture classification based on a silhouette feature. Only pure binary-shape information is used for posture classification without texture/color or any explicit body models. To this end, we have studied an efficient HV-PCA shape-based descriptor with temporal modeling, which achieves a posture-recognition accuracy rate of about 86% and outperforms other existing proposals. As our human motion scheme is efficient and achieves a fast performance (6-8 frames/second), it enables a fast surveillance system or further analysis of human behavior. In addition, a body-part detection approach is presented. The color and body ratio are combined to provide clues for human body detection and classification. The conventional assumption of up-right body posture is not required. Afterwards, we design and construct a specific framework for fast algorithms and apply them in two applications: tennis sports analysis and surveillance. Chapter 4 deals with tennis sports analysis and presents an automatic real-time system for multi-level analysis of tennis video sequences. First, we employ a 3-D camera model to bridge the pixel-level, object-level and scene-level of tennis sports analysis. Second, a weighted linear model combining the visual cues in the real-world domain is proposed to identify various events. The experimentally found event extraction rate of the system is about 90%. Also, audio signals are combined to enhance the scene analysis performance. The complete proposed application is efficient enough to obtain a real-time or near real-time performance (2-3 frames/second for 720×576 resolution, and 5-7 frames/second for 320×240 resolution, with a P-IV PC running at 3GHz). Chapter 5 addresses surveillance and presents a full real-time behavior-analysis framework, featuring layers at pixel, object, event and visualization level. More specifically, this framework captures the human motion, classifies its posture, infers the semantic event exploiting interaction modeling, and performs the 3-D scene reconstruction. We have introduced our system design based on a specific software architecture, by employing the well-known "4+1" view model. In addition, human behavior analysis algorithms are directly designed for real-time operation and embedded in an experimental runtime AV content-analysis architecture. This executable system is designed to be generic for multiple streaming applications with component-based architectures. To evaluate the performance, we have applied this networked system in a single-camera setup. The experimental platform operates with two Pentium Quadcore engines (2.33 GHz) and 4-GB memory. Performance evaluations have shown that this networked framework is efficient and achieves a fast performance (13-15 frames/second) for monocular video sequences. Moreover, a dual-camera setup is tested within the behavior-analysis framework. After automatic camera calibration is conducted, the 3-D reconstruction and communication among different cameras are achieved. The extra view in the multi-camera setup improves the human tracking and event detection in case of occlusion. This extension of multiple-view fusion improves the event-based semantic analysis by 8.3-16.7% in accuracy rate. The detailed studies of two experimental intelligent applications, i.e., tennis sports analysis and surveillance, have proven their value in several extensive tests in the framework of the European Candela and Cantata ITEA research programs, where our proposed system has demonstrated competitive performance with respect to accuracy and efficiency

Enrichment of raw sensor data to enable high-level queries

Sensor networks are increasingly used across various application domains. Their usage has the advantage of automated, often continuous, monitoring of activities and events. Ubiquitous sensor networks detect location of people and objects and their movement. In our research, we employ a ubiquitous sensor network to track the movement of players in a tennis match. By doing so, our goal is to create a detailed analysis of how the match progressed, recording points scored, games and sets, and in doing so, greatly reduce the eort of coaches and players who are required to study matches afterwards. The sensor network is highly efficient as it eliminates the need for manual recording of the match. However, it generates raw data that is unusable by domain experts as it contains no frame of reference or context and cannot be analyzed or queried. In this work, we present the UbiQuSE system of data transformers which bridges the gap between raw sensor data and the high-level requirements of domain specialists such as the tennis coach

Improved Behavior Monitoring and Classification Using Cues Parameters Extraction from Camera Array Images

Behavior monitoring and classification is a mechanism used to automatically identify or verify individual based on their human detection, tracking and behavior recognition from video sequences captured by a depth camera. In this paper, we designed a system that precisely classifies the nature of 3D body postures obtained by Kinect using an advanced recognizer. We proposed novel features that are suitable for depth data. These features are robust to noise, invariant to translation and scaling, and capable of monitoring fast human bodyparts movements. Lastly, advanced hidden Markov model is used to recognize different activities. In the extensive experiments, we have seen that our system consistently outperforms over three depth-based behavior datasets, i.e., IM-DailyDepthActivity, MSRDailyActivity3D and MSRAction3D in both posture classification and behavior recognition. Moreover, our system handles subject's body parts rotation, self-occlusion and body parts missing which significantly track complex activities and improve recognition rate. Due to easy accessible, low-cost and friendly deployment process of depth camera, the proposed system can be applied over various consumer-applications including patient-monitoring system, automatic video surveillance, smart homes/offices and 3D games

Multi-sensor human action recognition with particular application to tennis event-based indexing

The ability to automatically classify human actions and activities using vi- sual sensors or by analysing body worn sensor data has been an active re- search area for many years. Only recently with advancements in both fields and the ubiquitous nature of low cost sensors in our everyday lives has auto- matic human action recognition become a reality. While traditional sports coaching systems rely on manual indexing of events from a single modality, such as visual or inertial sensors, this thesis investigates the possibility of cap- turing and automatically indexing events from multimodal sensor streams. In this work, we detail a novel approach to infer human actions by fusing multimodal sensors to improve recognition accuracy. State of the art visual action recognition approaches are also investigated. Firstly we apply these action recognition detectors to basic human actions in a non-sporting con- text. We then perform action recognition to infer tennis events in a tennis court instrumented with cameras and inertial sensing infrastructure. The system proposed in this thesis can use either visual or inertial sensors to au- tomatically recognise the main tennis events during play. A complete event retrieval system is also presented to allow coaches to build advanced queries, which existing sports coaching solutions cannot facilitate, without an inordi- nate amount of manual indexing. The event retrieval interface is evaluated against a leading commercial sports coaching tool in terms of both usability and efficiency

A Depth Video-based Human Detection and Activity Recognition using Multi-features and Embedded Hidden Markov Models for Health Care Monitoring Systems

Increase in number of elderly people who are living independently needs especial care in the form of healthcare monitoring systems. Recent advancements in depth video technologies have made human activity recognition (HAR) realizable for elderly healthcare applications. In this paper, a depth video-based novel method for HAR is presented using robust multi-features and embedded Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to recognize daily life activities of elderly people living alone in indoor environment such as smart homes. In the proposed HAR framework, initially, depth maps are analyzed by temporal motion identification method to segment human silhouettes from noisy background and compute depth silhouette area for each activity to track human movements in a scene. Several representative features, including invariant, multi-view differentiation and spatiotemporal body joints features were fused together to explore gradient orientation change, intensity differentiation, temporal variation and local motion of specific body parts. Then, these features are processed by the dynamics of their respective class and learned, modeled, trained and recognized with specific embedded HMM having active feature values. Furthermore, we construct a new online human activity dataset by a depth sensor to evaluate the proposed features. Our experiments on three depth datasets demonstrated that the proposed multi-features are efficient and robust over the state of the art features for human action and activity recognition

SAVASA project @ TRECVID 2012: interactive surveillance event detection

In this paper we describe our participation in the interactive surveillance event detection task at TRECVid 2012. The system we developed was comprised of individual classifiers brought together behind a simple video search interface that enabled users to select relevant segments based on down~sampled animated gifs. Two types of user -- `experts' and `end users' -- performed the evaluations. Due to time constraints we focussed on three events -- ObjectPut, PersonRuns and Pointing -- and two of the five available cameras (1 and 3). Results from the interactive runs as well as discussion of the performance of the underlying retrospective classifiers are presented

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: A Review

Acquiring information about the environment is a key step during each study in the field of environmental biology at different levels, from an individual species to community and biome. However, obtaining information about the environment is frequently difficult because of, for example, the phenological timing, spatial distribution of a species or limited accessibility of a particular area for the field survey. Moreover, remote sensing technology, which enables the observation of the Earth’s surface and is currently very common in environmental research, has many limitations such as insufficient spatial, spectral and temporal resolution and a high cost of data acquisition. Since the 1990s, researchers have been exploring the potential of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring Earth’s surface. The present study reviews recent scientific literature dealing with the use of UAV in environmental biology. Amongst numerous papers, short communications and conference abstracts, we selected 110 original studies of how UAVs can be used in environmental biology and which organisms can be studied in this manner. Most of these studies concerned the use of UAV to measure the vegetation parameters such as crown height, volume, number of individuals (14 studies) and quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation changes (12 studies). UAVs were also frequently applied to count birds and mammals, especially those living in the water. Generally, the analytical part of the present study was divided into following sections: (1) detecting, assessing and predicting threats on vegetation, (2) measuring the biophysical parameters of vegetation, (3) quantifying the dynamics of changes in plants and habitats and (4) population and behaviour studies of animals. At the end, we also synthesised all the information showing, amongst others, the advances in environmental biology because of UAV application. Considering that 33% of studies found and included in this review were published in 2017 and 2018, it is expected that the number and variety of applications of UAVs in environmental biology will increase in the future