233 research outputs found
Visual Human Tracking and Group Activity Analysis: A Video Mining System for Retail Marketing
Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Computer Sciences, 2007In this thesis we present a system for automatic human tracking and activity recognition from
video sequences. The problem of automated analysis of visual information in order to derive descriptors
of high level human activities has intrigued computer vision community for decades and is
considered to be largely unsolved. A part of this interest is derived from the vast range of applications
in which such a solution may be useful. We attempt to find efficient formulations of these tasks
as applied to the extracting customer behavior information in a retail marketing context. Based on
these formulations, we present a system that visually tracks customers in a retail store and performs
a number of activity analysis tasks based on the output from the tracker.
In tracking we introduce new techniques for pedestrian detection, initialization of the body
model and a formulation of the temporal tracking as a global trans-dimensional optimization problem.
Initial human detection is addressed by a novel method for head detection, which incorporates
the knowledge of the camera projection model.The initialization of the human body model is addressed
by newly developed shape and appearance descriptors. Temporal tracking of customer
trajectories is performed by employing a human body tracking system designed as a Bayesian
jump-diffusion filter. This approach demonstrates the ability to overcome model dimensionality
ambiguities as people are leaving and entering the scene.
Following the tracking, we developed a two-stage group activity formulation based upon the
ideas from swarming research. For modeling purposes, all moving actors in the scene are viewed here as simplistic agents in the swarm. This allows to effectively define a set of inter-agent interactions,
which combine to derive a distance metric used in further swarm clustering. This way, in the
first stage the shoppers that belong to the same group are identified by deterministically clustering
bodies to detect short term events and in the second stage events are post-processed to form clusters
of group activities with fuzzy memberships.
Quantitative analysis of the tracking subsystem shows an improvement over the state of the
art methods, if used under similar conditions. Finally, based on the output from the tracker, the
activity recognition procedure achieves over 80% correct shopper group detection, as validated by
the human generated ground truth results
Carried baggage detection and recognition in video surveillance with foreground segmentation
Security cameras installed in public spaces or in private organizations continuously
record video data with the aim of detecting and preventing crime. For that reason,
video content analysis applications, either for real time (i.e. analytic) or post-event
(i.e. forensic) analysis, have gained high interest in recent years. In this thesis,
the primary focus is on two key aspects of video analysis, reliable moving object
segmentation and carried object detection & identification.
A novel moving object segmentation scheme by background subtraction is presented
in this thesis. The scheme relies on background modelling which is based
on multi-directional gradient and phase congruency. As a post processing step,
the detected foreground contours are refined by classifying the edge segments as
either belonging to the foreground or background. Further contour completion
technique by anisotropic diffusion is first introduced in this area. The proposed
method targets cast shadow removal, gradual illumination change invariance, and
closed contour extraction.
A state of the art carried object detection method is employed as a benchmark
algorithm. This method includes silhouette analysis by comparing human temporal
templates with unencumbered human models. The implementation aspects of
the algorithm are improved by automatically estimating the viewing direction of
the pedestrian and are extended by a carried luggage identification module. As
the temporal template is a frequency template and the information that it provides
is not sufficient, a colour temporal template is introduced. The standard
steps followed by the state of the art algorithm are approached from a different
extended (by colour information) perspective, resulting in more accurate carried
object segmentation.
The experiments conducted in this research show that the proposed closed
foreground segmentation technique attains all the aforementioned goals. The incremental
improvements applied to the state of the art carried object detection
algorithm revealed the full potential of the scheme. The experiments demonstrate
the ability of the proposed carried object detection algorithm to supersede the
state of the art method
Object detection in surveillance videos
In this thesis, a novel scheme for object detection in complex background scenes has been proposed.The input videos used have fixed backgrounds and static cameras. Initially median of few frames is evaluated for obtaining a proper estimate of the background.Local threshold based background subtraction is done for extracting objects from the video sequence.During sudden illumination changes, optical flow analysis is used for motion segmentation.It is assumed that during photometric distortions, the object is in motion.Subsequently shadow detection and suppression is done to the resulting thresholded image. Hue Saturation Value(HSV) color space model is used for shadow suppression.Visual measures convey the performance of the algorithm
Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Techniques, Advancements, and Challenges in Video-Based Traffic Surveillance Systems
The challenges inherent in video surveillance are compounded by a several factors, like dynamic lighting conditions, the coordination of object matching, diverse environmental scenarios, the tracking of heterogeneous objects, and coping with fluctuations in object poses, occlusions, and motion blur. This research endeavor aims to undertake a rigorous and in-depth analysis of deep learning- oriented models utilized for object identification and tracking. Emphasizing the development of effective model design methodologies, this study intends to furnish a exhaustive and in-depth analysis of object tracking and identification models within the specific domain of video surveillance
Spatial and temporal background modelling of non-stationary visual scenes
PhDThe prevalence of electronic imaging systems in everyday life has become increasingly apparent
in recent years. Applications are to be found in medical scanning, automated manufacture, and
perhaps most significantly, surveillance. Metropolitan areas, shopping malls, and road traffic
management all employ and benefit from an unprecedented quantity of video cameras for monitoring
purposes. But the high cost and limited effectiveness of employing humans as the final
link in the monitoring chain has driven scientists to seek solutions based on machine vision techniques.
Whilst the field of machine vision has enjoyed consistent rapid development in the last
20 years, some of the most fundamental issues still remain to be solved in a satisfactory manner.
Central to a great many vision applications is the concept of segmentation, and in particular,
most practical systems perform background subtraction as one of the first stages of video
processing. This involves separation of ‘interesting foreground’ from the less informative but
persistent background. But the definition of what is ‘interesting’ is somewhat subjective, and
liable to be application specific. Furthermore, the background may be interpreted as including
the visual appearance of normal activity of any agents present in the scene, human or otherwise.
Thus a background model might be called upon to absorb lighting changes, moving trees and
foliage, or normal traffic flow and pedestrian activity, in order to effect what might be termed in
‘biologically-inspired’ vision as pre-attentive selection. This challenge is one of the Holy Grails
of the computer vision field, and consequently the subject has received considerable attention.
This thesis sets out to address some of the limitations of contemporary methods of background
segmentation by investigating methods of inducing local mutual support amongst pixels
in three starkly contrasting paradigms: (1) locality in the spatial domain, (2) locality in the shortterm
time domain, and (3) locality in the domain of cyclic repetition frequency.
Conventional per pixel models, such as those based on Gaussian Mixture Models, offer no
spatial support between adjacent pixels at all. At the other extreme, eigenspace models impose
a structure in which every image pixel bears the same relation to every other pixel. But Markov
Random Fields permit definition of arbitrary local cliques by construction of a suitable graph, and
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are used here to facilitate a novel structure capable of exploiting probabilistic local cooccurrence
of adjacent Local Binary Patterns. The result is a method exhibiting strong sensitivity to multiple
learned local pattern hypotheses, whilst relying solely on monochrome image data.
Many background models enforce temporal consistency constraints on a pixel in attempt to
confirm background membership before being accepted as part of the model, and typically some
control over this process is exercised by a learning rate parameter. But in busy scenes, a true
background pixel may be visible for a relatively small fraction of the time and in a temporally
fragmented fashion, thus hindering such background acquisition. However, support in terms of
temporal locality may still be achieved by using Combinatorial Optimization to derive shortterm
background estimates which induce a similar consistency, but are considerably more robust
to disturbance. A novel technique is presented here in which the short-term estimates act as
‘pre-filtered’ data from which a far more compact eigen-background may be constructed.
Many scenes entail elements exhibiting repetitive periodic behaviour. Some road junctions
employing traffic signals are among these, yet little is to be found amongst the literature regarding
the explicit modelling of such periodic processes in a scene. Previous work focussing on gait
recognition has demonstrated approaches based on recurrence of self-similarity by which local
periodicity may be identified. The present work harnesses and extends this method in order
to characterize scenes displaying multiple distinct periodicities by building a spatio-temporal
model. The model may then be used to highlight abnormality in scene activity. Furthermore, a
Phase Locked Loop technique with a novel phase detector is detailed, enabling such a model to
maintain correct synchronization with scene activity in spite of noise and drift of periodicity.
This thesis contends that these three approaches are all manifestations of the same broad
underlying concept: local support in each of the space, time and frequency domains, and furthermore,
that the support can be harnessed practically, as will be demonstrated experimentally
Hardware dedicado para sistemas empotrados de visión
La constante evolución de las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones no solo ha permitido que más de la mitad de la población mundial esté actualmente interconectada a través de Internet, sino que ha sido el caldo de cultivo en el que han surgido nuevos paradigmas, como el ‘Internet de las cosas’ (IoT) o la ‘Inteligencia ambiental’ (AmI), que plantean la necesidad de interconectar objetos con distintas funcionalidades para lograr un entorno digital, sensible y adaptativo, que proporcione servicios de muy distinta índole a sus usuarios. La consecución de este entorno requiere el desarrollo de dispositivos electrónicos de bajo coste que, con tamaño y peso reducido, sean capaces de interactuar con el medio que los rodea, operar con máxima autonomía y proporcionar un elevado nivel de inteligencia. La funcionalidad de muchos de estos dispositivos incluirá la capacidad para adquirir, procesar y transmitir imágenes, extrayendo, interpretando o modificando la información visual que resulte de interés para una determinada aplicación.
En el marco de este desafío surge la presente Tesis Doctoral, cuyo eje central es el desarrollo de hardware dedicado para la implementación de algoritmos de procesamiento de imágenes y secuencias de vídeo usados en sistemas empotrados de visión. El trabajo persigue una doble finalidad. Por una parte, la búsqueda de soluciones que, por sus prestaciones y rendimiento, puedan ser incorporadas en sistemas que satisfagan las estrictas exigencias de funcionalidad, tamaño, consumo de energía y velocidad de operación demandadas por las nuevas aplicaciones. Por otra, el diseño de una serie de bloques funcionales implementados como módulos de propiedad intelectual, que permitan aliviar la carga computacional de las unidades de procesado de los sistemas en los que se integren.
En la Tesis se proponen soluciones específicas para la implementación de dos tipos de operaciones habitualmente presentes en muchos sistemas de visión artificial: la sustracción de fondo y el etiquetado de componentes conexos. Las distintas alternativas surgen como consecuencia de aplicar una adecuada relación de compromiso entre funcionalidad y coste, entendiendo este último criterio en términos de recursos de cómputo, velocidad de operación y potencia consumida, lo que permite cubrir un amplio espectro de aplicaciones. En algunas de las soluciones propuestas se han utilizado además, técnicas de inferencia basadas en Lógica Difusa con idea de mejorar la calidad de los sistemas de visión resultantes.
Para la realización de los diferentes bloques funcionales se ha seguido una metodología de diseño basada en modelos, que ha permitido la realización de todo el ciclo de desarrollo en un único entorno de trabajo. Dicho entorno combina herramientas informáticas que facilitan las etapas de codificación algorítmica, diseño de circuitos, implementación física y verificación funcional y temporal de las distintas alternativas, acelerando con ello todas las fases del flujo de diseño y posibilitando una exploración más eficiente del espacio de posibles soluciones.
Asimismo, con el objetivo de demostrar la funcionalidad de las distintas aportaciones de esta Tesis Doctoral, algunas de las soluciones propuestas han sido integradas en sistemas de vídeo reales, que emplean buses estándares de uso común. Los dispositivos seleccionados para llevar a cabo estos demostradores han sido FPGAs y SoPCs de Xilinx, ya que sus excelentes propiedades para el prototipado y la construcción de sistemas que combinan componentes software y hardware, los convierten en candidatos ideales para dar soporte a la implementación de este tipo de sistemas.The continuous evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), not only has allowed more than half of the global population to be currently interconnected through Internet, but it has also been the breeding ground for new paradigms such as Internet of Things (ioT) or Ambient Intelligence (AmI). These paradigms expose the need of interconnecting elements with different functionalities in order to achieve a digital, sensitive, adaptive and responsive environment that provides services of distinct nature to the users.
The development of low cost devices, with small size, light weight and a high level of autonomy, processing power and ability for interaction is required to obtain this environment. Attending to this last feature, many of these devices will include the capacity to acquire, process and transmit images, extracting, interpreting and modifying the visual information that could be of interest for a certain application.
This PhD Thesis, focused on the development of dedicated hardware for the implementation of image and video processing algorithms used in embedded systems, attempts to response to this challenge. The work has a two-fold purpose: on one hand, the search of solutions that, for its performance and properties, could be integrated on systems with strict requirements of functionality, size, power consumption and speed of operation; on the other hand, the design of a set of blocks that, packaged and implemented as IP-modules, allow to alleviate the computational load of the processing units of the systems where they could be integrated.
In this Thesis, specific solutions for the implementation of two kinds of usual operations in many computer vision systems are provided. These operations are background subtraction and connected component labelling. Different solutions are created as the result of applying a good performance/cost trade-off (approaching this last criteria in terms of area, speed and consumed power), able to cover a wide range of applications. Inference techniques based on Fuzzy Logic have been applied to some of the proposed solutions in order to improve the quality of the resulting systems.
To obtain the mentioned solutions, a model based-design methodology has been applied. This fact has allowed us to carry out all the design flow from a single work environment. That environment combines CAD tools that facilitate the stages of code programming, circuit design, physical implementation and functional and temporal verification of the different algorithms, thus accelerating the overall processes and making it possible to explore the space of solutions.
Moreover, aiming to demonstrate the functionality of this PhD Thesis’s contributions, some of the proposed solutions have been integrated on real video systems that employ common and standard buses. The devices selected to perform these demonstrators have been FPGA and SoPCs (manufactured by Xilinx) since, due to their excellent properties for prototyping and creating systems that combine software and hardware components, they are ideal to develop these applications
Contour Based Tracking for Driveway Entrance Counting System
Managing vehicle in free-flow entrance is tiring to do manually by a guard control especially due to the increase in transportation demand. Providing an accurate vehicle counting approach is vital for traffic management and it will surely be an essential part in tomorrow's smart cities. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to propose a more accurate vehicle counter by using the tracking and heuristic rules approaches. EzCam v1.0 is a vehicle surveillance system for a free-flow entrance where a module of vehicle counting based on proposed idea has been applied. The proposed method does not require high computational resources more than any relatively affordable non task specific hardware. It employs single threshold, contour extraction and sequential frame analysis and finally, vehicle counting process subsequently. The tracking-based method employs foreground object detection method and a mechanism for object filtering approach as compared to Chris Dahms approach which does not consider any object rejection and accept all contour information as relevant to be counted as vehicles. As a result, EzCam v1.0 which utilizes the exploited contour-based approach is able to achieve up to 94 percent of accuracy rate and outperforms the classic Chris Dahms method which obtained an accuracy of 88 percent. Therefore, the Exploited Contour based tracking method helps vehicle counting system to perform better accuracy in comparison to Chris Dahms approach
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