Improving a real-time object detector with compact temporal information

Neural networks designed for real-time object detectionhave recently improved significantly, but in practice, look-ing at only a single RGB image at the time may not be ideal.For example, when detecting objects in videos, a foregrounddetection algorithm can be used to obtain compact temporaldata, which can be fed into a neural network alongside RGBimages. We propose an approach for doing this, based onan existing object detector, that re-uses pretrained weightsfor the processing of RGB images. The neural network wastested on the VIRAT dataset with annotations for object de-tection, a problem this approach is well suited for. The ac-curacy was found to improve significantly (up to 66%), witha roughly 40% increase in computational time

Bayesian Formulation of Gradient Orientation Matching

Gradient orientations are a common feature used in many computer vision algorithms. It is a good feature when the gradient magnitudes are high, but can be very noisy when the magnitudes are low. This means that some gradient orientations are matched with more confidence than others. By estimating this uncertainty, more weight can be put on the confident matches than those with higher uncertainty. To enable this, we derive the probability distribution of gradient orientations based on a signal to noise ratio defined as the gradient magnitude divided by the standard deviation of the Gaussian noise. The noise level is reasonably invariant over time, while the magnitude, has to be measured for every frame. Using this probability distribution we formulate the matching of gradient orientations as a Bayesian classification problem. A common application where this is useful is feature point matching. Another application is background/foreground segmentation. This paper will use the latter application as an example, but is focused on the general formulation. It is shown how the theory can be used to implement a very fast background/foreground segmentation algorithm that is capable of handling complex lighting variations