3,097 research outputs found
Multi modal multi-semantic image retrieval
PhDThe rapid growth in the volume of visual information, e.g. image, and video can
overwhelm users’ ability to find and access the specific visual information of interest
to them. In recent years, ontology knowledge-based (KB) image information retrieval
techniques have been adopted into in order to attempt to extract knowledge from these
images, enhancing the retrieval performance. A KB framework is presented to
promote semi-automatic annotation and semantic image retrieval using multimodal
cues (visual features and text captions). In addition, a hierarchical structure for the KB
allows metadata to be shared that supports multi-semantics (polysemy) for concepts.
The framework builds up an effective knowledge base pertaining to a domain specific
image collection, e.g. sports, and is able to disambiguate and assign high level
semantics to ‘unannotated’ images.
Local feature analysis of visual content, namely using Scale Invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) descriptors, have been deployed in the ‘Bag of Visual Words’
model (BVW) as an effective method to represent visual content information and to
enhance its classification and retrieval. Local features are more useful than global
features, e.g. colour, shape or texture, as they are invariant to image scale, orientation
and camera angle. An innovative approach is proposed for the representation,
annotation and retrieval of visual content using a hybrid technique based upon the use
of an unstructured visual word and upon a (structured) hierarchical ontology KB
model. The structural model facilitates the disambiguation of unstructured visual
words and a more effective classification of visual content, compared to a vector
space model, through exploiting local conceptual structures and their relationships.
The key contributions of this framework in using local features for image
representation include: first, a method to generate visual words using the semantic
local adaptive clustering (SLAC) algorithm which takes term weight and spatial
locations of keypoints into account. Consequently, the semantic information is
preserved. Second a technique is used to detect the domain specific ‘non-informative
visual words’ which are ineffective at representing the content of visual data and
degrade its categorisation ability. Third, a method to combine an ontology model with
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a visual word model to resolve synonym (visual heterogeneity) and polysemy
problems, is proposed. The experimental results show that this approach can discover
semantically meaningful visual content descriptions and recognise specific events,
e.g., sports events, depicted in images efficiently.
Since discovering the semantics of an image is an extremely challenging problem, one
promising approach to enhance visual content interpretation is to use any associated
textual information that accompanies an image, as a cue to predict the meaning of an
image, by transforming this textual information into a structured annotation for an
image e.g. using XML, RDF, OWL or MPEG-7. Although, text and image are distinct
types of information representation and modality, there are some strong, invariant,
implicit, connections between images and any accompanying text information.
Semantic analysis of image captions can be used by image retrieval systems to
retrieve selected images more precisely. To do this, a Natural Language Processing
(NLP) is exploited firstly in order to extract concepts from image captions. Next, an
ontology-based knowledge model is deployed in order to resolve natural language
ambiguities. To deal with the accompanying text information, two methods to extract
knowledge from textual information have been proposed. First, metadata can be
extracted automatically from text captions and restructured with respect to a semantic
model. Second, the use of LSI in relation to a domain-specific ontology-based
knowledge model enables the combined framework to tolerate ambiguities and
variations (incompleteness) of metadata. The use of the ontology-based knowledge
model allows the system to find indirectly relevant concepts in image captions and
thus leverage these to represent the semantics of images at a higher level.
Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances image
retrieval and leads to narrowing of the semantic gap between lower level machinederived
and higher level human-understandable conceptualisation
Activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos
PhDComputer scientists have made ceaseless efforts to replicate cognitive video understanding abilities
of human brains onto autonomous vision systems. As video surveillance cameras become
ubiquitous, there is a surge in studies on automated activity understanding and unusual event detection
in surveillance videos. Nevertheless, video content analysis in public scenes remained a
formidable challenge due to intrinsic difficulties such as severe inter-object occlusion in crowded
scene and poor quality of recorded surveillance footage. Moreover, it is nontrivial to achieve
robust detection of unusual events, which are rare, ambiguous, and easily confused with noise.
This thesis proposes solutions for resolving ambiguous visual observations and overcoming unreliability
of conventional activity analysis methods by exploiting multi-camera visual context
and human feedback.
The thesis first demonstrates the importance of learning visual context for establishing reliable
reasoning on observed activity in a camera network. In the proposed approach, a new Cross
Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is formulated to discover and quantify time delayed pairwise
correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views. This
thesis shows that learning time delayed pairwise activity correlations offers valuable contextual
information for (1) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network, (2) robust person
re-identification, and (3) accurate activity-based video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in
contrast to conventional methods, the proposed approach does not rely on either intra-camera or
inter-camera object tracking; it can thus be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featuring
severe inter-object occlusions.
Second, to detect global unusual event across multiple disjoint cameras, this thesis extends
visual context learning from pairwise relationship to global time delayed dependency between
regional activities. Specifically, a Time Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TD-PGM) is
proposed to model the multi-camera activities and their dependencies. Subtle global unusual
events are detected and localised using the model as context-incoherent patterns across multiple
camera views. In the model, different nodes represent activities in different decomposed re3
gions from different camera views, and the directed links between nodes encoding time delayed
dependencies between activities observed within and across camera views. In order to learn optimised
time delayed dependencies in a TD-PGM, a novel two-stage structure learning approach
is formulated by combining both constraint-based and scored-searching based structure learning
methods.
Third, to cope with visual context changes over time, this two-stage structure learning approach
is extended to permit tractable incremental update of both TD-PGM parameters and its
structure. As opposed to most existing studies that assume static model once learned, the proposed
incremental learning allows a model to adapt itself to reflect the changes in the current
visual context, such as subtle behaviour drift over time or removal/addition of cameras. Importantly,
the incremental structure learning is achieved without either exhaustive search in a large
graph structure space or storing all past observations in memory, making the proposed solution
memory and time efficient.
Forth, an active learning approach is presented to incorporate human feedback for on-line
unusual event detection. Contrary to most existing unsupervised methods that perform passive
mining for unusual events, the proposed approach automatically requests supervision for critical
points to resolve ambiguities of interest, leading to more robust detection of subtle unusual
events. The active learning strategy is formulated as a stream-based solution, i.e. it makes decision
on-the-fly on whether to request label for each unlabelled sample observed in sequence.
It selects adaptively two active learning criteria, namely likelihood criterion and uncertainty criterion
to achieve (1) discovery of unknown event classes and (2) refinement of classification
boundary.
The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated using videos captured from busy
public scenes such as underground stations and traffic intersections
Proceedings of the 2020 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory
In 2020 fand der jährliche Workshop des Faunhofer IOSB und the Lehrstuhls für interaktive Echtzeitsysteme statt. Vom 27. bis zum 31. Juli trugen die Doktorranden der beiden Institute über den Stand ihrer Forschung vor in Themen wie KI, maschinellen Lernen, computer vision, usage control, Metrologie vor. Die Ergebnisse dieser Vorträge sind in diesem Band als technische Berichte gesammelt
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
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