A Visual Tracking Study and A Proposal of Modifications

On-line visual tracking of a specified target in motion throughout frames of video clips faces challenges in robust identification of the target in the current frame based on the past frames. Three approaches for tracking the target image patch are described and compared. These approaches utilize particle filtering and principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the most likely location of the target in the current frame and a low dimensional subspace representation of the patches of images to be kept as the templates in the dictionary for the identification. By using a combination of methods and compare the result of each, a new model based is proposed. The goal is to achieve a more robust and accurate tracking of a target throughout the video and continue updating the identification templates to adapt the target changes, such as apparences in lighting, angle, scale and occlusions. The challenges in tracking are to introduction of the "right" templates into the identification templates in the dictionary and identify the most accurate particle image patch while tracking the target with the right tracking patch scaling. The first approach considered and on which the structure of the visual tracker is based is the "Incremental Learning for Robust Visual Tracking" by D. Ross et al., which is a computationally fast tracker that utilizes a method of low dimensional subspace for the identification template dictionary and incremental PCA for its tracking. The tracker has a simple rule in accepting the patches of images to be in the identification template dictionary after the image patch has gone through a singular value decomposition (SVD), where it eliminates singular values are smaller than $10^{-6}$ of the sum of squared sinuglar values and the corresponding bases are also eliminated. This elimination scheme has very limited robustness in tracking, therefore, more selective processes in accepting identification templates in the dictionary are explored and introduced on top of the existing method in comparison and to address the challenges in on-line video tracking. The second approach is the "Least Soft-Threshold Squares Tracking" proposed by D. Wang et al. solves the least soft-threshold squares distance problem to identify the distances of the particles to the templates in the dictionary, which greatly improves the tracking accuracy. This method is also computationally cheap in comparison to the first approach, and its accuracy is also better than the first approach, but it would sometimes fail to track in some applications. Finally, the third approach reviewed is the "Robust Visual Tracking and Vehicle Classification via Sparse Representation" by X. Mei et al. is to weight each particles when selecting the most likely target patch so the best patch has a highest weighted probability which ensures it being selected and introduced to the template dictionary. This approach performs well in comparison to the first and the second approaches in tracking accuracy and robustness, but this approach is extremely computationally expensive. Three new components are proposed in an effort to mitigate some of the limitations that the three approaches exhibit. One such component is to simply reject the image patches that exhibit too great of difference to the current template dictionary, which resulted in improved tracking robustness. This method is computationally cheap and easy to implement. Another component introduced is a second set of dictionary that is composed of admitted image patches, which is used for tracking when the image patches appears to be too dissimilar to the dictionary with low dimensional representation. It is expected that with more well defined and stronger features, it forces the tracking to identify the target. Finally, the third component introduced is the to prevent shrinkage of the target boundary box by weighting the particles drawn with the ratio of area change so that more weight is placed on particles with less arial change. This increases the likelihood of recovering the target again if tracking loses the target, and instead of shrinking the boundary box, the tracking is biased to staying with the image patch of the same size. The resulting performance of the proposed tracking scheme has not been noticeably improved, part of the reason is because the metrics available to identify a noisy image patch from the good image patches are not always indicative of the noisy-good image patch divide

Facial Expression Analysis under Partial Occlusion: A Survey

Automatic machine-based Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) has made substantial progress in the past few decades driven by its importance for applications in psychology, security, health, entertainment and human computer interaction. The vast majority of completed FEA studies are based on non-occluded faces collected in a controlled laboratory environment. Automatic expression recognition tolerant to partial occlusion remains less understood, particularly in real-world scenarios. In recent years, efforts investigating techniques to handle partial occlusion for FEA have seen an increase. The context is right for a comprehensive perspective of these developments and the state of the art from this perspective. This survey provides such a comprehensive review of recent advances in dataset creation, algorithm development, and investigations of the effects of occlusion critical for robust performance in FEA systems. It outlines existing challenges in overcoming partial occlusion and discusses possible opportunities in advancing the technology. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first FEA survey dedicated to occlusion and aimed at promoting better informed and benchmarked future work.Comment: Authors pre-print of the article accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys (accepted on 02-Nov-2017

REPRESENTATION LEARNING FOR ACTION RECOGNITION

The objective of this research work is to develop discriminative representations for human actions. The motivation stems from the fact that there are many issues encountered while capturing actions in videos like intra-action variations (due to actors, viewpoints, and duration), inter-action similarity, background motion, and occlusion of actors. Hence, obtaining a representation which can address all the variations in the same action while maintaining discrimination with other actions is a challenging task. In literature, actions have been represented either using either low-level or high-level features. Low-level features describe the motion and appearance in small spatio-temporal volumes extracted from a video. Due to the limited space-time volume used for extracting low-level features, they are not able to account for viewpoint and actor variations or variable length actions. On the other hand, high-level features handle variations in actors, viewpoints, and duration but the resulting representation is often high-dimensional which introduces the curse of dimensionality. In this thesis, we propose new representations for describing actions by combining the advantages of both low-level and high-level features. Specifically, we investigate various linear and non-linear decomposition techniques to extract meaningful attributes in both high-level and low-level features. In the first approach, the sparsity of high-level feature descriptors is leveraged to build action-specific dictionaries. Each dictionary retains only the discriminative information for a particular action and hence reduces inter-action similarity. Then, a sparsity-based classification method is proposed to classify the low-rank representation of clips obtained using these dictionaries. We show that this representation based on dictionary learning improves the classification performance across actions. Also, a few of the actions consist of rapid body deformations that hinder the extraction of local features from body movements. Hence, we propose to use a dictionary which is trained on convolutional neural network (CNN) features of the human body in various poses to reliably identify actors from the background. Particularly, we demonstrate the efficacy of sparse representation in the identification of the human body under rapid and substantial deformation. In the first two approaches, sparsity-based representation is developed to improve discriminability using class-specific dictionaries that utilize action labels. However, developing an unsupervised representation of actions is more beneficial as it can be used to both recognize similar actions and localize actions. We propose to exploit inter-action similarity to train a universal attribute model (UAM) in order to learn action attributes (common and distinct) implicitly across all the actions. Using maximum aposteriori (MAP) adaptation, a high-dimensional super action-vector (SAV) for each clip is extracted. As this SAV contains redundant attributes of all other actions, we use factor analysis to extract a novel lowvi dimensional action-vector representation for each clip. Action-vectors are shown to suppress background motion and highlight actions of interest in both trimmed and untrimmed clips that contributes to action recognition without the help of any classifiers. It is observed during our experiments that action-vector cannot effectively discriminate between actions which are visually similar to each other. Hence, we subject action-vectors to supervised linear embedding using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and probabilistic LDA (PLDA) to enforce discrimination. Particularly, we show that leveraging complimentary information across action-vectors using different local features followed by discriminative embedding provides the best classification performance. Further, we explore non-linear embedding of action-vectors using Siamese networks especially for fine-grained action recognition. A visualization of the hidden layer output in Siamese networks shows its ability to effectively separate visually similar actions. This leads to better classification performance than linear embedding on fine-grained action recognition. All of the above approaches are presented on large unconstrained datasets with hundreds of examples per action. However, actions in surveillance videos like snatch thefts are difficult to model because of the diverse variety of scenarios in which they occur and very few labeled examples. Hence, we propose to utilize the universal attribute model (UAM) trained on large action datasets to represent such actions. Specifically, we show that there are similarities between certain actions in the large datasets with snatch thefts which help in extracting a representation for snatch thefts using the attributes from the UAM. This representation is shown to be effective in distinguishing snatch thefts from regular actions with high accuracy.In summary, this thesis proposes both supervised and unsupervised approaches for representing actions which provide better discrimination than existing representations. The first approach presents a dictionary learning based sparse representation for effective discrimination of actions. Also, we propose a sparse representation for the human body based on dictionaries in order to recognize actions with rapid body deformations. In the next approach, a low-dimensional representation called action-vector for unsupervised action recognition is presented. Further, linear and non-linear embedding of action-vectors is proposed for addressing inter-action similarity and fine-grained action recognition, respectively. Finally, we propose a representation for locating snatch thefts among thousands of regular interactions in surveillance videos

Subspace Representations for Robust Face and Facial Expression Recognition

Analyzing human faces and modeling their variations have always been of interest to the computer vision community. Face analysis based on 2D intensity images is a challenging problem, complicated by variations in pose, lighting, blur, and non-rigid facial deformations due to facial expressions. Among the different sources of variation, facial expressions are of interest as important channels of non-verbal communication. Facial expression analysis is also affected by changes in view-point and inter-subject variations in performing different expressions. This dissertation makes an attempt to address some of the challenges involved in developing robust algorithms for face and facial expression recognition by exploiting the idea of proper subspace representations for data. Variations in the visual appearance of an object mostly arise due to changes in illumination and pose. So we first present a video-based sequential algorithm for estimating the face albedo as an illumination-insensitive signature for face recognition. We show that by knowing/estimating the pose of the face at each frame of a sequence, the albedo can be efficiently estimated using a Kalman filter. Then we extend this to the case of unknown pose by simultaneously tracking the pose as well as updating the albedo through an efficient Bayesian inference method performed using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. Since understanding the effects of blur, especially motion blur, is an important problem in unconstrained visual analysis, we then propose a blur-robust recognition algorithm for faces with spatially varying blur. We model a blurred face as a weighted average of geometrically transformed instances of its clean face. We then build a matrix, for each gallery face, whose column space spans the space of all the motion blurred images obtained from the clean face. This matrix representation is then used to define a proper objective function and perform blur-robust face recognition. To develop robust and generalizable models for expression analysis one needs to break the dependence of the models on the choice of the coordinate frame of the camera. To this end, we build models for expressions on the affine shape-space (Grassmann manifold), as an approximation to the projective shape-space, by using a Riemannian interpretation of deformations that facial expressions cause on different parts of the face. This representation enables us to perform various expression analysis and recognition algorithms without the need for pose normalization as a preprocessing step. There is a large degree of inter-subject variations in performing various expressions. This poses an important challenge on developing robust facial expression recognition algorithms. To address this challenge, we propose a dictionary-based approach for facial expression analysis by decomposing expressions in terms of action units (AUs). First, we construct an AU-dictionary using domain experts' knowledge of AUs. To incorporate the high-level knowledge regarding expression decomposition and AUs, we then perform structure-preserving sparse coding by imposing two layers of grouping over AU-dictionary atoms as well as over the test image matrix columns. We use the computed sparse code matrix for each expressive face to perform expression decomposition and recognition. Most of the existing methods for the recognition of faces and expressions consider either the expression-invariant face recognition problem or the identity-independent facial expression recognition problem. We propose joint face and facial expression recognition using a dictionary-based component separation algorithm (DCS). In this approach, the given expressive face is viewed as a superposition of a neutral face component with a facial expression component, which is sparse with respect to the whole image. This assumption leads to a dictionary-based component separation algorithm, which benefits from the idea of sparsity and morphological diversity. The DCS algorithm uses the data-driven dictionaries to decompose an expressive test face into its constituent components. The sparse codes we obtain as a result of this decomposition are then used for joint face and expression recognition

A Study on Human Motion Acquisition and Recognition Employing Structured Motion Database

九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号:工博甲第332号　学位授与年月日:平成24年3月23日1 Introduction||2 Human Motion Representation||3 Human Motion Recognition||4 Automatic Human Motion Acquisition||5 Human Motion Recognition Employing Structured Motion Database||6 Analysis on the Constraints in Human Motion Recognition||7 Multiple Persons’ Action Recognition||8 Discussion and ConclusionsHuman motion analysis is an emerging research field for the video-based applications capable of acquiring and recognizing human motions or actions. The automaticity of such a system with these capabilities has vital importance in real-life scenarios. With the increasing number of applications, the demand for a human motion acquisition system is gaining importance day-by-day. We develop such kind of acquisition system based on body-parts modeling strategy. The system is able to acquire the motion by positioning body joints and interpreting those joints by the inter-parts inclination. Besides the development of the acquisition system, there is increasing need for a reliable human motion recognition system in recent years. There are a number of researches on motion recognition is performed in last two decades. At the same time, an enormous amount of bulk motion datasets are becoming available. Therefore, it becomes an indispensable task to develop a motion database that can deal with large variability of motions efficiently. We have developed such a system based on the structured motion database concept. In order to gain a perspective on this issue, we have analyzed various aspects of the motion database with a view to establishing a standard recognition scheme. The conventional structured database is subjected to improvement by considering three aspects: directional organization, nearest neighbor searching problem resolution, and prior direction estimation. In order to investigate and analyze comprehensively the effect of those aspects on motion recognition, we have adopted two forms of motion representation, eigenspace-based motion compression, and B-Tree structured database. Moreover, we have also analyzed the two important constraints in motion recognition: missing information and clutter outdoor motions. Two separate systems based on these constraints are also developed that shows the suitable adoption of the constraints. However, several people occupy a scene in practical cases. We have proposed a detection-tracking-recognition integrated action recognition system to deal with multiple people case. The system shows decent performance in outdoor scenarios. The experimental results empirically illustrate the suitability and compatibility of various factors of the motion recognition

Single-target tracking of arbitrary objects using multi-layered features and contextual information

This thesis investigated single-target tracking of arbitrary objects. Tracking is a difficult problem due to a variety of challenges such as significant deformations of the target, occlusions, illumination variations, background clutter and camouflage. To achieve robust tracking performance under these severe conditions, this thesis proposed firstly a novel RGB single-target tracker which models the target with multi-layered features and contextual information. The proposed algorithm was tested on two different tracking benchmarks, i.e., VTB and VOT, where it demonstrated significantly more robust performance than other state-of-the-art RGB trackers. Proposed secondly was an extension of the designed RGB tracker to handle RGB-D images using both temporal and spatial constraints to exploit depth information more robustly. For evaluation, the thesis introduced a new RGB-D benchmark dataset with per-frame annotated attributes and extensive bias analysis, on which the proposed tracker achieved the best results. Proposed thirdly was a new tracking approach to handle camouflage problems in highly cluttered scenes exploiting global dynamic constraints from the context. To evaluate the tracker, a benchmark dataset was augmented with a new set of clutter sub-attributes. Using this dataset, it was demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art single target trackers on highly cluttered scenes

Contributions to the study of Austism Spectrum Brain conectivity

164 p.Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a largely prevalent neurodevelopmental condition with a big social and economical impact affecting the entire life of families. There is an intense search for biomarkers that can be assessed as early as possible in order to initiate treatment and preparation of the family to deal with the challenges imposed by the condition. Brain imaging biomarkers have special interest. Specifically, functional connectivity data extracted from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) should allow to detect brain connectivity alterations. Machine learning pipelines encompass the estimation of the functional connectivity matrix from brain parcellations, feature extraction and building classification models for ASD prediction. The works reported in the literature are very heterogeneous from the computational and methodological point of view. In this Thesis we carry out a comprehensive computational exploration of the impact of the choices involved while building these machine learning pipelines