24,745 research outputs found
Vectors of Locally Aggregated Centers for Compact Video Representation
We propose a novel vector aggregation technique for compact video
representation, with application in accurate similarity detection within large
video datasets. The current state-of-the-art in visual search is formed by the
vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) of Jegou et. al. VLAD generates
compact video representations based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)
vectors (extracted per frame) and local feature centers computed over a
training set. With the aim to increase robustness to visual distortions, we
propose a new approach that operates at a coarser level in the feature
representation. We create vectors of locally aggregated centers (VLAC) by first
clustering SIFT features to obtain local feature centers (LFCs) and then
encoding the latter with respect to given centers of local feature centers
(CLFCs), extracted from a training set. The sum-of-differences between the LFCs
and the CLFCs are aggregated to generate an extremely-compact video description
used for accurate video segment similarity detection. Experimentation using a
video dataset, comprising more than 1000 minutes of content from the Open Video
Project, shows that VLAC obtains substantial gains in terms of mean Average
Precision (mAP) against VLAD and the hyper-pooling method of Douze et. al.,
under the same compaction factor and the same set of distortions.Comment: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, ICME
2015, Torino, Ital
Semi-Global Stereo Matching with Surface Orientation Priors
Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely-used efficient stereo matching
technique. It works well for textured scenes, but fails on untextured slanted
surfaces due to its fronto-parallel smoothness assumption. To remedy this
problem, we propose a simple extension, termed SGM-P, to utilize precomputed
surface orientation priors. Such priors favor different surface slants in
different 2D image regions or 3D scene regions and can be derived in various
ways. In this paper we evaluate plane orientation priors derived from stereo
matching at a coarser resolution and show that such priors can yield
significant performance gains for difficult weakly-textured scenes. We also
explore surface normal priors derived from Manhattan-world assumptions, and we
analyze the potential performance gains using oracle priors derived from
ground-truth data. SGM-P only adds a minor computational overhead to SGM and is
an attractive alternative to more complex methods employing higher-order
smoothness terms.Comment: extended draft of 3DV 2017 (spotlight) pape
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
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