Distributed Feature Extraction Using Cloud Computing Resources

The need to expand the computational resources in a massive surveillance network is clear but traditional means of purchasing new equipment for short-term tasks every year is wasteful. In this work I will provide evidence in support of utilizing a cloud computing infrastructure to perform computationally intensive feature extraction tasks on data streams. Efficient off-loading of computational tasks to cloud resources will require a minimization of the time needed to expand the cloud resources, an efficient model of communication and a study of the interplay between the in-network computational resources and remote resources in the cloud. This report provides strong evidence that the use of cloud computing resources in a near real-time distributed sensor network surveillance system, ASAP, is feasible. A face detection web service operating on an Amazon EC2 instance is shown to provide processing of 10-15 frames per second.Umakishore Ramachandran - Faculty Mentor ; Rajnish Kumar - Committee Member/Second Reade

Incremental Training of a Detector Using Online Sparse Eigen-decomposition

The ability to efficiently and accurately detect objects plays a very crucial role for many computer vision tasks. Recently, offline object detectors have shown a tremendous success. However, one major drawback of offline techniques is that a complete set of training data has to be collected beforehand. In addition, once learned, an offline detector can not make use of newly arriving data. To alleviate these drawbacks, online learning has been adopted with the following objectives: (1) the technique should be computationally and storage efficient; (2) the updated classifier must maintain its high classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient framework for learning an adaptive online greedy sparse linear discriminant analysis (GSLDA) model. Unlike many existing online boosting detectors, which usually apply exponential or logistic loss, our online algorithm makes use of LDA's learning criterion that not only aims to maximize the class-separation criterion but also incorporates the asymmetrical property of training data distributions. We provide a better alternative for online boosting algorithms in the context of training a visual object detector. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our methods on handwriting digit and face data sets. Our results confirm that object detection tasks benefit significantly when trained in an online manner.Comment: 14 page

Single camera pose estimation using Bayesian filtering and Kinect motion priors

Traditional approaches to upper body pose estimation using monocular vision rely on complex body models and a large variety of geometric constraints. We argue that this is not ideal and somewhat inelegant as it results in large processing burdens, and instead attempt to incorporate these constraints through priors obtained directly from training data. A prior distribution covering the probability of a human pose occurring is used to incorporate likely human poses. This distribution is obtained offline, by fitting a Gaussian mixture model to a large dataset of recorded human body poses, tracked using a Kinect sensor. We combine this prior information with a random walk transition model to obtain an upper body model, suitable for use within a recursive Bayesian filtering framework. Our model can be viewed as a mixture of discrete Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, in that states behave as random walks, but drift towards a set of typically observed poses. This model is combined with measurements of the human head and hand positions, using recursive Bayesian estimation to incorporate temporal information. Measurements are obtained using face detection and a simple skin colour hand detector, trained using the detected face. The suggested model is designed with analytical tractability in mind and we show that the pose tracking can be Rao-Blackwellised using the mixture Kalman filter, allowing for computational efficiency while still incorporating bio-mechanical properties of the upper body. In addition, the use of the proposed upper body model allows reliable three-dimensional pose estimates to be obtained indirectly for a number of joints that are often difficult to detect using traditional object recognition strategies. Comparisons with Kinect sensor results and the state of the art in 2D pose estimation highlight the efficacy of the proposed approach.Comment: 25 pages, Technical report, related to Burke and Lasenby, AMDO 2014 conference paper. Code sample: https://github.com/mgb45/SignerBodyPose Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJMTSo7-uF