Real-Time Salient Closed Boundary Tracking via Line Segments Perceptual Grouping

This paper presents a novel real-time method for tracking salient closed boundaries from video image sequences. This method operates on a set of straight line segments that are produced by line detection. The tracking scheme is coherently integrated into a perceptual grouping framework in which the visual tracking problem is tackled by identifying a subset of these line segments and connecting them sequentially to form a closed boundary with the largest saliency and a certain similarity to the previous one. Specifically, we define a new tracking criterion which combines a grouping cost and an area similarity constraint. The proposed criterion makes the resulting boundary tracking more robust to local minima. To achieve real-time tracking performance, we use Delaunay Triangulation to build a graph model with the detected line segments and then reduce the tracking problem to finding the optimal cycle in this graph. This is solved by our newly proposed closed boundary candidates searching algorithm called "Bidirectional Shortest Path (BDSP)". The efficiency and robustness of the proposed method are tested on real video sequences as well as during a robot arm pouring experiment.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, The 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) submission ID 103

Representations for Cognitive Vision : a Review of Appearance-Based, Spatio-Temporal, and Graph-Based Approaches

The emerging discipline of cognitive vision requires a proper representation of visual information including spatial and temporal relationships, scenes, events, semantics and context. This review article summarizes existing representational schemes in computer vision which might be useful for cognitive vision, a and discusses promising future research directions. The various approaches are categorized according to appearance-based, spatio-temporal, and graph-based representations for cognitive vision. While the representation of objects has been covered extensively in computer vision research, both from a reconstruction as well as from a recognition point of view, cognitive vision will also require new ideas how to represent scenes. We introduce new concepts for scene representations and discuss how these might be efficiently implemented in future cognitive vision systems

Single View Modeling and View Synthesis

This thesis develops new algorithms to produce 3D content from a single camera. Today, amateurs can use hand-held camcorders to capture and display the 3D world in 2D, using mature technologies. However, there is always a strong desire to record and re-explore the 3D world in 3D. To achieve this goal, current approaches usually make use of a camera array, which suffers from tedious setup and calibration processes, as well as lack of portability, limiting its application to lab experiments. In this thesis, I try to produce the 3D contents using a single camera, making it as simple as shooting pictures. It requires a new front end capturing device rather than a regular camcorder, as well as more sophisticated algorithms. First, in order to capture the highly detailed object surfaces, I designed and developed a depth camera based on a novel technique called light fall-off stereo (LFS). The LFS depth camera outputs color+depth image sequences and achieves 30 fps, which is necessary for capturing dynamic scenes. Based on the output color+depth images, I developed a new approach that builds 3D models of dynamic and deformable objects. While the camera can only capture part of a whole object at any instance, partial surfaces are assembled together to form a complete 3D model by a novel warping algorithm. Inspired by the success of single view 3D modeling, I extended my exploration into 2D-3D video conversion that does not utilize a depth camera. I developed a semi-automatic system that converts monocular videos into stereoscopic videos, via view synthesis. It combines motion analysis with user interaction, aiming to transfer as much depth inferring work from the user to the computer. I developed two new methods that analyze the optical flow in order to provide additional qualitative depth constraints. The automatically extracted depth information is presented in the user interface to assist with user labeling work. In this thesis, I developed new algorithms to produce 3D contents from a single camera. Depending on the input data, my algorithm can build high fidelity 3D models for dynamic and deformable objects if depth maps are provided. Otherwise, it can turn the video clips into stereoscopic video

From pixels to people : recovering location, shape and pose of humans in images

Humans are at the centre of a significant amount of research in computer vision. Endowing machines with the ability to perceive people from visual data is an immense scientific challenge with a high degree of direct practical relevance. Success in automatic perception can be measured at different levels of abstraction, and this will depend on which intelligent behaviour we are trying to replicate: the ability to localise persons in an image or in the environment, understanding how persons are moving at the skeleton and at the surface level, interpreting their interactions with the environment including with other people, and perhaps even anticipating future actions. In this thesis we tackle different sub-problems of the broad research area referred to as "looking at people", aiming to perceive humans in images at different levels of granularity. We start with bounding box-level pedestrian detection: We present a retrospective analysis of methods published in the decade preceding our work, identifying various strands of research that have advanced the state of the art. With quantitative exper- iments, we demonstrate the critical role of developing better feature representations and having the right training distribution. We then contribute two methods based on the insights derived from our analysis: one that combines the strongest aspects of past detectors and another that focuses purely on learning representations. The latter method outperforms more complicated approaches, especially those based on hand- crafted features. We conclude our work on pedestrian detection with a forward-looking analysis that maps out potential avenues for future research. We then turn to pixel-level methods: Perceiving humans requires us to both separate them precisely from the background and identify their surroundings. To this end, we introduce Cityscapes, a large-scale dataset for street scene understanding. This has since established itself as a go-to benchmark for segmentation and detection. We additionally develop methods that relax the requirement for expensive pixel-level annotations, focusing on the task of boundary detection, i.e. identifying the outlines of relevant objects and surfaces. Next, we make the jump from pixels to 3D surfaces, from localising and labelling to fine-grained spatial understanding. We contribute a method for recovering 3D human shape and pose, which marries the advantages of learning-based and model- based approaches. We conclude the thesis with a detailed discussion of benchmarking practices in computer vision. Among other things, we argue that the design of future datasets should be driven by the general goal of combinatorial robustness besides task-specific considerations.Der Mensch steht im Zentrum vieler Forschungsanstrengungen im Bereich des maschinellen Sehens. Es ist eine immense wissenschaftliche Herausforderung mit hohem unmittelbarem Praxisbezug, Maschinen mit der Fähigkeit auszustatten, Menschen auf der Grundlage von visuellen Daten wahrzunehmen. Die automatische Wahrnehmung kann auf verschiedenen Abstraktionsebenen erfolgen. Dies hängt davon ab, welches intelligente Verhalten wir nachbilden wollen: die Fähigkeit, Personen auf der Bildfläche oder im 3D-Raum zu lokalisieren, die Bewegungen von Körperteilen und Körperoberflächen zu erfassen, Interaktionen einer Person mit ihrer Umgebung einschließlich mit anderen Menschen zu deuten, und vielleicht sogar zukünftige Handlungen zu antizipieren. In dieser Arbeit beschäftigen wir uns mit verschiedenen Teilproblemen die dem breiten Forschungsgebiet "Betrachten von Menschen" gehören. Beginnend mit der Fußgängererkennung präsentieren wir eine Analyse von Methoden, die im Jahrzehnt vor unserem Ausgangspunkt veröffentlicht wurden, und identifizieren dabei verschiedene Forschungsstränge, die den Stand der Technik vorangetrieben haben. Unsere quantitativen Experimente zeigen die entscheidende Rolle sowohl der Entwicklung besserer Bildmerkmale als auch der Trainingsdatenverteilung. Anschließend tragen wir zwei Methoden bei, die auf den Erkenntnissen unserer Analyse basieren: eine Methode, die die stärksten Aspekte vergangener Detektoren kombiniert, eine andere, die sich im Wesentlichen auf das Lernen von Bildmerkmalen konzentriert. Letztere übertrifft kompliziertere Methoden, insbesondere solche, die auf handgefertigten Bildmerkmalen basieren. Wir schließen unsere Arbeit zur Fußgängererkennung mit einer vorausschauenden Analyse ab, die mögliche Wege für die zukünftige Forschung aufzeigt. Anschließend wenden wir uns Methoden zu, die Entscheidungen auf Pixelebene betreffen. Um Menschen wahrzunehmen, müssen wir diese sowohl praezise vom Hintergrund trennen als auch ihre Umgebung verstehen. Zu diesem Zweck führen wir Cityscapes ein, einen umfangreichen Datensatz zum Verständnis von Straßenszenen. Dieser hat sich seitdem als Standardbenchmark für Segmentierung und Erkennung etabliert. Darüber hinaus entwickeln wir Methoden, die die Notwendigkeit teurer Annotationen auf Pixelebene reduzieren. Wir konzentrieren uns hierbei auf die Aufgabe der Umgrenzungserkennung, d. h. das Erkennen der Umrisse relevanter Objekte und Oberflächen. Als nächstes machen wir den Sprung von Pixeln zu 3D-Oberflächen, vom Lokalisieren und Beschriften zum präzisen räumlichen Verständnis. Wir tragen eine Methode zur Schätzung der 3D-Körperoberfläche sowie der 3D-Körperpose bei, die die Vorteile von lernbasierten und modellbasierten Ansätzen vereint. Wir schließen die Arbeit mit einer ausführlichen Diskussion von Evaluationspraktiken im maschinellen Sehen ab. Unter anderem argumentieren wir, dass der Entwurf zukünftiger Datensätze neben aufgabenspezifischen Überlegungen vom allgemeinen Ziel der kombinatorischen Robustheit bestimmt werden sollte

Camera Self-Calibration Using the Kruppa Equations and the SVD of the Fundamental Matrix: The Case of Varying Intrinsic Parameters

Estimation of the camera intrinsic calibration parameters is a prerequisite to a wide variety of vision tasks related to motion and stereo analysis. A major breakthrough related to the intrinsic calibration problem was the introduction in the early nineties of the autocalibration paradigm, according to which calibration is achieved not with the aid of a calibration pattern but by observing a number of image features in a set of successive images. Until recently, however, most research efforts have been focused on applying the autocalibration paradigm to estimating constant intrinsic calibration parameters. Therefore, such approaches are inapplicable to cases where the intrinsic parameters undergo continuous changes due to focusing and/or zooming. In this paper, our previous work for autocalibration in the case of constant camera intrinsic parameters is extended and a novel autocalibration method capable of handling variable intrinsic parameters is proposed. The method relies upon the Singular Value Decomposition of the fundamental matrix, which leads to a particularly simple form of the Kruppa equations. In contrast to the classical formulation that yields an over-determined system of constraints, a purely algebraic derivation is proposed here which provides a straightforward answer to the problem of determining which constraints to employ among the set of available ones. Additionally, the new formulation does not employ the epipoles, which are known to be difficult to estimate accurately. The intrinsic calibration parameters are recovered from the developed constraints through a nonlinear minimization scheme that explicitly takes into consideration the uncertainty associated with the estimates of the employed fundamental matrices. Detailed experimental results using both simulated and real image sequences demonstrate the feasibility of the approach