18,677 research outputs found
Estimating snow cover from publicly available images
In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous
regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We
argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated
photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as
additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and
airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and
processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific
challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks,
filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying
illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index,
which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of
visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a
manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area
estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show
that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover
index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
Context-aware CNNs for person head detection
Person detection is a key problem for many computer vision tasks. While face
detection has reached maturity, detecting people under a full variation of
camera view-points, human poses, lighting conditions and occlusions is still a
difficult challenge. In this work we focus on detecting human heads in natural
scenes. Starting from the recent local R-CNN object detector, we extend it with
two types of contextual cues. First, we leverage person-scene relations and
propose a Global CNN model trained to predict positions and scales of heads
directly from the full image. Second, we explicitly model pairwise relations
among objects and train a Pairwise CNN model using a structured-output
surrogate loss. The Local, Global and Pairwise models are combined into a joint
CNN framework. To train and test our full model, we introduce a large dataset
composed of 369,846 human heads annotated in 224,740 movie frames. We evaluate
our method and demonstrate improvements of person head detection against
several recent baselines in three datasets. We also show improvements of the
detection speed provided by our model.Comment: To appear in International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201
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