722 research outputs found
Tracking interacting targets in multi-modal sensors
PhDObject tracking is one of the fundamental tasks in various applications such as surveillance,
sports, video conferencing and activity recognition. Factors such as occlusions,
illumination changes and limited field of observance of the sensor make tracking a challenging
task. To overcome these challenges the focus of this thesis is on using multiple
modalities such as audio and video for multi-target, multi-modal tracking. Particularly,
this thesis presents contributions to four related research topics, namely, pre-processing of
input signals to reduce noise, multi-modal tracking, simultaneous detection and tracking,
and interaction recognition.
To improve the performance of detection algorithms, especially in the presence
of noise, this thesis investigate filtering of the input data through spatio-temporal feature
analysis as well as through frequency band analysis. The pre-processed data from multiple
modalities is then fused within Particle filtering (PF). To further minimise the discrepancy
between the real and the estimated positions, we propose a strategy that associates the
hypotheses and the measurements with a real target, using a Weighted Probabilistic Data
Association (WPDA). Since the filtering involved in the detection process reduces the
available information and is inapplicable on low signal-to-noise ratio data, we investigate
simultaneous detection and tracking approaches and propose a multi-target track-beforedetect
Particle filtering (MT-TBD-PF). The proposed MT-TBD-PF algorithm bypasses
the detection step and performs tracking in the raw signal. Finally, we apply the proposed
multi-modal tracking to recognise interactions between targets in regions within, as well
as outside the cameras’ fields of view.
The efficiency of the proposed approaches are demonstrated on large uni-modal,
multi-modal and multi-sensor scenarios from real world detections, tracking and event
recognition datasets and through participation in evaluation campaigns
Acoustical Ranging Techniques in Embedded Wireless Sensor Networked Devices
Location sensing provides endless opportunities for a wide range of applications in GPS-obstructed environments;
where, typically, there is a need for higher degree of accuracy. In this article, we focus on robust range
estimation, an important prerequisite for fine-grained localization. Motivated by the promise of acoustic in
delivering high ranging accuracy, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of acoustic (both
ultrasound and audible) ranging systems.We distill the limitations of acoustic ranging; and present efficient
signal designs and detection algorithms to overcome the challenges of coverage, range, accuracy/resolution,
tolerance to Doppler’s effect, and audible intensity. We evaluate our proposed techniques experimentally on
TWEET, a low-power platform purpose-built for acoustic ranging applications. Our experiments demonstrate
an operational range of 20 m (outdoor) and an average accuracy 2 cm in the ultrasound domain. Finally,
we present the design of an audible-range acoustic tracking service that encompasses the benefits of a near-inaudible
acoustic broadband chirp and approximately two times increase in Doppler tolerance to achieve better performance
SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis
Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social
settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information
available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing
native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social
scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in
extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity
and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To
this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and
Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research
on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions
among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes,
under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting
difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations,
numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To
alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the
social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges
worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth
and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations
concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body
orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through
extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the
limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues
synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is
available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
Audiovisual head orientation estimation with particle filtering in multisensor scenarios
This article presents a multimodal approach to head pose estimation of individuals in environments equipped with multiple cameras and microphones, such as SmartRooms or automatic video conferencing. Determining the individuals head orientation is the basis for many forms of more sophisticated interactions between humans and technical devices and can also be used for automatic sensor selection (camera, microphone) in communications or video surveillance systems. The use of particle filters as a unified framework for the estimation of the head orientation for both monomodal and multimodal cases is proposed. In video, we estimate head orientation from color information by exploiting spatial redundancy among cameras. Audio information is processed to estimate the direction of the voice produced by a speaker making use of the directivity characteristics of the head radiation pattern. Furthermore, two different particle filter multimodal information fusion schemes for combining the audio and video streams are analyzed in terms of accuracy and robustness. In the first one, fusion is performed at a decision level by combining each monomodal head pose estimation, while the second one uses a joint estimation system combining information at data level. Experimental results conducted over the CLEAR 2006 evaluation database are reported and the comparison of the proposed multimodal head pose estimation algorithms with the reference monomodal approaches proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Postprint (published version
Studies on noise robust automatic speech recognition
Noise in everyday acoustic environments such as cars, traffic environments, and cafeterias remains one of the main challenges in automatic speech recognition (ASR). As a research theme, it has received wide attention in conferences and scientific journals focused on speech technology. This article collection reviews both the classic and novel approaches suggested for noise robust ASR. The articles are literature reviews written for the spring 2009 seminar course on noise robust automatic speech recognition (course code T-61.6060) held at TKK
Multiple Source Localization Based on Acoustic Map De-Emphasis
This paper describes a novel approach for localization of multiple sources overlapping in time. The proposed algorithm relies on acoustic maps computed in multi-microphone settings, which are descriptions of the distribution of the acoustic activity in a monitored area. Through a proper processing of the acoustic maps, the positions of two or more simultaneously active acoustic sources can be estimated in a robust way. Experimental results obtained on real data collected for this specific task show the capabilities of the given method both with distributed microphone networks and with compact arrays
- …