18,084 research outputs found
Exploratory search through large video corpora
Activity retrieval is a growing field in electrical engineering that specializes in the search and retrieval of relevant activities and events in video corpora. With the affordability and popularity of cameras for government, personal and retail use, the quantity of available video data is rapidly outscaling our ability to reason over it. Towards the end of empowering users to navigate and interact with the contents of these video corpora, we propose a framework for exploratory search that emphasizes activity structure and search space reduction over complex feature representations.
Exploratory search is a user driven process wherein a person provides a system with a query describing the activity, event, or object he is interested in finding. Typically, this description takes the implicit form of one or more exemplar videos, but it can also involve an explicit description. The system returns candidate matches, followed by query refinement and iteration. System performance is judged by the run-time of the system and the precision/recall curve of of the query matches returned.
Scaling is one of the primary challenges in video search. From vast web-video archives like youtube (1 billion videos and counting) to the 30 million active surveillance cameras shooting an estimated 4 billion hours of footage every week in the United States, trying to find a set of matches can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Our goal is to create an efficient archival representation of video corpora that can be calculated in real-time as video streams in, and then enables a user to quickly get a set of results that match.
First, we design a system for rapidly identifying simple queries in large-scale video corpora. Instead of focusing on feature design, our system focuses on the spatiotemporal relationships between those features as a means of disambiguating an activity of interest from background. We define a semantic feature vocabulary of concepts that are both readily extracted from video and easily understood by an operator. As data streams in, features are hashed to an inverted index and retrieved in constant time after the system is presented with a user's query.
We take a zero-shot approach to exploratory search: the user manually assembles vocabulary elements like color, speed, size and type into a graph. Given that information, we perform an initial downsampling of the archived data, and design a novel dynamic programming approach based on genome-sequencing to search for similar patterns. Experimental results indicate that this approach outperforms other methods for detecting activities in surveillance video datasets.
Second, we address the problem of representing complex activities that take place over long spans of space and time. Subgraph and graph matching methods have seen limited use in exploratory search because both problems are provably NP-hard. In this work, we render these problems computationally tractable by identifying the maximally discriminative spanning tree (MDST), and using dynamic programming to optimally reduce the archive data based on a custom algorithm for tree-matching in attributed relational graphs. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on popular surveillance video datasets in several modalities.
Finally, we design an approach for successive search space reduction in subgraph matching problems. Given a query graph and archival data, our algorithm iteratively selects spanning trees from the query graph that optimize the expected search space reduction at each step until the archive converges. We use this approach to efficiently reason over video surveillance datasets, simulated data, as well as large graphs of protein data
Video analytics system for surveillance videos
Developing an intelligent inspection system that can enhance the public safety is challenging. An efficient video analytics system can help monitor unusual events and mitigate possible damage or loss. This thesis aims to analyze surveillance video data, report abnormal activities and retrieve corresponding video clips. The surveillance video dataset used in this thesis is derived from ALERT Dataset, a collection of surveillance videos at airport security checkpoints.
The video analytics system in this thesis can be thought as a pipelined process. The system takes the surveillance video as input, and passes it through a series of processing such as object detection, multi-object tracking, person-bin association and re-identification. In the end, we can obtain trajectories of passengers and baggage in the surveillance videos. Abnormal events like taking away other's belongings will be detected and trigger the alarm automatically. The system could also retrieve the corresponding video clips based on user-defined query
TRECVID 2008 - goals, tasks, data, evaluation mechanisms and metrics
The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2008 is a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based exploitation of digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last 7 years this effort has yielded a
better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. In 2008, 77 teams (see Table 1) from various research organizations --- 24 from
Asia, 39 from Europe, 13 from North America, and 1 from Australia --- participated in one or more of five tasks: high-level feature extraction, search (fully automatic, manually assisted, or interactive), pre-production video (rushes) summarization, copy detection, or surveillance event detection. The copy detection and surveillance event detection tasks are being run for the first time in TRECVID.
This paper presents an overview of TRECVid in 2008
UG^2: a Video Benchmark for Assessing the Impact of Image Restoration and Enhancement on Automatic Visual Recognition
Advances in image restoration and enhancement techniques have led to
discussion about how such algorithmscan be applied as a pre-processing step to
improve automatic visual recognition. In principle, techniques like deblurring
and super-resolution should yield improvements by de-emphasizing noise and
increasing signal in an input image. But the historically divergent goals of
the computational photography and visual recognition communities have created a
significant need for more work in this direction. To facilitate new research,
we introduce a new benchmark dataset called UG^2, which contains three
difficult real-world scenarios: uncontrolled videos taken by UAVs and manned
gliders, as well as controlled videos taken on the ground. Over 160,000
annotated frames forhundreds of ImageNet classes are available, which are used
for baseline experiments that assess the impact of known and unknown image
artifacts and other conditions on common deep learning-based object
classification approaches. Further, current image restoration and enhancement
techniques are evaluated by determining whether or not theyimprove baseline
classification performance. Results showthat there is plenty of room for
algorithmic innovation, making this dataset a useful tool going forward.Comment: Supplemental material: https://goo.gl/vVM1xe, Dataset:
https://goo.gl/AjA6En, CVPR 2018 Prize Challenge: ug2challenge.or
Towards robots reasoning about group behavior of museum visitors: leader detection and group tracking
The final publication is available at IOS Press through http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/AIS-170467Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Learning to Look Around: Intelligently Exploring Unseen Environments for Unknown Tasks
It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs
(e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good
observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to
look around: if a visual agent has the ability to voluntarily acquire new views
to observe its environment, how can it learn efficient exploratory behaviors to
acquire informative observations? We propose a reinforcement learning solution,
where the agent is rewarded for actions that reduce its uncertainty about the
unobserved portions of its environment. Based on this principle, we develop a
recurrent neural network-based approach to perform active completion of
panoramic natural scenes and 3D object shapes. Crucially, the learned policies
are not tied to any recognition task nor to the particular semantic content
seen during training. As a result, 1) the learned "look around" behavior is
relevant even for new tasks in unseen environments, and 2) training data
acquisition involves no manual labeling. Through tests in diverse settings, we
demonstrate that our approach learns useful generic policies that transfer to
new unseen tasks and environments. Completion episodes are shown at
https://goo.gl/BgWX3W
Total Variation Regularized Tensor RPCA for Background Subtraction from Compressive Measurements
Background subtraction has been a fundamental and widely studied task in
video analysis, with a wide range of applications in video surveillance,
teleconferencing and 3D modeling. Recently, motivated by compressive imaging,
background subtraction from compressive measurements (BSCM) is becoming an
active research task in video surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel
tensor-based robust PCA (TenRPCA) approach for BSCM by decomposing video frames
into backgrounds with spatial-temporal correlations and foregrounds with
spatio-temporal continuity in a tensor framework. In this approach, we use 3D
total variation (TV) to enhance the spatio-temporal continuity of foregrounds,
and Tucker decomposition to model the spatio-temporal correlations of video
background. Based on this idea, we design a basic tensor RPCA model over the
video frames, dubbed as the holistic TenRPCA model (H-TenRPCA). To characterize
the correlations among the groups of similar 3D patches of video background, we
further design a patch-group-based tensor RPCA model (PG-TenRPCA) by joint
tensor Tucker decompositions of 3D patch groups for modeling the video
background. Efficient algorithms using alternating direction method of
multipliers (ADMM) are developed to solve the proposed models. Extensive
experiments on simulated and real-world videos demonstrate the superiority of
the proposed approaches over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE TI
Leveraging video annotations in video-based e-learning
The e-learning community has been producing and using video content for a
long time, and in the last years, the advent of MOOCs greatly relied on video
recordings of teacher courses. Video annotations are information pieces that
can be anchored in the temporality of the video so as to sustain various
processes ranging from active reading to rich media editing. In this position
paper we study how video annotations can be used in an e-learning context -
especially MOOCs - from the triple point of view of pedagogical processes,
current technical platforms functionalities, and current challenges. Our
analysis is that there is still plenty of room for leveraging video annotations
in MOOCs beyond simple active reading, namely live annotation, performance
annotation and annotation for assignment; and that new developments are needed
to accompany this evolution.Comment: 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU),
Barcelone : Spain (2014
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