9,015 research outputs found
Cognitive visual tracking and camera control
Cognitive visual tracking is the process of observing and understanding the behaviour of a moving person. This paper presents an efficient solution to extract, in real-time, high-level information from an observed scene, and generate the most appropriate commands for a set of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras in a surveillance scenario. Such a high-level feedback control loop, which is the main novelty of our work, will serve to reduce uncertainties in the observed scene and to maximize the amount of information extracted from it. It is implemented with a distributed camera system using SQL tables as virtual communication channels, and Situation Graph Trees for knowledge representation, inference and high-level camera control. A set of experiments in a surveillance scenario show the effectiveness of our approach and its potential for real applications of cognitive vision
Occlusion Handling using Semantic Segmentation and Visibility-Based Rendering for Mixed Reality
Real-time occlusion handling is a major problem in outdoor mixed reality
system because it requires great computational cost mainly due to the
complexity of the scene. Using only segmentation, it is difficult to accurately
render a virtual object occluded by complex objects such as trees, bushes etc.
In this paper, we propose a novel occlusion handling method for real-time,
outdoor, and omni-directional mixed reality system using only the information
from a monocular image sequence. We first present a semantic segmentation
scheme for predicting the amount of visibility for different type of objects in
the scene. We also simultaneously calculate a foreground probability map using
depth estimation derived from optical flow. Finally, we combine the
segmentation result and the probability map to render the computer generated
object and the real scene using a visibility-based rendering method. Our
results show great improvement in handling occlusions compared to existing
blending based methods
Visual Dynamics: Stochastic Future Generation via Layered Cross Convolutional Networks
We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a
single input image. In contrast to traditional methods that have tackled this
problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose to model future
frames in a probabilistic manner. Our probabilistic model makes it possible for
us to sample and synthesize many possible future frames from a single input
image. To synthesize realistic movement of objects, we propose a novel network
structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network; this network encodes image and
motion information as feature maps and convolutional kernels, respectively. In
experiments, our model performs well on synthetic data, such as 2D shapes and
animated game sprites, and on real-world video frames. We present analyses of
the learned network representations, showing it is implicitly learning a
compact encoding of object appearance and motion. We also demonstrate a few of
its applications, including visual analogy-making and video extrapolation.Comment: Journal preprint of arXiv:1607.02586 (IEEE TPAMI, 2019). The first
two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page:
http://visualdynamics.csail.mit.ed
Multi modal multi-semantic image retrieval
PhDThe rapid growth in the volume of visual information, e.g. image, and video can
overwhelm usersā ability to find and access the specific visual information of interest
to them. In recent years, ontology knowledge-based (KB) image information retrieval
techniques have been adopted into in order to attempt to extract knowledge from these
images, enhancing the retrieval performance. A KB framework is presented to
promote semi-automatic annotation and semantic image retrieval using multimodal
cues (visual features and text captions). In addition, a hierarchical structure for the KB
allows metadata to be shared that supports multi-semantics (polysemy) for concepts.
The framework builds up an effective knowledge base pertaining to a domain specific
image collection, e.g. sports, and is able to disambiguate and assign high level
semantics to āunannotatedā images.
Local feature analysis of visual content, namely using Scale Invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) descriptors, have been deployed in the āBag of Visual Wordsā
model (BVW) as an effective method to represent visual content information and to
enhance its classification and retrieval. Local features are more useful than global
features, e.g. colour, shape or texture, as they are invariant to image scale, orientation
and camera angle. An innovative approach is proposed for the representation,
annotation and retrieval of visual content using a hybrid technique based upon the use
of an unstructured visual word and upon a (structured) hierarchical ontology KB
model. The structural model facilitates the disambiguation of unstructured visual
words and a more effective classification of visual content, compared to a vector
space model, through exploiting local conceptual structures and their relationships.
The key contributions of this framework in using local features for image
representation include: first, a method to generate visual words using the semantic
local adaptive clustering (SLAC) algorithm which takes term weight and spatial
locations of keypoints into account. Consequently, the semantic information is
preserved. Second a technique is used to detect the domain specific ānon-informative
visual wordsā which are ineffective at representing the content of visual data and
degrade its categorisation ability. Third, a method to combine an ontology model with
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a visual word model to resolve synonym (visual heterogeneity) and polysemy
problems, is proposed. The experimental results show that this approach can discover
semantically meaningful visual content descriptions and recognise specific events,
e.g., sports events, depicted in images efficiently.
Since discovering the semantics of an image is an extremely challenging problem, one
promising approach to enhance visual content interpretation is to use any associated
textual information that accompanies an image, as a cue to predict the meaning of an
image, by transforming this textual information into a structured annotation for an
image e.g. using XML, RDF, OWL or MPEG-7. Although, text and image are distinct
types of information representation and modality, there are some strong, invariant,
implicit, connections between images and any accompanying text information.
Semantic analysis of image captions can be used by image retrieval systems to
retrieve selected images more precisely. To do this, a Natural Language Processing
(NLP) is exploited firstly in order to extract concepts from image captions. Next, an
ontology-based knowledge model is deployed in order to resolve natural language
ambiguities. To deal with the accompanying text information, two methods to extract
knowledge from textual information have been proposed. First, metadata can be
extracted automatically from text captions and restructured with respect to a semantic
model. Second, the use of LSI in relation to a domain-specific ontology-based
knowledge model enables the combined framework to tolerate ambiguities and
variations (incompleteness) of metadata. The use of the ontology-based knowledge
model allows the system to find indirectly relevant concepts in image captions and
thus leverage these to represent the semantics of images at a higher level.
Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances image
retrieval and leads to narrowing of the semantic gap between lower level machinederived
and higher level human-understandable conceptualisation
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