Growing Regression Forests by Classification: Applications to Object Pose Estimation

In this work, we propose a novel node splitting method for regression trees and incorporate it into the regression forest framework. Unlike traditional binary splitting, where the splitting rule is selected from a predefined set of binary splitting rules via trial-and-error, the proposed node splitting method first finds clusters of the training data which at least locally minimize the empirical loss without considering the input space. Then splitting rules which preserve the found clusters as much as possible are determined by casting the problem into a classification problem. Consequently, our new node splitting method enjoys more freedom in choosing the splitting rules, resulting in more efficient tree structures. In addition to the Euclidean target space, we present a variant which can naturally deal with a circular target space by the proper use of circular statistics. We apply the regression forest employing our node splitting to head pose estimation (Euclidean target space) and car direction estimation (circular target space) and demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (38.5% and 22.5% error reduction respectively).Comment: Paper accepted by ECCV 201

Understanding social relationships in egocentric vision

The understanding of mutual people interaction is a key component for recognizing people social behavior, but it strongly relies on a personal point of view resulting difficult to be a-priori modeled. We propose the adoption of the unique head mounted cameras first person perspective (ego-vision) to promptly detect people interaction in different social contexts. The proposal relies on a complete and reliable system that extracts people\u5f3s head pose combining landmarks and shape descriptors in a temporal smoothed HMM framework. Finally, interactions are detected through supervised clustering on mutual head orientation and people distances exploiting a structural learning framework that specifically adjusts the clustering measure according to a peculiar scenario. Our solution provides the flexibility to capture the interactions disregarding the number of individuals involved and their level of acquaintance in context with a variable degree of social involvement. The proposed system shows competitive performances on both publicly available ego-vision datasets and ad hoc benchmarks built with real life situations

A Multi-task Learning Framework for Head Pose Estimation under Target Motion

Recently, head pose estimation (HPE) from low-resolution surveillance data has gained in importance. However, monocular and multi-view HPE approaches still work poorly under target motion, as facial appearance distorts owing to camera perspective and scale changes when a person moves around. To this end, we propose FEGA-MTL, a novel framework based on Multi-Task Learning (MTL) for classifying the head pose of a person who moves freely in an environment monitored by multiple, large field-of-view surveillance cameras. Upon partitioning the monitored scene into a dense uniform spatial grid, FEGA-MTL simultaneously clusters grid partitions into regions with similar facial appearance, while learning region-specific head pose classifiers. In the learning phase, guided by two graphs which a-priori model the similarity among (1) grid partitions based on camera geometry and (2) head pose classes, FEGA-MTL derives the optimal scene partitioning and associated pose classifiers. Upon determining the target's position using a person tracker at test time, the corresponding region-specific classifier is invoked for HPE. The FEGA-MTL framework naturally extends to a weakly supervised setting where the target's walking direction is employed as a proxy in lieu of head orientation. Experiments confirm that FEGA-MTL significantly outperforms competing single-task and multi-task learning methods in multi-view settings

No Matter Where You Are: Flexible Graph-Guided Multi-task Learning for Multi-view Head Pose Classification under Target Motion

We propose a novel Multi-Task Learning framework (FEGA-MTL) for classifying the head pose of a person who moves freely in an environment monitored by multi-ple, large field-of-view surveillance cameras. As the tar-get (person) moves, distortions in facial appearance ow-ing to camera perspective and scale severely impede per-formance of traditional head pose classification methods. FEGA-MTL operates on a dense uniform spatial grid and learns appearance relationships across partitions as well as partition-specific appearance variations for a given head pose to build region-specific classifiers. Guided by two graphs which a-priori model appearance similarity among (i) grid partitions based on camera geometry and (ii) head pose classes, the learner efficiently clusters appearance-wise related grid partitions to derive the optimal partition-ing. For pose classification, upon determining the target’s position using a person tracker, the appropriate region-specific classifier is invoked. Experiments confirm that FEGA-MTL achieves state-of-the-art classification with few training data. 1

The S-HOCK dataset: Analyzing crowds at the stadium

The topic of crowd modeling in computer vision usually assumes a single generic typology of crowd, which is very simplistic. In this paper we adopt a taxonomy that is widely accepted in sociology, focusing on a particular category, the spectator crowd, which is formed by people \u201cinterested in watching something specific that they came to see\u201d [6]. This can be found at the stadiums, amphitheaters, cinema, etc. In particular, we propose a novel dataset, the Spectators Hockey (S-HOCK), which deals with 4 hockey matches during an international tournament. In the dataset, a massive annotation has been carried out, focusing on the spectators at different levels of details: at a higher level, people have been labeled depending on the team they are supporting and the fact that they know the people close to them; going to the lower levels, standard pose information has been considered (regarding the head, the body) but also fine grained actions such as hands on hips, clapping hands etc. The labeling focused on the game field also, permitting to relate what is going on in the match with the crowd behavior. This brought to more than 100 millions of annotations, useful for standard applications as people counting and head pose estimation but also for novel tasks as spectator categorization. For all of these we provide protocols and baseline results, encouraging further research

부분 정보를 이용한 시각 데이터의 구조화 된 이해: 희소성, 무작위성, 연관성, 그리고 딥 네트워크

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2019. 2. Oh, Songhwai.For a deeper understanding of visual data, a relationship between local parts and a global scene has to be carefully examined. Examples of such relationships related to vision problems include but not limited to detecting a region of interest in the scene, classifying an image based on limited visual cues, and synthesizing new images conditioned on the local or global inputs. In this thesis, we aim to learn the relationship and demonstrate its importance by showing that it is one of critical keys to address four challenging vision problems mentioned above. For each problem, we construct deep neural networks that suit for each task. The first problem considered in the thesis is object detection. It requires not only finding local patches that look like target objects conditioned on the context of input scene but also comparing local patches themselves to assign a single detection for each object. To this end, we introduce individualness of detection candidates as a complement to objectness for object detection. The individualness assigns a single detection for each object out of raw detection candidates given by either object proposals or sliding windows. We show that conventional approaches, such as non-maximum suppression, are sub-optimal since they suppress nearby detections using only detection scores. We use a determinantal point process combined with the individualness to optimally select final detections. It models each detection using its quality and similarity to other detections based on the individualness. Then, detections with high detection scores and low correlations are selected by measuring their probability using a determinant of a matrix, which is composed of quality terms on the diagonal entries and similarities on the off-diagonal entries. For concreteness, we focus on the pedestrian detection problem as it is one of the most challenging problems due to frequent occlusions and unpredictable human motions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works favorably against existing methods, including non-maximal suppression and a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization based method. For a second problem, we classify images based on observations of local patches. More specifically, we consider the problem of estimating the head pose and body orientation of a person from a low-resolution image. Under this setting, it is difficult to reliably extract facial features or detect body parts. We propose a convolutional random projection forest (CRPforest) algorithm for these tasks. A convolutional random projection network (CRPnet) is used at each node of the forest. It maps an input image to a high-dimensional feature space using a rich filter bank. The filter bank is designed to generate sparse responses so that they can be efficiently computed by compressive sensing. A sparse random projection matrix can capture most essential information contained in the filter bank without using all the filters in it. Therefore, the CRPnet is fast, e.g., it requires 0.04ms to process an image of 50×50 pixels, due to the small number of convolutions (e.g., 0.01% of a layer of a neural network) at the expense of less than 2% accuracy. The overall forest estimates head and body pose well on benchmark datasets, e.g., over 98% on the HIIT dataset, while requiring at 3.8ms without using a GPU. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in low-resolution images with noise, occlusion, and motion blur. Then, we shift our attention to image synthesis based on the local-global relationship. Learning how to synthesize and place object instances into an image (semantic map) based on the scene context is a challenging and interesting problem in vision and learning. On one hand, solving this problem requires a joint decision of (a) generating an object mask from a certain class at a plausible scale, location, and shape, and (b) inserting the object instance mask into an existing scene so that the synthesized content is semantically realistic. On the other hand, such a model can synthesize realistic outputs to potentially facilitate numerous image editing and scene parsing tasks. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable neural network that can synthesize and insert object instances into an image via a semantic map. The proposed network contains two generative modules that determine where the inserted object should be (i.e., location and scale) and what the object shape (and pose) should look like. The two modules are connected together with a spatial transformation network and jointly trained and optimized in a purely data-driven way. Specifically, we propose a novel network architecture with parallel supervised and unsupervised paths to guarantee diverse results. We show that the proposed network architecture learns the context-aware distribution of the location and shape of object instances to be inserted, and it can generate realistic and statistically meaningful object instances that simultaneously address the where and what sub-problems. As the final topic of the thesis, we introduce a new vision problem: generating an image based on a small number of key local patches without any geometric prior. In this work, key local patches are defined as informative regions of the target object or scene. This is a challenging problem since it requires generating realistic images and predicting locations of parts at the same time. We construct adversarial networks to tackle this problem. A generator network generates a fake image as well as a mask based on the encoder-decoder framework. On the other hand, a discriminator network aims to detect fake images. The network is trained with three losses to consider spatial, appearance, and adversarial information. The spatial loss determines whether the locations of predicted parts are correct. Input patches are restored in the output image without much modification due to the appearance loss. The adversarial loss ensures output images are realistic. The proposed network is trained without supervisory signals since no labels of key parts are required. Experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably on challenging objects and scenes.시각 데이터를 심도 깊게 이해하기 위해서는 전체 영역과 부분 영역들 간의 연관성 혹은 상호 작용을 주의 깊게 분석하는 것이 필요하다. 이에 관련된 컴퓨터 비전 문제로는 이미지에서 원하는 부분을 검출한다던지, 제한된 부분적인 정보만으로 전체 이미지를 판별 하거나, 혹은 주어진 정보로부터 원하는 이미지를 생성하는 등이 있다. 이 논문에서는, 그 연관성을 학습하는 것이 앞서 언급된 다양한 문제들을 푸는데 중요한 열쇠가 된다는 것을 보여주고자 한다. 이에 더해서, 각각의 문제에 알맞는 딥 네트워크의 디자인 또한 토의하고자 한다. 첫 주제로, 물체 검출 방식에 대해 분석하고자 한다. 이 문제는 타겟 물체와 비슷하게 생긴 영역을 찾아야 할 뿐 아니라, 찾아진 영역들 사이에 연관성을 분석함으로써 각 물체 마다 단 하나의 검출 결과를 할당시켜야 한다. 이를 위해, 우리는 objectness에 대한 보완으로써 individualness라는 개념을 제안 하였다. 이는 임의의 방식으로 얻어진 후보 물체 영역 중 하나씩을 물체 마다 할당하는데 쓰이는데, 이것은 검출 스코어만을 바탕으로 후처리를 하는 기존의 non-maximum suppression 등의 방식이 sub-optimal 결과를 얻을 수 밖에 없기 때문에 이를 개선하고자 도입하였다. 우리는 후보 물체 영역으로부터 최적의 영역들을 선택하기 위해서, determinantal point process라는 random process의 일종을 사용하였다. 이것은 먼저 각각의 검출 결과를 그것의 quality(검출 스코어)와 다른 검출 결과들 사이에 individualness를 바탕으 로 계산된 similarity(상관 관계)를 이용해 모델링 한다. 그 후, 각각의 검출 결과가 선택될 확률을 quality와 similarity에 기반한 커널의 determinant로 표현한다. 그 커널에 diagonal 부분에는 quality가 들어가고, off-diagonal에는 similarity가 대입 된다. 따라서, 어떤 검출 후보가 최종 검출 결과로 선택될 확률이 높아지기 위해서는, 높은 quality를 가짐과 동시에 다른 검출 결과들과 낮은 similarity를 가져야 한다. 이 논문에서는 보행자 검출에 집중하였는데, 이는 보행자 검출이 중요한 문제이면서도, 다른 물체들에 비해 자주 가려지고 다양한 움직임을 보이는 검출이 어려운 물체이기 때문이다. 실험 결과는 제안한 방법이 non-maximum suppression 혹은 quadratic unconstrained binary optimization 방식들 보다 우수함을 보여주었다. 다음 문제로는, 부분 정보를 이용해서 전체 이미지를 classify하는 것을 고려한다. 다양한 classification 문제 중에, 이 논문에서는 저해상도 이미지로부터 사람의 머리와 몸이 향하는 방향을 알아내는 문제에 집중하였다. 이 경우에는, 눈, 코, 입 등을 찾거나, 몸의 파트를 정확히 알아내는 것이 어렵다. 이를 위해, 우리는 convolutional random projection forest (CRPforest)라는 방식을 제안하였다. 이 forest에 각각의 node 안에는 convolutional random projection network (CRPnet)이 들어있는데, 이는 다양한 필터를 이용해서 인풋 이미지를 높은 차원으로 mapping 한다. 이를 효율적으로 다루기 위해 sparse한 결과를 얻을 수 있는 필터들을 사용함으로써, 압축 센싱 개념을 도입 할 수 있도록 하였다. 즉, 실제로는 적은 수의 필터만을 사용해서 전체 이미지의 중요한 정보를 모두 담고자 하는 것이다. 따라서 CRPnet은 50×50 픽셀 이미지에서 0.04ms 만에 동작 할 수 있을 정도로 매우 빠르며, 동시에 성능 하락은 2% 정도로 미미한 결과를 보여주었다. 이를 바탕으로 한 전체 forest는 GPU 없이 3.8ms 안에 동작하며, 머리와 몸통 방향 측정에 대해 다양한 데이터셋에서 최고의 성능을 보여주었다. 또한, 저해상도, 노이즈, 가려짐, 블러 등의 다양한 경우에도 좋은 성능을 보여주었다. 다음으로 부분-전체의 연관성을 통한 이미지 생성 문제를 탐구한다. 입력 이미지 상에 어떤 물체를 어떻게 놓을 것인지를 유추하는 것은 컴퓨터 비전과 기계 학습의 입장에서 아주 흥미로운 문제이다. 이는 먼저, 물체의 마스크를 적절한 크기, 위치, 모양으로 만들면서 동시에 그 물체가 입력 이미지 상에 놓여졌을 때에도 합리적으로 보일 수 있도록 해야 한다. 그렇게 된다면, image editing 혹은 scene parsing 등의 다양한 문제에 응용 될 수 있다. 이 논문에서는, 입력 semantic map으로 부터 새로운 물체를 알맞은 곳에 놓는 문제를 end-to-end 방식으로 학습 가능한 딥 네트워크를 구성하고자 한다. 이를 위해, where 모듈과 what 모듈을 바탕으로 하는 네트워크를 구성하였으며, 두 모듈을 spatial transformer network을 통해 연결하여 동시에 학습이 가능하도록 하였다. 또한, 각각의 모듈에 지도적 학습 경로와 비지도적 학습 경로를 병렬적으로 배치하여 동일한 입력으로 부터 다양한 결과를 얻을 수 있게 하였다. 실험을 통해, 제안한 방식이 삽입될 물체의 위치와 모양에 대한 분포를 동시에 학습 할 수 있고, 그 분포로부터 실제와 유사한 물체를 알맞은 곳에 놓을 수 있음을 보였다. 마지막으로 고려할 문제는, 컴퓨터 비전 분야에 새로운 문제로써, 위치 정보가 상실 된 적은 수의 부분 패치들을 바탕으로 전체 이미지를 복원하는 것이다. 이것은 이미지 생성과 동시에 각 패치의 위치 정보를 추측해야 하기에 어려운 문제가 된다. 우리는 적대적 네트워크를 바탕으로 이 문제를 해결하고자 하였다. 즉, 생성 네트워크는 encoder-decoder 방식을 이용해서 이미지와 위치 마스크를 찾고자 하는 반면에, 판별 네트워크는 생성된 가짜 이미지를 찾으려고 한다. 그리고 전체 네트워크는 위치, 겉보기, 적대적 경쟁의 세 가지 목적 함수들로 학습이 된다. 위치 목적 함수는 알맞은 위치를 예측하기 위해 사용되었고, 겉보기 목적 함수는 입력 패치 들이 결과 이미지 상에 적은 변화만을 가지고 남아있도록 하기 위해 사용되었으며, 적대적 경쟁 목적 함수는 생성된 이미지가 실제 이미지와 비슷할 수 있도록 하기 위해 적용되었다. 이렇게 구성된 네트워크는 별도의 annotation 없이 기존 데이터셋 들을 바탕으로 학습이 가능한 장점이 있다. 또한 실험을 통해, 제안한 방식이 다양한 데이터셋에서 잘 동작함을 보였다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Organization of the Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2 Related Work 9 2.1 Detection methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2 Orientation estimation methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.3 Instance synthesis methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.4 Image generation methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3 Pedestrian detection 19 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.2 Proposed Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.2.1 Determinantal Point Process Formulation . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.2.2 Quality Term . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2.3 Individualness and Diversity Feature . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.2.4 Mode Finding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.2.5 Relationship to Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.3.1 Experimental Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.3.2 Evaluation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3.3.3 DET curves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.3.4 Sensitivity analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.3.5 Effectiveness of the quality and similarity term design . . . 44 3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4 Head and body orientation estimation 51 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2 Algorithmic Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3 Rich Filter Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.3.1 Compressed Filter Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.3.2 Box Filter Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.4 Convolutional Random Projection Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.4.1 Input Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.4.2 Convolutional and ReLU Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 4.4.3 Random Projection Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.4.4 Fully-Connected and Output Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.5 Convolutional Random Projection Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.6 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 4.6.1 Evaluation Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 4.6.2 CRPnet Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 4.6.3 Head and Body Orientation Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . 67 4.6.4 Analysis of the Proposed Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.6.5 Classification Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.6.6 Regression Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 4.6.7 Experiments on the Original Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 4.6.8 Dataset Corrections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 4.7 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 5 Instance synthesis and placement 109 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 5.2 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 5.2.1 The where module: learning a spatial distribution of object instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 5.2.2 The what module: learning a shape distribution of object instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 5.2.3 The complete pipeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 5.3 Experimental Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 5.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 6 Image generation 129 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 6.2 Proposed Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 6.2.1 Key Part Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 6.2.2 Part Encoding Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 6.2.3 Mask Prediction Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 6.2.4 Image Generation Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 6.2.5 Real-Fake Discriminator Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 6.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 6.3.1 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 6.3.2 Image Generation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 6.3.3 Experimental Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 6.3.4 Image Generation from Local Patches . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 6.3.5 Part Combination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 6.3.6 Unsupervised Feature Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 6.3.7 An Alternative Objective Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 6.3.8 An Alternative Network Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 6.3.9 Different Number of Input Patches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 6.3.10 Smaller Size of Input Patches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 6.3.11 Degraded Input Patches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 6.3.12 User Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 6.3.13 Failure cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 6.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 7 Conclusion and Future Work 179Docto

Person re-Identification over distributed spaces and time

PhDReplicating the human visual system and cognitive abilities that the brain uses to process the information it receives is an area of substantial scientific interest. With the prevalence of video surveillance cameras a portion of this scientific drive has been into providing useful automated counterparts to human operators. A prominent task in visual surveillance is that of matching people between disjoint camera views, or re-identification. This allows operators to locate people of interest, to track people across cameras and can be used as a precursory step to multi-camera activity analysis. However, due to the contrasting conditions between camera views and their effects on the appearance of people re-identification is a non-trivial task. This thesis proposes solutions for reducing the visual ambiguity in observations of people between camera views This thesis first looks at a method for mitigating the effects on the appearance of people under differing lighting conditions between camera views. This thesis builds on work modelling inter-camera illumination based on known pairs of images. A Cumulative Brightness Transfer Function (CBTF) is proposed to estimate the mapping of colour brightness values based on limited training samples. Unlike previous methods that use a mean-based representation for a set of training samples, the cumulative nature of the CBTF retains colour information from underrepresented samples in the training set. Additionally, the bi-directionality of the mapping function is explored to try and maximise re-identification accuracy by ensuring samples are accurately mapped between cameras. Secondly, an extension is proposed to the CBTF framework that addresses the issue of changing lighting conditions within a single camera. As the CBTF requires manually labelled training samples it is limited to static lighting conditions and is less effective if the lighting changes. This Adaptive CBTF (A-CBTF) differs from previous approaches that either do not consider lighting change over time, or rely on camera transition time information to update. By utilising contextual information drawn from the background in each camera view, an estimation of the lighting change within a single camera can be made. This background lighting model allows the mapping of colour information back to the original training conditions and thus remove the need for 3 retraining. Thirdly, a novel reformulation of re-identification as a ranking problem is proposed. Previous methods use a score based on a direct distance measure of set features to form a correct/incorrect match result. Rather than offering an operator a single outcome, the ranking paradigm is to give the operator a ranked list of possible matches and allow them to make the final decision. By utilising a Support Vector Machine (SVM) ranking method, a weighting on the appearance features can be learned that capitalises on the fact that not all image features are equally important to re-identification. Additionally, an Ensemble-RankSVM is proposed to address scalability issues by separating the training samples into smaller subsets and boosting the trained models. Finally, the thesis looks at a practical application of the ranking paradigm in a real world application. The system encompasses both the re-identification stage and the precursory extraction and tracking stages to form an aid for CCTV operators. Segmentation and detection are combined to extract relevant information from the video, while several combinations of matching techniques are combined with temporal priors to form a more comprehensive overall matching criteria. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is tested on datasets obtained from a variety of challenging environments including offices, apartment buildings, airports and outdoor public spaces

Activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos

PhDComputer scientists have made ceaseless efforts to replicate cognitive video understanding abilities of human brains onto autonomous vision systems. As video surveillance cameras become ubiquitous, there is a surge in studies on automated activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos. Nevertheless, video content analysis in public scenes remained a formidable challenge due to intrinsic difficulties such as severe inter-object occlusion in crowded scene and poor quality of recorded surveillance footage. Moreover, it is nontrivial to achieve robust detection of unusual events, which are rare, ambiguous, and easily confused with noise. This thesis proposes solutions for resolving ambiguous visual observations and overcoming unreliability of conventional activity analysis methods by exploiting multi-camera visual context and human feedback. The thesis first demonstrates the importance of learning visual context for establishing reliable reasoning on observed activity in a camera network. In the proposed approach, a new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is formulated to discover and quantify time delayed pairwise correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views. This thesis shows that learning time delayed pairwise activity correlations offers valuable contextual information for (1) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network, (2) robust person re-identification, and (3) accurate activity-based video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, the proposed approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it can thus be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featuring severe inter-object occlusions. Second, to detect global unusual event across multiple disjoint cameras, this thesis extends visual context learning from pairwise relationship to global time delayed dependency between regional activities. Specifically, a Time Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TD-PGM) is proposed to model the multi-camera activities and their dependencies. Subtle global unusual events are detected and localised using the model as context-incoherent patterns across multiple camera views. In the model, different nodes represent activities in different decomposed re3 gions from different camera views, and the directed links between nodes encoding time delayed dependencies between activities observed within and across camera views. In order to learn optimised time delayed dependencies in a TD-PGM, a novel two-stage structure learning approach is formulated by combining both constraint-based and scored-searching based structure learning methods. Third, to cope with visual context changes over time, this two-stage structure learning approach is extended to permit tractable incremental update of both TD-PGM parameters and its structure. As opposed to most existing studies that assume static model once learned, the proposed incremental learning allows a model to adapt itself to reflect the changes in the current visual context, such as subtle behaviour drift over time or removal/addition of cameras. Importantly, the incremental structure learning is achieved without either exhaustive search in a large graph structure space or storing all past observations in memory, making the proposed solution memory and time efficient. Forth, an active learning approach is presented to incorporate human feedback for on-line unusual event detection. Contrary to most existing unsupervised methods that perform passive mining for unusual events, the proposed approach automatically requests supervision for critical points to resolve ambiguities of interest, leading to more robust detection of subtle unusual events. The active learning strategy is formulated as a stream-based solution, i.e. it makes decision on-the-fly on whether to request label for each unlabelled sample observed in sequence. It selects adaptively two active learning criteria, namely likelihood criterion and uncertainty criterion to achieve (1) discovery of unknown event classes and (2) refinement of classification boundary. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated using videos captured from busy public scenes such as underground stations and traffic intersections