130,191 research outputs found
Semi-Global Stereo Matching with Surface Orientation Priors
Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely-used efficient stereo matching
technique. It works well for textured scenes, but fails on untextured slanted
surfaces due to its fronto-parallel smoothness assumption. To remedy this
problem, we propose a simple extension, termed SGM-P, to utilize precomputed
surface orientation priors. Such priors favor different surface slants in
different 2D image regions or 3D scene regions and can be derived in various
ways. In this paper we evaluate plane orientation priors derived from stereo
matching at a coarser resolution and show that such priors can yield
significant performance gains for difficult weakly-textured scenes. We also
explore surface normal priors derived from Manhattan-world assumptions, and we
analyze the potential performance gains using oracle priors derived from
ground-truth data. SGM-P only adds a minor computational overhead to SGM and is
an attractive alternative to more complex methods employing higher-order
smoothness terms.Comment: extended draft of 3DV 2017 (spotlight) pape
Difference image photometry with bright variable backgrounds
Over the last two decades the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) has been something of a
test-bed for methods aimed at obtaining accurate time-domain relative
photometry within highly crowded fields. Difference imaging methods, originally
pioneered towards M31, have evolved into sophisticated methods, such as the
Optimal Image Subtraction (OIS) method of Alard & Lupton (1998), that today are
most widely used to survey variable stars, transients and microlensing events
in our own Galaxy. We show that modern difference image (DIA) algorithms such
as OIS, whilst spectacularly successful towards the Milky Way bulge, may
perform badly towards high surface brightness targets such as the M31 bulge.
Poor results can occur in the presence of common systematics which add spurious
flux contributions to images, such as internal reflections, scattered light or
fringing. Using data from the Angstrom Project microlensing survey of the M31
bulge, we show that very good results are usually obtainable by first
performing careful photometric alignment prior to using OIS to perform
point-spread function (PSF) matching. This separation of background matching
and PSF matching, a common feature of earlier M31 photometry techniques, allows
us to take full advantage of the powerful PSF matching flexibility offered by
OIS towards high surface brightness targets. We find that difference images
produced this way have noise distributions close to Gaussian, showing
significant improvement upon results achieved using OIS alone. We show that
with this correction light-curves of variable stars and transients can be
recovered to within ~10 arcseconds of the M31 nucleus. Our method is simple to
implement and is quick enough to be incorporated within real-time DIA
pipelines. (Abridged)Comment: 12 pages. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Includes an expanded
discussion of DIA testing and results, including additional lightcurve
example
Expectation Propagation for Nonlinear Inverse Problems -- with an Application to Electrical Impedance Tomography
In this paper, we study a fast approximate inference method based on
expectation propagation for exploring the posterior probability distribution
arising from the Bayesian formulation of nonlinear inverse problems. It is
capable of efficiently delivering reliable estimates of the posterior mean and
covariance, thereby providing an inverse solution together with quantified
uncertainties. Some theoretical properties of the iterative algorithm are
discussed, and the efficient implementation for an important class of problems
of projection type is described. The method is illustrated with one typical
nonlinear inverse problem, electrical impedance tomography with complete
electrode model, under sparsity constraints. Numerical results for real
experimental data are presented, and compared with that by Markov chain Monte
Carlo. The results indicate that the method is accurate and computationally
very efficient.Comment: Journal of Computational Physics, to appea
A higher-order active contour model of a `gas of circles' and its application to tree crown extraction
Many image processing problems involve identifying the region in the image
domain occupied by a given entity in the scene. Automatic solution of these
problems requires models that incorporate significant prior knowledge about the
shape of the region. Many methods for including such knowledge run into
difficulties when the topology of the region is unknown a priori, for example
when the entity is composed of an unknown number of similar objects.
Higher-order active contours (HOACs) represent one method for the modelling of
non-trivial prior knowledge about shape without necessarily constraining region
topology, via the inclusion of non-local interactions between region boundary
points in the energy defining the model. The case of an unknown number of
circular objects arises in a number of domains, e.g. medical, biological,
nanotechnological, and remote sensing imagery. Regions composed of an a priori
unknown number of circles may be referred to as a `gas of circles'. In this
report, we present a HOAC model of a `gas of circles'. In order to guarantee
stable circles, we conduct a stability analysis via a functional Taylor
expansion of the HOAC energy around a circular shape. This analysis fixes one
of the model parameters in terms of the others and constrains the rest. In
conjunction with a suitable likelihood energy, we apply the model to the
extraction of tree crowns from aerial imagery, and show that the new model
outperforms other techniques
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