Object detection, recognition and re-identification in video footage

There has been a significant number of security concerns in recent times; as a result, security cameras have been installed to monitor activities and to prevent crimes in most public places. These analysis are done either through video analytic or forensic analysis operations on human observations. To this end, within the research context of this thesis, a proactive machine vision based military recognition system has been developed to help monitor activities in the military environment. The proposed object detection, recognition and re-identification systems have been presented in this thesis. A novel technique for military personnel recognition is presented in this thesis. Initially the detected camouflaged personnel are segmented using a grabcut segmentation algorithm. Since in general a camouflaged personnel's uniform appears to be similar both at the top and the bottom of the body, an image patch is initially extracted from the segmented foreground image and used as the region of interest. Subsequently the colour and texture features are extracted from each patch and used for classification. A second approach for personnel recognition is proposed through the recognition of the badge on the cap of a military person. A feature matching metric based on the extracted Speed Up Robust Features (SURF) from the badge on a personnel's cap enabled the recognition of the personnel's arm of service. A state-of-the-art technique for recognising vehicle types irrespective of their view angle is also presented in this thesis. Vehicles are initially detected and segmented using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based foreground/background segmentation algorithm. A Canny Edge Detection (CED) stage, followed by morphological operations are used as pre-processing stage to help enhance foreground vehicular object detection and segmentation. Subsequently, Region, Histogram Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are extracted from the refined foreground vehicle object and used as features for vehicle type recognition. Two different datasets with variant views of front/rear and angle are used and combined for testing the proposed technique. For night-time video analytics and forensics, the thesis presents a novel approach to pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition. A novel feature acquisition technique named, CENTROG, is proposed for pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition in this thesis. Thermal images containing pedestrians and vehicular objects are used to analyse the performance of the proposed algorithms. The video is initially segmented using a GMM based foreground object segmentation algorithm. A CED based pre-processing step is used to enhance segmentation accuracy prior using Census Transforms for initial feature extraction. HOG features are then extracted from the Census transformed images and used for detection and recognition respectively of human and vehicular objects in thermal images. Finally, a novel technique for people re-identification is proposed in this thesis based on using low-level colour features and mid-level attributes. The low-level colour histogram bin values were normalised to 0 and 1. A publicly available dataset (VIPeR) and a self constructed dataset have been used in the experiments conducted with 7 clothing attributes and low-level colour histogram features. These 7 attributes are detected using features extracted from 5 different regions of a detected human object using an SVM classifier. The low-level colour features were extracted from the regions of a detected human object. These 5 regions are obtained by human object segmentation and subsequent body part sub-division. People are re-identified by computing the Euclidean distance between a probe and the gallery image sets. The experiments conducted using SVM classifier and Euclidean distance has proven that the proposed techniques attained all of the aforementioned goals. The colour and texture features proposed for camouflage military personnel recognition surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. Similarly, experiments prove that combining features performed best when recognising vehicles in different views subsequent to initial training based on multi-views. In the same vein, the proposed CENTROG technique performed better than the state-of-the-art CENTRIST technique for both pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition at night-time using thermal images. Finally, we show that the proposed 7 mid-level attributes and the low-level features results in improved performance accuracy for people re-identification

Ship Detection Feature Analysis in Optical Satellite Imagery through Machine Learning Applications

Ship detection remains an important challenge within the government and the commercial industry. Current research has focused on deep learning and has found high success with large labeled datasets. However, deep learning becomes insufficient for limited datasets as well as when explainability is required. There exist scenarios in which explainability and human-in-the-loop processing are needed, such as in naval applications. In these scenarios, handcrafted features and traditional classification algorithms can be useful. This research aims at analyzing multiple textures and statistical features on a small optical satellite imagery dataset. The feature analysis consists of Haar-like features, Haralick features, Hu moments, Histogram of Oriented Gradients, grayscale intensity histograms, and Local Binary Patterns. Feature performance is measured using 8 different classification algorithms, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine, Random Decision Forest, Extremely Randomized Trees, and Bagging. The features are analyzed individually and in different combinations. Individual feature analysis results found Haralick features achieved a precision of 92.2% and were computationally efficient. The best combination of features was Haralick features paired with Histogram of Oriented Gradients and grayscale intensity histograms. This combination achieved a precision score of 96.18% and an F1 score of 94.23%

Effective plant discrimination based on the combination of local binary pattern operators and multiclass support vector machine methods

Accurate crop and weed discrimination plays a critical role in addressing the challenges of weed management in agriculture. The use of herbicides is currently the most common approach to weed control. However, herbicide resistant plants have long been recognised as a major concern due to the excessive use of herbicides. Effective weed detection techniques can reduce the cost of weed management and improve crop quality and yield. A computationally efficient and robust plant classification algorithm is developed and applied to the classification of three crops: Brassica napus (canola), Zea mays (maize/corn), and radish. The developed algorithm is based on the combination of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operators, for the extraction of crop leaf textural features and Support vector machine (SVM) method, for multiclass plant classification. This paper presents the first investigation of the accuracy of the combined LBP algorithms, trained using a large dataset of canola, radish and barley leaf images captured by a testing facility under simulated field conditions. The dataset has four subclasses, background, canola, corn, and radish, with 24,000 images used for training and 6000 images, for validation. The dataset is referred herein as “bccr-segset” and published online. In each subclass, plant images are collected at four crop growth stages. Experimentally, the algorithm demonstrates plant classification accuracy as high as 91.85%, for the four classes. © 2018 China Agricultural Universit

Texture and Colour in Image Analysis

Research in colour and texture has experienced major changes in the last few years. This book presents some recent advances in the field, specifically in the theory and applications of colour texture analysis. This volume also features benchmarks, comparative evaluations and reviews