3D Pedestrian Tracking and Virtual Reconstruction of Ceramic Vessels Using Geometric and Color Cues

Object tracking using cameras has many applications ranging from monitoring children and the elderly, to behavior analysis, entertainment, and homeland security. This thesis concentrates on the problem of tracking person(s) of interest in crowded scenes (e.g., airports, train stations, malls, etc.), rendering their locations in time and space along with high quality close-up images of the person for recognition. The tracking is achieved using a combination of overhead cameras for 3D tracking and a network of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras to obtain close-up frontal face images. Based on projective geometry, the overhead cameras track people using salient and easily computable feature points such as head points. When the obtained head point is not accurate enough, the color information of the head tops across subsequent frames is integrated to detect and track people. To capture the best frontal face images of a target across time, a PTZ camera scheduling is proposed, where the 'best' PTZ camera is selected based on the capture quality (as close as possible to frontal view) and handoff success (response time needed by the newly selected camera to move from current to desired state) probabilities. The experiments show the 3D tracking errors are very small (less than 5 cm with 14 people crowding an area of around 4 m2) and the frontal face images are captured effectively with most of them centering in the frames. Computational archaeology is becoming a success story of applying computational tools in the reconstruction of vessels obtained from digs, freeing the expert from hours of intensive labor in manually stitching shards into meaningful vessels. In this thesis, we concentrate on the use of geometric and color information of the fragments for 3D virtual reconstruction of broken ceramic vessels. Generic models generated by the experts as a rendition of what the original vessel may have looked like are also utilized. The generic models need not to be identical to the original vessel, but are within a geometric transformation of it in most of its parts. The markings on the 3D surfaces of fragments and generic models are extracted based on their color cues. Ceramic fragments are then aligned against the corresponding generic models based on the geometric relation between the extracted markings. The alignments yield sub-scanner resolution fitting errors.Ph.D., Electrical Engineering -- Drexel University, 201

Nuevas tecnologías aplicadas al análisis de la cerámica ibérica a torno del Alto Guadalquivir (S. VI a.n.e-S. I d.n.e)

[ES] En esta tesis se presenta una metodología de digitalización, sistematización y clasificación de cerámica arqueológica realizada sobre una colección de referencia compuesta por 1.133 recipientes cerámicos documentados en asentamientos de época ibérica de la Alta Andalucía (Jaén, Córdoba y Granada). Se han introducido métodos basados en nuevas tecnologías que han permitido la realización de modelos tridimensionales de recipientes cerámicos, la construcción de una plataforma on line en la que se ha incluido información gráfica y semántica referente a los recipientes y el diseño de un sistema informático de apoyo a la decisión en el proceso de clasificación basado en análisis de imágenes.Por último la información se ha insertado en el portal de la cultura europea de Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/).[EN] This thesis presents a methodology for digitization, systematization and classification of archaeological ceramics. It has been performed on a reference collection composed of 1,133 ceramic vessels documented in settlements of the Iberian period of Andalusia (Jaén, Córdoba and Granada). Methods based on new technologies have been introduced to allow the elaboration of three-dimensional models of ceramic vessels, the construction of an online platform on which graphical and semantic information is included and the design of a decision support system for the ceramic classification based on image analysis. Finally the information has been inserted in the European culture portal of Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/).Tesis Univ. Jaén. Departamento de Patrimonio Histórico. Leída el 28 de enero de 201

Interactive Reconstruction of Archaeological Fragments in a Collaborative Environment

The automatic reassembling of archaeological artefacts from a collection of fragments is a crucial problem in archaeology. It is arduous and time-consuming because the available information, in the form of fragments, is limited and "noisy". Previous research to assist in reassembly of artefacts has largely focused on either pattern-recognition or augmented-visualisation based perspectives. This paper presents a computer-aided and collaborative system for the reconstruction of archaeological artefacts, using boundarymatching estimation by string registration. The system has three key components. It uses invariant features to represent the 3D boundary curves of fragments. It utilises robust string matching to search the globally optimal alignment so as to tolerate noise. To further handle limited and noisy information, it creates a collaborative environment to allow multiple archaeologists to remotely reassemble artefacts at the same time. A series of experiments verify the acceptable performance of the system as well as its components