38,404 research outputs found
How to Train a CAT: Learning Canonical Appearance Transformations for Direct Visual Localization Under Illumination Change
Direct visual localization has recently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity
with the increasing availability of cheap mobile computing power. The
competitive accuracy and robustness of these algorithms compared to
state-of-the-art feature-based methods, as well as their natural ability to
yield dense maps, makes them an appealing choice for a variety of mobile
robotics applications. However, direct methods remain brittle in the face of
appearance change due to their underlying assumption of photometric
consistency, which is commonly violated in practice. In this paper, we propose
to mitigate this problem by training deep convolutional encoder-decoder models
to transform images of a scene such that they correspond to a previously-seen
canonical appearance. We validate our method in multiple environments and
illumination conditions using high-fidelity synthetic RGB-D datasets, and
integrate the trained models into a direct visual localization pipeline,
yielding improvements in visual odometry (VO) accuracy through time-varying
illumination conditions, as well as improved metric relocalization performance
under illumination change, where conventional methods normally fail. We further
provide a preliminary investigation of transfer learning from synthetic to real
environments in a localization context. An open-source implementation of our
method using PyTorch is available at https://github.com/utiasSTARS/cat-net.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18), Brisbane,
Australia, May 21-25, 201
Multitarget Tracking in Nonoverlapping Cameras Using a Reference Set
Tracking multiple targets in nonoverlapping cameras are challenging since the observations of the same targets are often separated by time and space. There might be significant appearance change of a target across camera views caused by variations in illumination conditions, poses, and camera imaging characteristics. Consequently, the same target may appear very different in two cameras. Therefore, associating tracks in different camera views directly based on their appearance similarity is difficult and prone to error. In most previous methods, the appearance similarity is computed either using color histograms or based on pretrained brightness transfer function that maps color between cameras. In this paper, a novel reference set based appearance model is proposed to improve multitarget tracking in a network of nonoverlapping cameras. Contrary to previous work, a reference set is constructed for a pair of cameras, containing subjects appearing in both camera views. For track association, instead of directly comparing the appearance of two targets in different camera views, they are compared indirectly via the reference set. Besides global color histograms, texture and shape features are extracted at different locations of a target, and AdaBoost is used to learn the discriminative power of each feature. The effectiveness of the proposed method over the state of the art on two challenging real-world multicamera video data sets is demonstrated by thorough experiments
Efficient illumination independent appearance-based face tracking
One of the major challenges that visual tracking algorithms face nowadays is being
able to cope with changes in the appearance of the target during tracking. Linear
subspace models have been extensively studied and are possibly the most popular
way of modelling target appearance. We introduce a linear subspace representation
in which the appearance of a face is represented by the addition of two approxi-
mately independent linear subspaces modelling facial expressions and illumination
respectively. This model is more compact than previous bilinear or multilinear ap-
proaches. The independence assumption notably simplifies system training. We only
require two image sequences. One facial expression is subject to all possible illumina-
tions in one sequence and the face adopts all facial expressions under one particular
illumination in the other. This simple model enables us to train the system with
no manual intervention. We also revisit the problem of efficiently fitting a linear
subspace-based model to a target image and introduce an additive procedure for
solving this problem. We prove that Matthews and Baker’s Inverse Compositional
Approach makes a smoothness assumption on the subspace basis that is equiva-
lent to Hager and Belhumeur’s, which worsens convergence. Our approach differs
from Hager and Belhumeur’s additive and Matthews and Baker’s compositional ap-
proaches in that we make no smoothness assumptions on the subspace basis. In the
experiments conducted we show that the model introduced accurately represents
the appearance variations caused by illumination changes and facial expressions.
We also verify experimentally that our fitting procedure is more accurate and has
better convergence rate than the other related approaches, albeit at the expense of
a slight increase in computational cost. Our approach can be used for tracking a
human face at standard video frame rates on an average personal computer
Bags of Affine Subspaces for Robust Object Tracking
We propose an adaptive tracking algorithm where the object is modelled as a
continuously updated bag of affine subspaces, with each subspace constructed
from the object's appearance over several consecutive frames. In contrast to
linear subspaces, affine subspaces explicitly model the origin of subspaces.
Furthermore, instead of using a brittle point-to-subspace distance during the
search for the object in a new frame, we propose to use a subspace-to-subspace
distance by representing candidate image areas also as affine subspaces.
Distances between subspaces are then obtained by exploiting the non-Euclidean
geometry of Grassmann manifolds. Experiments on challenging videos (containing
object occlusions, deformations, as well as variations in pose and
illumination) indicate that the proposed method achieves higher tracking
accuracy than several recent discriminative trackers.Comment: in International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques
and Applications, 201
Deformable Object Tracking with Gated Fusion
The tracking-by-detection framework receives growing attentions through the
integration with the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Existing
tracking-by-detection based methods, however, fail to track objects with severe
appearance variations. This is because the traditional convolutional operation
is performed on fixed grids, and thus may not be able to find the correct
response while the object is changing pose or under varying environmental
conditions. In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution layer to enrich
the target appearance representations in the tracking-by-detection framework.
We aim to capture the target appearance variations via deformable convolution,
which adaptively enhances its original features. In addition, we also propose a
gated fusion scheme to control how the variations captured by the deformable
convolution affect the original appearance. The enriched feature representation
through deformable convolution facilitates the discrimination of the CNN
classifier on the target object and background. Extensive experiments on the
standard benchmarks show that the proposed tracker performs favorably against
state-of-the-art methods
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