15,465 research outputs found
Aperture Supervision for Monocular Depth Estimation
We present a novel method to train machine learning algorithms to estimate
scene depths from a single image, by using the information provided by a
camera's aperture as supervision. Prior works use a depth sensor's outputs or
images of the same scene from alternate viewpoints as supervision, while our
method instead uses images from the same viewpoint taken with a varying camera
aperture. To enable learning algorithms to use aperture effects as supervision,
we introduce two differentiable aperture rendering functions that use the input
image and predicted depths to simulate the depth-of-field effects caused by
real camera apertures. We train a monocular depth estimation network end-to-end
to predict the scene depths that best explain these finite aperture images as
defocus-blurred renderings of the input all-in-focus image.Comment: To appear at CVPR 2018 (updated to camera ready version
Focusing on out-of-focus : assessing defocus estimation algorithms for the benefit of automated image masking
Acquiring photographs as input for an image-based modelling pipeline is less trivial than often assumed. Photographs should be correctly exposed, cover the subject sufficiently from all possible angles, have the required spatial resolution, be devoid of any motion blur, exhibit accurate focus and feature an adequate depth of field. The last four characteristics all determine the " sharpness " of an image and the photogrammetric, computer vision and hybrid photogrammetric computer vision communities all assume that the object to be modelled is depicted " acceptably " sharp throughout the whole image collection. Although none of these three fields has ever properly quantified " acceptably sharp " , it is more or less standard practice to mask those image portions that appear to be unsharp due to the limited depth of field around the plane of focus (whether this means blurry object parts or completely out-of-focus backgrounds). This paper will assess how well-or ill-suited defocus estimating algorithms are for automatically masking a series of photographs, since this could speed up modelling pipelines with many hundreds or thousands of photographs. To that end, the paper uses five different real-world datasets and compares the output of three state-of-the-art edge-based defocus estimators. Afterwards, critical comments and plans for the future finalise this paper
Homography-based ground plane detection using a single on-board camera
This study presents a robust method for ground plane detection in vision-based systems with a non-stationary camera. The proposed method is based on the reliable estimation of the homography between ground planes in successive images. This homography is computed using a feature matching approach, which in contrast to classical approaches to on-board motion estimation does not require explicit ego-motion calculation. As opposed to it, a novel homography calculation method based on a linear estimation framework is presented. This framework provides predictions of the ground plane transformation matrix that are dynamically updated with new measurements. The method is specially suited for challenging environments, in particular traffic scenarios, in which the information is scarce and the homography computed from the images is usually inaccurate or erroneous. The proposed estimation framework is able to remove erroneous measurements and to correct those that are inaccurate, hence producing a reliable homography estimate at each instant. It is based on the evaluation of the difference between the predicted and the observed transformations, measured according to the spectral norm of the associated matrix of differences. Moreover, an example is provided on how to use the information extracted from ground plane estimation to achieve object detection and tracking. The method has been successfully demonstrated for the detection of moving vehicles in traffic environments
3D Pose Regression using Convolutional Neural Networks
3D pose estimation is a key component of many important computer vision tasks
such as autonomous navigation and 3D scene understanding. Most state-of-the-art
approaches to 3D pose estimation solve this problem as a pose-classification
problem in which the pose space is discretized into bins and a CNN classifier
is used to predict a pose bin. We argue that the 3D pose space is continuous
and propose to solve the pose estimation problem in a CNN regression framework
with a suitable representation, data augmentation and loss function that
captures the geometry of the pose space. Experiments on PASCAL3D+ show that the
proposed 3D pose regression approach achieves competitive performance compared
to the state-of-the-art
Estimation of a 3D motion field from a multi-camera array using a multiresolution Gaussian mixture model
The problem of modelling geometry for video based rendering has been much studied in recent years, due to the growing interest in 'free viewpoint' video and similar applications. Common approaches fall into two categories: those which approximate surfaces from dense depth maps obtained by generalisations of stereopsis and those which employ an explicit geometric representation such as a mesh. While the former have generality with respect to geometry, they are limited in terms of viewpoint; the latter, on the other hand, sacrifice generality of geometry for freedom to pick an arbitary viewpoint. The purpose of the work reported here is to bridge this gap in object representation, by employing a stochastic model of object structure: a multiresolution Gaussian mixture. Estimation of the model and tracking it through time from multiple cameras is achieved by a multiresolution stochastic simulation. After a brief outline of the method, its use in modelling human motion using data from local and other sources is presented to illustrate its effectiveness compared to the current state of the art
Posing 3D Models from Drawing
Inferring the 3D pose of a character from a drawing is a complex and under-constrained problem. Solving it may help automate various parts of an animation production pipeline such as pre-visualisation. In this paper, a novel way of inferring the 3D pose from a monocular 2D sketch is proposed. The proposed method does not make any external assumptions about the model, allowing it to be used on different types of characters. The inference of the 3D pose is formulated as an optimisation problem and a parallel variation of the Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm called PARAC-LOAPSO is utilised for searching the minimum. Testing in isolation as well as part of a larger scene, the presented method is evaluated by posing a lamp, a horse and a human character. The results show that this method is robust, highly scalable and is able to be extended to various types of models
Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes
The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on availability of
large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually
rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Creating realistic 3D
content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In
this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic
data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models.
Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for
this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the
target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap,
and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating
complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to
augment real images with virtual objects. This allows us to create realistic
composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance and a large
number of complex object arrangements. In contrast to modeling complete 3D
environments, our augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions
in combination with 3D shapes of the target object. Through extensive
experimentation, we conclude the right set of parameters to produce augmented
data which can maximally enhance the performance of instance segmentation
models. Further, we demonstrate the utility of our approach on training
standard deep models for semantic instance segmentation and object detection of
cars in outdoor driving scenes. We test the models trained on our augmented
data on the KITTI 2015 dataset, which we have annotated with pixel-accurate
ground truth, and on Cityscapes dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that
models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on
synthetic data or models trained on limited amount of annotated real data
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