Robust arbitrary-view gait recognition based on 3D partial similarity matching

Existing view-invariant gait recognition methods encounter difficulties due to limited number of available gait views and varying conditions during training. This paper proposes gait partial similarity matching that assumes a 3-dimensional (3D) object shares common view surfaces in significantly different views. Detecting such surfaces aids the extraction of gait features from multiple views. 3D parametric body models are morphed by pose and shape deformation from a template model using 2-dimensional (2D) gait silhouette as observation. The gait pose is estimated by a level set energy cost function from silhouettes including incomplete ones. Body shape deformation is achieved via Laplacian deformation energy function associated with inpainting gait silhouettes. Partial gait silhouettes in different views are extracted by gait partial region of interest elements selection and re-projected onto 2D space to construct partial gait energy images. A synthetic database with destination views and multi-linear subspace classifier fused with majority voting are used to achieve arbitrary view gait recognition that is robust to varying conditions. Experimental results on CMU, CASIA B, TUM-IITKGP, AVAMVG and KY4D datasets show the efficacy of the propose method

Lidar-based Gait Analysis and Activity Recognition in a 4D Surveillance System

This paper presents new approaches for gait and activity analysis based on data streams of a Rotating Multi Beam (RMB) Lidar sensor. The proposed algorithms are embedded into an integrated 4D vision and visualization system, which is able to analyze and interactively display real scenarios in natural outdoor environments with walking pedestrians. The main focus of the investigations are gait based person re-identification during tracking, and recognition of specific activity patterns such as bending, waving, making phone calls and checking the time looking at wristwatches. The descriptors for training and recognition are observed and extracted from realistic outdoor surveillance scenarios, where multiple pedestrians are walking in the field of interest following possibly intersecting trajectories, thus the observations might often be affected by occlusions or background noise. Since there is no public database available for such scenarios, we created and published a new Lidar-based outdoors gait and activity dataset on our website, that contains point cloud sequences of 28 different persons extracted and aggregated from 35 minutes-long measurements. The presented results confirm that both efficient gait-based identification and activity recognition is achievable in the sparse point clouds of a single RMB Lidar sensor. After extracting the people trajectories, we synthesized a free-viewpoint video, where moving avatar models follow the trajectories of the observed pedestrians in real time, ensuring that the leg movements of the animated avatars are synchronized with the real gait cycles observed in the Lidar stream

AFFECT-PRESERVING VISUAL PRIVACY PROTECTION

The prevalence of wireless networks and the convenience of mobile cameras enable many new video applications other than security and entertainment. From behavioral diagnosis to wellness monitoring, cameras are increasing used for observations in various educational and medical settings. Videos collected for such applications are considered protected health information under privacy laws in many countries. Visual privacy protection techniques, such as blurring or object removal, can be used to mitigate privacy concern, but they also obliterate important visual cues of affect and social behaviors that are crucial for the target applications. In this dissertation, we propose to balance the privacy protection and the utility of the data by preserving the privacy-insensitive information, such as pose and expression, which is useful in many applications involving visual understanding. The Intellectual Merits of the dissertation include a novel framework for visual privacy protection by manipulating facial image and body shape of individuals, which: (1) is able to conceal the identity of individuals; (2) provide a way to preserve the utility of the data, such as expression and pose information; (3) balance the utility of the data and capacity of the privacy protection. The Broader Impacts of the dissertation focus on the significance of privacy protection on visual data, and the inadequacy of current privacy enhancing technologies in preserving affect and behavioral attributes of the visual content, which are highly useful for behavior observation in educational and medical settings. This work in this dissertation represents one of the first attempts in achieving both goals simultaneously

Robust arbitrary view gait recognition based on parametric 3D human body reconstruction and virtual posture synthesis

This paper proposes an arbitrary view gait recognition method where the gait recognition is performed in 3-dimensional (3D) to be robust to variation in speed, inclined plane and clothing, and in the presence of a carried item. 3D parametric gait models in a gait period are reconstructed by an optimized 3D human pose, shape and simulated clothes estimation method using multiview gait silhouettes. The gait estimation involves morphing a new subject with constant semantic constraints using silhouette cost function as observations. Using a clothes-independent 3D parametric gait model reconstruction method, gait models of different subjects with various postures in a cycle are obtained and used as galleries to construct 3D gait dictionary. Using a carrying-items posture synthesized model, virtual gait models with different carrying-items postures are synthesized to further construct an over-complete 3D gait dictionary. A self-occlusion optimized simultaneous sparse representation model is also introduced to achieve high robustness in limited gait frames. Experimental analyses on CASIA B dataset and CMU MoBo dataset show a significant performance gain in terms of accuracy and robustness

Fisher Motion Descriptor for Multiview Gait Recognition

The goal of this paper is to identify individuals by analyzing their gait. Instead of using binary silhouettes as input data (as done in many previous works) we propose and evaluate the use of motion descriptors based on densely sampled short-term trajectories. We take advantage of state-of-the-art people detectors to de ne custom spatial con gurations of the descriptors around the target person, obtaining a rich representation of the gait motion. The local motion features (described by the Divergence-Curl-Shear descriptor [1]) extracted on the di erent spatial areas of the person are combined into a single high-level gait descriptor by using the Fisher Vector encoding [2]. The proposed approach, coined Pyramidal Fisher Motion, is experimentally validated on `CASIA' dataset [3] (parts B and C), `TUM GAID' dataset [4], `CMU MoBo' dataset [5] and the recent `AVA Multiview Gait' dataset [6]. The results show that this new approach achieves state-of-the-art results in the problem of gait recognition, allowing to recognize walking people from diverse viewpoints on single and multiple camera setups, wearing di erent clothes, carrying bags, walking at diverse speeds and not limited to straight walking paths

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2013 Florence

Important Information Technology topics are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, protection of data, access to the content. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (2D, 3D) regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace – Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The main parts of the Conference Proceedings regard: Strategic Issues, EC Projects and Related Networks & Initiatives, International Forum on “Culture & Technology”, 2D – 3D Technologies & Applications, Virtual Galleries – Museums and Related Initiatives, Access to the Culture Information. Three Workshops are related to: International Cooperation, Innovation and Enterprise, Creative Industries and Cultural Tourism

Efficient Human Activity Recognition in Large Image and Video Databases

Vision-based human action recognition has attracted considerable interest in recent research for its applications to video surveillance, content-based search, healthcare, and interactive games. Most existing research deals with building informative feature descriptors, designing efficient and robust algorithms, proposing versatile and challenging datasets, and fusing multiple modalities. Often, these approaches build on certain conventions such as the use of motion cues to determine video descriptors, application of off-the-shelf classifiers, and single-factor classification of videos. In this thesis, we deal with important but overlooked issues such as efficiency, simplicity, and scalability of human activity recognition in different application scenarios: controlled video environment (e.g.~indoor surveillance), unconstrained videos (e.g.~YouTube), depth or skeletal data (e.g.~captured by Kinect), and person images (e.g.~Flicker). In particular, we are interested in answering questions like (a) is it possible to efficiently recognize human actions in controlled videos without temporal cues? (b) given that the large-scale unconstrained video data are often of high dimension low sample size (HDLSS) nature, how to efficiently recognize human actions in such data? (c) considering the rich 3D motion information available from depth or motion capture sensors, is it possible to recognize both the actions and the actors using only the motion dynamics of underlying activities? and (d) can motion information from monocular videos be used for automatically determining saliency regions for recognizing actions in still images