Robust online subspace learning

In this thesis, I aim to advance the theories of online non-linear subspace learning through the development of strategies which are both efficient and robust. The use of subspace learning methods is very popular in computer vision and they have been employed to numerous tasks. With the increasing need for real-time applications, the formulation of online (i.e. incremental and real-time) learning methods is a vibrant research field and has received much attention from the research community. A major advantage of incremental systems is that they update the hypothesis during execution, thus allowing for the incorporation of the real data seen in the testing phase. Tracking acts as an attractive and popular evaluation tool for incremental systems, and thus, the connection between online learning and adaptive tracking is seen commonly in the literature. The proposed system in this thesis facilitates learning from noisy input data, e.g. caused by occlusions, casted shadows and pose variations, that are challenging problems in general tracking frameworks. First, a fast and robust alternative to standard L2-norm principal component analysis (PCA) is introduced, which I coin Euler PCA (e-PCA). The formulation of e-PCA is based on robust, non-linear kernel PCA (KPCA) with a cosine-based kernel function that is expressed via an explicit feature space. When applied to tracking, face reconstruction and background modeling, promising results are achieved. In the second part, the problem of matching vectors of 3D rotations is explicitly targeted. A novel distance which is robust for 3D rotations is introduced, and formulated as a kernel function. The kernel leads to a new representation of 3D rotations, the full-angle quaternion (FAQ) representation. Finally, I propose 3D object recognition from point clouds, and object tracking with color values using FAQs. A domain-specific kernel function designed for visual data is then presented. KPCA with Krein space kernels is introduced, as this kernel is indefinite, and an exact incremental learning framework for the new kernel is developed. In a tracker framework, the presented online learning outperforms the competitors in nine popular and challenging video sequences. In the final part, the generalized eigenvalue problem is studied. Specifically, incremental slow feature analysis (SFA) with indefinite kernels is proposed, and applied to temporal video segmentation and tracking with change detection. As online SFA allows for drift detection, further improvements are achieved in the evaluation of the tracking task.Open Acces

Extraction and Classification of Diving Clips from Continuous Video Footage

Due to recent advances in technology, the recording and analysis of video data has become an increasingly common component of athlete training programmes. Today it is incredibly easy and affordable to set up a fixed camera and record athletes in a wide range of sports, such as diving, gymnastics, golf, tennis, etc. However, the manual analysis of the obtained footage is a time-consuming task which involves isolating actions of interest and categorizing them using domain-specific knowledge. In order to automate this kind of task, three challenging sub-problems are often encountered: 1) temporally cropping events/actions of interest from continuous video; 2) tracking the object of interest; and 3) classifying the events/actions of interest. Most previous work has focused on solving just one of the above sub-problems in isolation. In contrast, this paper provides a complete solution to the overall action monitoring task in the context of a challenging real-world exemplar. Specifically, we address the problem of diving classification. This is a challenging problem since the person (diver) of interest typically occupies fewer than 1% of the pixels in each frame. The model is required to learn the temporal boundaries of a dive, even though other divers and bystanders may be in view. Finally, the model must be sensitive to subtle changes in body pose over a large number of frames to determine the classification code. We provide effective solutions to each of the sub-problems which combine to provide a highly functional solution to the task as a whole. The techniques proposed can be easily generalized to video footage recorded from other sports.Comment: To appear at CVsports 201

STV-based Video Feature Processing for Action Recognition

In comparison to still image-based processes, video features can provide rich and intuitive information about dynamic events occurred over a period of time, such as human actions, crowd behaviours, and other subject pattern changes. Although substantial progresses have been made in the last decade on image processing and seen its successful applications in face matching and object recognition, video-based event detection still remains one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision research due to its complex continuous or discrete input signals, arbitrary dynamic feature definitions, and the often ambiguous analytical methods. In this paper, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) and region intersection (RI) based 3D shape-matching method has been proposed to facilitate the definition and recognition of human actions recorded in videos. The distinctive characteristics and the performance gain of the devised approach stemmed from a coefficient factor-boosted 3D region intersection and matching mechanism developed in this research. This paper also reported the investigation into techniques for efficient STV data filtering to reduce the amount of voxels (volumetric-pixels) that need to be processed in each operational cycle in the implemented system. The encouraging features and improvements on the operational performance registered in the experiments have been discussed at the end