Patch Classifier of Face Shape Outline Using Gray-Value Variance with Bilinear Interpolation

This paper proposes a method to classify whether a landmark, which consists of the outline in a face shape model in the shape model based approaches, is properly fitted to feature points. Through this method, the reliability of information can be determined in the process of managing and using the shape. The enlarged face image by image sensor is processed by bilinear interpolation. We use the gray-value variance that considers the texture feature of skin for classification of landmarks. The gray-value variance is calculated in skin area of the patch constructed around the landmark. In order to make a system strong to poses, we project the image of face to the frontal face shape model. And, to fill out each area, the area with insufficient pixel information is filled out with bilinear interpolation. When the fitting is properly done, it has the variance with a low value to be calculated for smooth skin texture. On the other hand, the variance for misaligned landmark shows a high variance by the background and facial contour gradient. We have proposed a classifier using this characteristic and, as a result, classified the true and false in the landmark with an accuracy of 83.32% through the patch classifier

Super-resolution mapping

Super-resolution mapping is becoming an increasing important technique in remote sensing for land cover mapping at a sub-pixel scale from coarse spatial resolution imagery. The potential of this technique could increase the value of the low cost coarse spatial resolution imagery. Among many types of land cover patches that can be represented by the super-resolution mapping, the prediction of patches smaller than an image pixel is one of the most difficult. This is because of the lack of information on the existence and spatial extend of the small land cover patches. Another difficult problem is to represent the location of small patches accurately. This thesis focuses on the potential of super-resolution mapping for accurate land cover mapping, with particular emphasis on the mapping of small patches. Popular super-resolution mapping techniques such as pixel swapping and the Hopfield neural network are used as well as a new method proposed. Using a Hopfield neural network (HNN) for super-resolution mapping, the best parameters and configuration to represent land cover patches of different sizes, shapes and mosaics are investigated. In addition, it also shown how a fusion of time series coarse spatial resolution imagery, such as daily MODIS 250 m images, can aid the determination of small land cover patch locations, thus reducing the spatial variability of the representation of such patches. Results of the improved HNN using a time series images are evaluated in a series of assessments, and demonstrated to be superior in terms of mapping accuracy than that of the standard techniques. A novel super-resolution mapping technique based on halftoning concept is presented as an alternative solution for the super-resolution mapping. This new technique is able to represent more land cover patches than the standard techniques

Image enlargement using multiple sensors

Image sensing is generally performed with multiple spectral sensors. For example, combination of three sensors (red, green, and blue) is used for color image reproduction, and electrooptical and infrared sensors are used for surveillance and satellite imaging, respectively. The resolution of each sensor can be intensified by taking the other sensors into account and applying correlations between different sensors. There are various successful applications of image enlargement using multiple sensors and even multimodal sensors. However, there still are several open issues in sensor processing which can be explained by signal processing-based image enlargement using redundancy among the sensors

Super-resolution mapping

Super-resolution mapping is becoming an increasing important technique in remote sensing for land cover mapping at a sub-pixel scale from coarse spatial resolution imagery. The potential of this technique could increase the value of the low cost coarse spatial resolution imagery. Among many types of land cover patches that can be represented by the super-resolution mapping, the prediction of patches smaller than an image pixel is one of the most difficult. This is because of the lack of information on the existence and spatial extend of the small land cover patches. Another difficult problem is to represent the location of small patches accurately. This thesis focuses on the potential of super-resolution mapping for accurate land cover mapping, with particular emphasis on the mapping of small patches. Popular super-resolution mapping techniques such as pixel swapping and the Hopfield neural network are used as well as a new method proposed. Using a Hopfield neural network (HNN) for super-resolution mapping, the best parameters and configuration to represent land cover patches of different sizes, shapes and mosaics are investigated. In addition, it also shown how a fusion of time series coarse spatial resolution imagery, such as daily MODIS 250 m images, can aid the determination of small land cover patch locations, thus reducing the spatial variability of the representation of such patches. Results of the improved HNN using a time series images are evaluated in a series of assessments, and demonstrated to be superior in terms of mapping accuracy than that of the standard techniques. A novel super-resolution mapping technique based on halftoning concept is presented as an alternative solution for the super-resolution mapping. This new technique is able to represent more land cover patches than the standard techniques

State of the Art in Face Recognition

Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to solve the face recognition problem, it is not possible yet to design a face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. New computer vision and pattern recognition approaches need to be investigated. Even new knowledge and perspectives from different fields like, psychology and neuroscience must be incorporated into the current field of face recognition to design a robust face recognition system. Indeed, many more efforts are required to end up with a human like face recognition system. This book tries to make an effort to reduce the gap between the previous face recognition research state and the future state

Improvements of local directional pattern for texture classification.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The Local Directional Pattern (LDP) method has established its effectiveness and performance compared to the popular Local Binary Pattern (LBP) method in different applications. In this thesis, several extensions and modification of LDP are proposed with an objective to increase its robustness and discriminative power. Local Directional Pattern (LDP) is dependent on the empirical choice of three for the number of significant bits used to code the responses of the Kirsch Mask operation. In a first study, we applied LDP on informal settlements using various values for the number of significant bits k. It was observed that the change of the value of the number of significant bits led to a change in the performance, depending on the application. Local Directional Pattern (LDP) is based on the computation Kirsch Mask application response values in eight directions. But this method ignores the gray value of the center pixel, which may lead to loss of significant information. Centered Local Directional Pattern (CLDP) is introduced to solve this issue, using the value of the center pixel based on its relations with neighboring pixels. Local Directional Pattern (LDP) also generates a code based on the absolute value of the edge response value; however, the sign of the original value indicates two different trends (positive or negative) of the gradient. To capture the gradient trend, Signed Local Directional Pattern (SLDP) and Centered-SLDP (C-SLDP) are proposed, which compute the eight edge responses based on the two different directions (positive or negative) of the gradients.The Directional Local Binary pattern (DLBP) is introduced, which adopts directional information to represent texture images. This method is more stable than both LDP and LBP because it utilizes the center pixel as a threshold for the edge response of a pixel in eight directions, instead of employing the center pixel as the threshold for pixel intensity of the neighbors, as in the LBP method. Angled Local directional pattern (ALDP) is also presented, with an objective to resolve two problems in the LDP method. These are the value of the number of significant bits k, and to taking into account the center pixel value. It computes the angle values for the edge response of a pixel in eight directions for each angle (0◦,45◦,90◦,135◦). Each angle vector contains three values. The central value in each vector is chosen as a threshold for the other two neighboring pixels. Circular Local Directional Pattern (CILDP) isalso presented, with an objective of a better analysis, especially with textures with a different scale. The method is built around the circular shape to compute the directional edge vector using different radiuses. The performances of LDP, LBP, CLDP, SLDP, C-SLDP, DLBP, ALDP and CILDP are evaluated using five classifiers (K-nearest neighbour algorithm (k-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Perceptron, Naive-Bayes (NB), and Decision Tree (DT)) applied to two different texture datasets: Kylberg dataset and KTH-TIPS2-b dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed methods outperform both LDP and LBP

Study on Co-occurrence-based Image Feature Analysis and Texture Recognition Employing Diagonal-Crisscross Local Binary Pattern

In this thesis, we focus on several important fields on real-world image texture analysis and recognition. We survey various important features that are suitable for texture analysis. Apart from the issue of variety of features, different types of texture datasets are also discussed in-depth. There is no thorough work covering the important databases and analyzing them in various viewpoints. We persuasively categorize texture databases ? based on many references. In this survey, we put a categorization to split these texture datasets into few basic groups and later put related datasets. Next, we exhaustively analyze eleven second-order statistical features or cues based on co-occurrence matrices to understand image texture surface. These features are exploited to analyze properties of image texture. The features are also categorized based on their angular orientations and their applicability. Finally, we propose a method called diagonal-crisscross local binary pattern (DCLBP) for texture recognition. We also propose two other extensions of the local binary pattern. Compare to the local binary pattern and few other extensions, we achieve that our proposed method performs satisfactorily well in two very challenging benchmark datasets, called the KTH-TIPS (Textures under varying Illumination, Pose and Scale) database, and the USC-SIPI (University of Southern California ? Signal and Image Processing Institute) Rotations Texture dataset.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号:工博甲第354号　学位授与年月日:平成25年9月27日CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION|CHAPTER 2 FEATURES FOR TEXTURE ANALYSIS|CHAPTER 3 IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF TEXTURE DATABASES|CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS OF FEATURES BASED ON CO-OCCURRENCE IMAGE MATRIX|CHAPTER 5 CATEGORIZATION OF FEATURES BASED ON CO-OCCURRENCE IMAGE MATRIX|CHAPTER 6 TEXTURE RECOGNITION BASED ON DIAGONAL-CRISSCROSS LOCAL BINARY PATTERN|CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK九州工業大学平成25年

Robust and real-time hand detection and tracking in monocular video

In recent years, personal computing devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones have become ubiquitous. Moreover, intelligent sensors are being integrated into many consumer devices such as eyeglasses, wristwatches and smart televisions. With the advent of touchscreen technology, a new human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigm arose that allows users to interface with their device in an intuitive manner. Using simple gestures, such as swipe or pinch movements, a touchscreen can be used to directly interact with a virtual environment. Nevertheless, touchscreens still form a physical barrier between the virtual interface and the real world. An increasingly popular field of research that tries to overcome this limitation, is video based gesture recognition, hand detection and hand tracking. Gesture based interaction allows the user to directly interact with the computer in a natural manner by exploring a virtual reality using nothing but his own body language. In this dissertation, we investigate how robust hand detection and tracking can be accomplished under real-time constraints. In the context of human-computer interaction, real-time is defined as both low latency and low complexity, such that a complete video frame can be processed before the next one becomes available. Furthermore, for practical applications, the algorithms should be robust to illumination changes, camera motion, and cluttered backgrounds in the scene. Finally, the system should be able to initialize automatically, and to detect and recover from tracking failure. We study a wide variety of existing algorithms, and propose significant improvements and novel methods to build a complete detection and tracking system that meets these requirements. Hand detection, hand tracking and hand segmentation are related yet technically different challenges. Whereas detection deals with finding an object in a static image, tracking considers temporal information and is used to track the position of an object over time, throughout a video sequence. Hand segmentation is the task of estimating the hand contour, thereby separating the object from its background. Detection of hands in individual video frames allows us to automatically initialize our tracking algorithm, and to detect and recover from tracking failure. Human hands are highly articulated objects, consisting of finger parts that are connected with joints. As a result, the appearance of a hand can vary greatly, depending on the assumed hand pose. Traditional detection algorithms often assume that the appearance of the object of interest can be described using a rigid model and therefore can not be used to robustly detect human hands. Therefore, we developed an algorithm that detects hands by exploiting their articulated nature. Instead of resorting to a template based approach, we probabilistically model the spatial relations between different hand parts, and the centroid of the hand. Detecting hand parts, such as fingertips, is much easier than detecting a complete hand. Based on our model of the spatial configuration of hand parts, the detected parts can be used to obtain an estimate of the complete hand's position. To comply with the real-time constraints, we developed techniques to speed-up the process by efficiently discarding unimportant information in the image. Experimental results show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in object detection while providing a reduction in computational complexity with a factor 1 000. Furthermore, we showed that our algorithm can also be used to detect other articulated objects such as persons or animals and is therefore not restricted to the task of hand detection. Once a hand has been detected, a tracking algorithm can be used to continuously track its position in time. We developed a probabilistic tracking method that can cope with uncertainty caused by image noise, incorrect detections, changing illumination, and camera motion. Furthermore, our tracking system automatically determines the number of hands in the scene, and can cope with hands entering or leaving the video canvas. We introduced several novel techniques that greatly increase tracking robustness, and that can also be applied in other domains than hand tracking. To achieve real-time processing, we investigated several techniques to reduce the search space of the problem, and deliberately employ methods that are easily parallelized on modern hardware. Experimental results indicate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art in hand tracking, while providing a much lower computational complexity. One of the methods used by our probabilistic tracking algorithm, is optical flow estimation. Optical flow is defined as a 2D vector field describing the apparent velocities of objects in a 3D scene, projected onto the image plane. Optical flow is known to be used by many insects and birds to visually track objects and to estimate their ego-motion. However, most optical flow estimation methods described in literature are either too slow to be used in real-time applications, or are not robust to illumination changes and fast motion. We therefore developed an optical flow algorithm that can cope with large displacements, and that is illumination independent. Furthermore, we introduce a regularization technique that ensures a smooth flow-field. This regularization scheme effectively reduces the number of noisy and incorrect flow-vector estimates, while maintaining the ability to handle motion discontinuities caused by object boundaries in the scene. The above methods are combined into a hand tracking framework which can be used for interactive applications in unconstrained environments. To demonstrate the possibilities of gesture based human-computer interaction, we developed a new type of computer display. This display is completely transparent, allowing multiple users to perform collaborative tasks while maintaining eye contact. Furthermore, our display produces an image that seems to float in thin air, such that users can touch the virtual image with their hands. This floating imaging display has been showcased on several national and international events and tradeshows. The research that is described in this dissertation has been evaluated thoroughly by comparing detection and tracking results with those obtained by state-of-the-art algorithms. These comparisons show that the proposed methods outperform most algorithms in terms of accuracy, while achieving a much lower computational complexity, resulting in a real-time implementation. Results are discussed in depth at the end of each chapter. This research further resulted in an international journal publication; a second journal paper that has been submitted and is under review at the time of writing this dissertation; nine international conference publications; a national conference publication; a commercial license agreement concerning the research results; two hardware prototypes of a new type of computer display; and a software demonstrator

Non-cooperative iris recognition

The dramatic growth in practical applications for iris biometrics has been accompanied by relevant developments in the underlying algorithms and techniques. Along with the research focused on near-infrared images captured with subject cooperation, e orts are being made to minimize the trade-o between the quality of the captured data and the recognition accuracy on less constrained environments, where images are obtained at the visible wavelength, at increased distances, over simpli ed acquisition protocols and adverse lightning conditions. At a rst stage, interpolation e ects on normalization process are addressed, pointing the outcomes in the overall recognition error rates. Secondly, a couple of post-processing steps to the Daugman's approach are performed, attempting to increase its performance in the particular unconstrained environments this thesis assumes. Analysis on both frequency and spatial domains and nally pattern recognition methods are applied in such e orts. This thesis embodies the study on how subject recognition can be achieved, without his cooperation, making use of iris data captured at-a-distance, on-the-move and at visible wavelength conditions. Widely used methods designed for constrained scenarios are analyzed.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT