847,133 research outputs found
A mask-based approach for the geometric calibration of thermal-infrared cameras
Accurate and efficient thermal-infrared (IR) camera calibration is important for advancing computer vision research within the thermal modality. This paper presents an approach for geometrically calibrating individual and multiple cameras in both the thermal and visible modalities. The proposed technique can be used to correct for lens distortion and to simultaneously reference both visible and thermal-IR cameras to a single coordinate frame. The most popular existing approach for the geometric calibration of thermal cameras uses a printed chessboard heated by a flood lamp and is comparatively inaccurate and difficult to execute. Additionally, software toolkits provided for calibration either are unsuitable for this task or require substantial manual intervention. A new geometric mask with high thermal contrast and not requiring a flood lamp is presented as an alternative calibration pattern. Calibration points on the pattern are then accurately located using a clustering-based algorithm which utilizes the maximally stable extremal region detector. This algorithm is integrated into an automatic end-to-end system for calibrating single or multiple cameras. The evaluation shows that using the proposed mask achieves a mean reprojection error up to 78% lower than that using a heated chessboard. The effectiveness of the approach is further demonstrated by using it to calibrate two multiple-camera multiple-modality setups. Source code and binaries for the developed software are provided on the project Web site
A hybrid GA–PS–SQP method to solve power system valve-point economic dispatch problems
This study presents a new approach based on a hybrid algorithm consisting of Genetic Algorithm (GA), Pattern Search (PS) and Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) techniques to solve the well-known power system Economic dispatch problem (ED). GA is the main optimizer of the algorithm, whereas PS and SQP are used to fine tune the results of GA to increase confidence in the solution. For illustrative purposes, the algorithm has been applied to various test systems to assess its effectiveness. Furthermore, convergence characteristics and robustness of the proposed method have been explored through comparison with results reported in literature. The outcome is very encouraging and suggests that the hybrid GA–PS–SQP algorithm is very efficient in solving power system economic dispatch problem
Visual Landmark Recognition from Internet Photo Collections: A Large-Scale Evaluation
The task of a visual landmark recognition system is to identify photographed
buildings or objects in query photos and to provide the user with relevant
information on them. With their increasing coverage of the world's landmark
buildings and objects, Internet photo collections are now being used as a
source for building such systems in a fully automatic fashion. This process
typically consists of three steps: clustering large amounts of images by the
objects they depict; determining object names from user-provided tags; and
building a robust, compact, and efficient recognition index. To this date,
however, there is little empirical information on how well current approaches
for those steps perform in a large-scale open-set mining and recognition task.
Furthermore, there is little empirical information on how recognition
performance varies for different types of landmark objects and where there is
still potential for improvement. With this paper, we intend to fill these gaps.
Using a dataset of 500k images from Paris, we analyze each component of the
landmark recognition pipeline in order to answer the following questions: How
many and what kinds of objects can be discovered automatically? How can we best
use the resulting image clusters to recognize the object in a query? How can
the object be efficiently represented in memory for recognition? How reliably
can semantic information be extracted? And finally: What are the limiting
factors in the resulting pipeline from query to semantics? We evaluate how
different choices of methods and parameters for the individual pipeline steps
affect overall system performance and examine their effects for different query
categories such as buildings, paintings or sculptures
Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval
Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in
conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In
this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of
annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to
track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document
that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video
are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar
motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in
the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new
video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on
in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art
appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with
complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for
Video Technolog
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