8,217 research outputs found
Statistical/Geometric Techniques for Object Representation and Recognition
Object modeling and recognition are key areas of research in computer vision and graphics with wide range of applications. Though research in these areas is not new, traditionally most of it has focused on analyzing problems under controlled environments. The challenges posed by real life applications demand for more general and robust solutions. The wide variety of objects with large intra-class variability makes the task very challenging. The difficulty in modeling and matching objects also vary depending on the input modality. In addition, the easy availability of sensors and storage have resulted in tremendous increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed which requires efficient algorithms suitable for large-size databases. In this dissertation, we address some of the challenges involved in modeling and matching of objects in realistic scenarios.
Object matching in images require accounting for large variability in the appearance due to changes in illumination and view point. Any real world object is characterized by its underlying shape and albedo, which unlike the image intensity are insensitive to changes in illumination conditions. We propose a stochastic filtering framework for estimating object albedo from a single intensity image by formulating the albedo estimation as an image estimation problem. We also show how this albedo estimate can be used for illumination insensitive object matching and for more accurate shape recovery from a single image using standard shape from shading formulation. We start with the simpler problem where the pose of the object is known and only the illumination varies. We then extend the proposed approach to handle unknown pose in addition to illumination variations. We also use the estimated albedo maps for another important application, which is recognizing faces across age progression.
Many approaches which address the problem of modeling and recognizing objects from images assume that the underlying objects are of diffused texture. But most real world objects exhibit a combination of diffused and specular properties. We propose an approach for separating the diffused and specular reflectance from a given color image so that the algorithms proposed for objects of diffused texture become applicable to a much wider range of real world objects.
Representing and matching the 2D and 3D geometry of objects is also an integral part of object matching with applications in gesture recognition, activity classification, trademark and logo recognition, etc. The challenge in matching 2D/3D shapes lies in accounting for the different rigid and non-rigid deformations, large intra-class variability, noise and outliers. In addition, since shapes are usually represented as a collection of landmark points, the shape matching algorithm also has to deal with the challenges of missing or unknown correspondence across these data points. We propose an efficient shape indexing approach where the different feature vectors representing the shape are mapped to a hash table. For a query shape, we show how the similar shapes in the database can be efficiently retrieved without the need for establishing correspondence making the algorithm extremely fast and scalable. We also propose an approach for matching and registration of 3D point cloud data across unknown or missing correspondence using
an implicit surface representation. Finally, we discuss possible future directions of this research
Neighbourhood Consensus Networks
We address the problem of finding reliable dense correspondences between a
pair of images. This is a challenging task due to strong appearance differences
between the corresponding scene elements and ambiguities generated by
repetitive patterns. The contributions of this work are threefold. First,
inspired by the classic idea of disambiguating feature matches using semi-local
constraints, we develop an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network
architecture that identifies sets of spatially consistent matches by analyzing
neighbourhood consensus patterns in the 4D space of all possible
correspondences between a pair of images without the need for a global
geometric model. Second, we demonstrate that the model can be trained
effectively from weak supervision in the form of matching and non-matching
image pairs without the need for costly manual annotation of point to point
correspondences. Third, we show the proposed neighbourhood consensus network
can be applied to a range of matching tasks including both category- and
instance-level matching, obtaining the state-of-the-art results on the PF
Pascal dataset and the InLoc indoor visual localization benchmark.Comment: In Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Neural Information
Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018
Affine Subspace Representation for Feature Description
This paper proposes a novel Affine Subspace Representation (ASR) descriptor
to deal with affine distortions induced by viewpoint changes. Unlike the
traditional local descriptors such as SIFT, ASR inherently encodes local
information of multi-view patches, making it robust to affine distortions while
maintaining a high discriminative ability. To this end, PCA is used to
represent affine-warped patches as PCA-patch vectors for its compactness and
efficiency. Then according to the subspace assumption, which implies that the
PCA-patch vectors of various affine-warped patches of the same keypoint can be
represented by a low-dimensional linear subspace, the ASR descriptor is
obtained by using a simple subspace-to-point mapping. Such a linear subspace
representation could accurately capture the underlying information of a
keypoint (local structure) under multiple views without sacrificing its
distinctiveness. To accelerate the computation of ASR descriptor, a fast
approximate algorithm is proposed by moving the most computational part (ie,
warp patch under various affine transformations) to an offline training stage.
Experimental results show that ASR is not only better than the state-of-the-art
descriptors under various image transformations, but also performs well without
a dedicated affine invariant detector when dealing with viewpoint changes.Comment: To Appear in the 2014 European Conference on Computer Visio
Invariance of visual operations at the level of receptive fields
Receptive field profiles registered by cell recordings have shown that
mammalian vision has developed receptive fields tuned to different sizes and
orientations in the image domain as well as to different image velocities in
space-time. This article presents a theoretical model by which families of
idealized receptive field profiles can be derived mathematically from a small
set of basic assumptions that correspond to structural properties of the
environment. The article also presents a theory for how basic invariance
properties to variations in scale, viewing direction and relative motion can be
obtained from the output of such receptive fields, using complementary
selection mechanisms that operate over the output of families of receptive
fields tuned to different parameters. Thereby, the theory shows how basic
invariance properties of a visual system can be obtained already at the level
of receptive fields, and we can explain the different shapes of receptive field
profiles found in biological vision from a requirement that the visual system
should be invariant to the natural types of image transformations that occur in
its environment.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figure
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