АЛГОРИТМ АНАЛИЗА ДИНАМИЧЕСКИХ ТЕКСТУР

Recognizing dynamic patterns based on visual processing is significant for many applications such as remote monitoring for the prevention of natural disasters, e.g. forest fires, various types of surveillance, e.g. traffic monitoring, background subtraction in challenging environments, e.g. outdoor scenes with vegetation, homeland security applications and scientific studies of animal behavior. In the context of surveillance, recognizing dynamic patterns is of significance to isolate activities of interest (e.g. fire) from distracting background (e.g. windblown vegetation and changes in scene illumination).Methods: pattern recognition, computer vision.Results: This paper presents video based image processing algorithm with samples usually containing a cluttered background. According to the spatiotemporal features, four categorized groups were formulated. Dynamic texture recognition algorithm refers image objects to one of this group. Motion, color, facial, energy Laws and ELBP features are extracted for dynamic texture categorization. Classification based on boosted random forest.Practical relevance: Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective for video-based dynamic texture categorization. Averaged classification accuracy on the all video images is 95.2%.Постановка проблемы: Обнаружение динамических текстур на видеоизображениях в настоящее время находит все более широкое применение в системах компьютерного зрения. Например, обнаружение дыма и пламени в системах экологического мониторинга, анализ автомобильного трафика при мониторинге загруженности дорог, и в других системах. Поиск объекта интереса на динамическом фоне часто бывает затруднен за счет похожих текстурных признаков или признаков движения у фона и искомого объекта. В связи с этим возникает необходимость разработки алгоритма классификации динамических текстур для выделения объектов интереса на динамическом фоне.Методы: распознавание образов, компьютерное зрение.Результаты: В данной работе рассматривается обработка видеоизображений содержащих объекты с динамическим поведением на динамическом фоне, такие как вода, туман, пламя, текстиль на ветру и др. Разработан алгоритм отнесения объектов видеоизображения к одной из четырех предлагаемых категорий. Извлекаются признаки движения, цветовые особенности, фрактальности, энергетические признаки Ласа, строятся ELBP-гистограммы. В качестве классификатора использован бустинговый случайный лес.Практическая значимость: Разработан метод, позволяющий разделить динамические текстур на категории: по типу движения (периодическое и хаотичное) и типу объектов интереса (природные и искусственные). Экспериментальные исследования подтверждают эффективность предложенного алгоритма для отнесения объектов изображения к той или иной категории. Средняя точность классификации составила 95.2%

Reconnaissance d'objets multiclasses pour des applications d'aide à la conduite et de vidéo surveillance

Co-encadrement de la thèse : Bogdan StanciulescuPedestrian Detection and Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) are important components of an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). This thesis presents two methods for eliminating false alarms in pedestrian detection applications and a novel three stage approach for TSR. Our TSR approch consists of a color segmentation, a shape detection and a content classification phase. The red color enhancement is improved by using an adaptive threshold. The performance of the K-d tree is augmented by introducing a spatial weighting. The Random Forests yield a classification accuracy of 97% on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark. Moreover, the processing and memory requirements are reduced by employing a feature space reduction. The classifiers attain an equally high classification rate using only a fraction of the feature dimension, selected using the Random Forest or Fisher's Criterion. This technique is also validated on two different multiclass benchmarks: ETH80 and Caltech 101. Further, in a static camera video surveillance application, the immobile false positives, such as trees and poles, are eliminated using the correlation measure over several frames. The recurring false alarms in the pedestrian detection in the scope of an embedded ADAS application are removed using a complementary tree filter.La détection de piétons et la reconnaissance des panneaux routiers sont des fonctions importantes des systèmes d'aide à la conduite (anglais : Advanced Driver Assistance System - ADAS). Une nouvelle approche pour la reconnaissance des panneaux et deux méthodes d'élimination de fausses alarmes dans des applications de détection de piétons sont présentées dans cette thèse. Notre approche de reconnaissance de panneaux consiste en trois phases: une segmentation de couleurs, une détection de formes et une classification du contenu. Le color enhancement des régions rouges est amélioré en introduisant un seuil adaptatif. Dans la phase de classification, la performance du K-d tree est augmentée en utilisant un poids spatial. Les Random Forests obtiennent un taux de classification de 97% sur le benchmark allemand de la reconnaissance des panneaux routiers (German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark). Les besoins en mémoire et calcul sont réduits en employant une réduction de la dimension des caractéristiques. Les classifieurs atteignent un taux de classification aussi haut qu'avec une fraction de la dimension des caractéristiques, selectionée en utilisant des Random Forests ou Fisher's Crtierion. Cette technique est validée sur deux benchmarks d'images multiclasses : ETH80 et Caltech 101. Dans une application de vidéo surveillance avec des caméras statiques, les fausses alarmes des objets fixes, comme les arbres et les lampadaires, sont éliminées avec la corrélation sur plusieurs trames. Les fausses alarmes récurrentes sont supprimées par un filtre complémentaire en forme d'arbre

Dynamic Scene Understanding with Applications to Traffic Monitoring

Many breakthroughs have been witnessed in the computer vision community in recent years, largely due to deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and largescale datasets. This thesis aims to investigate dynamic scene understanding from images. The problem of dynamic scene understanding involves simultaneously solving several sub-tasks including object detection, object recognition, and segmentation. Successfully completing these tasks will enable us to interpret the objects of interest within a scene. Vision-based traffic monitoring is one of many fast-emerging areas in the intelligent transportation system (ITS). In the thesis, we focus on the following problems in traffic scene understanding. They are 1) How to detect and recognize all the objects of interest in street view images? 2) How to employ CNN features and semantic pixel labelling to boost the performance of pedestrian detection? 3) How to enhance the discriminative power of CNN representations for improving the performance of fine-grained car recognition? 4) How to learn an adaptive color space to represent vehicle images for vehicle color recognition? For the first task, we propose a single learning based detection framework to detect three important classes of objects (traffic signs, cars, and cyclists). The proposed framework consists of a dense feature extractor and detectors of these three classes. The advantage of using one common framework is that the detection speed is much faster, since all dense features need only to be evaluated once and then are shared with all detectors. The proposed framework introduces spatially pooled features as a part of aggregated channel features to enhance the robustness to noises and image deformations. We also propose an object subcategorization scheme as a means of capturing the intra-class variation of objects. To address the second problem, we show that by re-using the convolutional feature maps (CFMs) of a deep CNN model as visual features to train an ensemble of boosted decision forests, we are able to remarkably improve the performance of pedestrian detection without using specially designed learning algorithms. We also show that semantic pixel labelling can be simply combined with a pedestrian detector to further boost the detection performance. Fine-grained details of objects usually contain very discriminative information which are crucial for fine-grained object recognition. Conventional pooling strategies (e.g. max-pooling, average-pooling) may discard these fine-grained details and hurt the iii iv recognition performance. To remedy this problem, we propose a spatially weighted pooling (swp) strategy which considerably improves the discriminative power of CNN representations. The swp pools the CNN features with the guidance of its learnt masks, which measures the importance of the spatial units in terms of discriminative power. In image color recognition, visual features are extracted from image pixels represented in one color space. The choice of the color space may influence the quality of extracted features and impact the recognition performance. We propose a color transformation method that converts image pixels from the RGB space to a learnt space for improving the recognition performance. Moreover, we propose a ColorNet which optimizes the architecture of AlexNet and embeds a mini-CNN of color transformation for vehicle color recognition.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201

Automatic Multi-Scale and Multi-Object Pedestrian and Car Detection in Digital Images Based on the Discriminative Generalized Hough Transform and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Many approaches have been suggested for automatic pedestrian and car detection to cope with the large variability regarding object size, occlusion, background variability, aspect and so forth. Current state-of-the-art deep learning-based frameworks rely either on a proposal generation mechanism (e.g., "Faster R-CNN") or on the inspection of image quadrants / octants (e.g., "YOLO" or "SSD"), which are then further processed with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). In this thesis, the Discriminative Generalized Hough Transform (DGHT), which operates on edge images, is analyzed for the application to automatic multi-scale and multi-object pedestrian and car detection in 2D digital images. The analysis motivates to use the DGHT as an efficient proposal generation mechanism, followed by a proposal (bounding box) refinement and proposal acceptance or rejection based on a deep CNN. The impact of the different components of the resulting DGHT object detection pipeline as well as the amount of DGHT training data on the detection performance are analyzed in detail. Due to the low false negative rate and the low number of candidates of the DGHT as well as the high classification accuracy of the CNN, competitive performance to the state-of-the-art in pedestrian and car detection is obtained on the IAIR database with much less generated proposals than other proposal-generating algorithms, being outperformed only by YOLOv2 fine-tuned to IAIR cars. By evaluations on further databases (without retraining or adaptation) the generalization capability of the DGHT object detection pipeline is shown

Image-based recognition, 3D localization, and retro-reflectivity evaluation of high-quantity low-cost roadway assets for enhanced condition assessment

Systematic condition assessment of high-quantity low-cost roadway assets such as traffic signs, guardrails, and pavement markings requires frequent reporting on location and up-to-date status of these assets. Today, most Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the US collect data using camera-mounted vehicles to filter, annotate, organize, and present the data necessary for these assessments. However, the cost and complexity of the collection, analysis, and reporting as-is conditions result in sparse and infrequent monitoring. Thus, some of the gains in efficiency are consumed by monitoring costs. This dissertation proposes to improve frequency, detail, and applicability of image-based condition assessment via automating detection, classification, and 3D localization of multiple types of high-quantity low-cost roadway assets using both images collected by the DOTs and online databases such Google Street View Images. To address the new requirements of US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), a new method is also developed that simulates nighttime visibility of traffic signs from images taken during daytime and measures their retro-reflectivity condition. To initiate detection and classification of high-quantity low-cost roadway assets from street-level images, a number of algorithms are proposed that automatically segment and localize high-level asset categories in 3D. The first set of algorithms focus on the task of detecting and segmenting assets at high-level categories. More specifically, a method based on Semantic Texton Forest classifiers, segments each geo-registered 2D video frame at the pixel-level based on shape, texture, and color. A Structure from Motion (SfM) procedure reconstructs the road and its assets in 3D. Next, a voting scheme assigns the most observed asset category to each point in 3D. The experimental results from application of this method are promising, nevertheless because this method relies on using supervised ground-truth pixel labels for training purposes, scaling it to various types of assets is challenging. To address this issue, a non-parametric image parsing method is proposed that leverages lazy learning scheme for segmentation and recognition of roadway assets. The semi-supervised technique used in the proposed method does not need training and provides ground truth data in a more efficient manner. It is easily scalable to thousands of video frames captured during data collection. Once the high-level asset categories are detected, specific techniques needs to be exploited to detect and classify the assets at a higher level of granularity. To this end, performance of three computer vision algorithms are evaluated for classification of traffic signs in presence of cluttered backgrounds and static and dynamic occlusions. Without making any prior assumptions about the location of traffic signs in 2D, the best performing method uses histograms of oriented gradients and color together with multiple one-vs-all Support Vector Machines, and classifies these assets into warning, regulatory, stop, and yield sign categories. To minimize the reliance on visual data collected by the DOTs and improve frequency and applicability of condition assessment, a new end-to-end procedure is presented that applies the above algorithms and creates comprehensive inventory of traffic signs using Google Street View images. By processing images extracted using Google Street View API and discriminative classification scores from all images that see a sign, the most probable 3D location of each traffic sign is derived and is shown on the Google Earth using a dynamic heat map. A data card containing information about location, type, and condition of each detected traffic sign is also created. Finally, a computer vision-based algorithm is proposed that measures retro-reflectivity of traffic signs during daytime using a vehicle mounted device. The algorithm simulates nighttime visibility of traffic signs from images taken during daytime and measures their retro-reflectivity. The technique is faster, cheaper, and safer compared to the state-of-the-art as it neither requires nighttime operation nor requires manual sign inspection. It also satisfies measurement guidelines set forth by FHWA both in terms of granularity and accuracy. To validate the techniques, new detailed video datasets and their ground-truth were generated from 2.2-mile smart road research facility and two interstate highways in the US. The comprehensive dataset contains over 11,000 annotated U.S. traffic sign images and exhibits large variations in sign pose, scale, background, illumination, and occlusion conditions. The performance of all algorithms were examined using these datasets. For retro-reflectivity measurement of traffic signs, experiments were conducted at different times of day and for different distances. Results were compared with a method recommended by ASTM standards. The experimental results show promise in scalability of these methods to reduce the time and effort required for developing road inventories, especially for those assets such as guardrails and traffic lights that are not typically considered in 2D asset recognition methods and also multiple categories of traffic signs. The applicability of Google Street View Images for inventory management purposes and also the technique for retro-reflectivity measurement during daytime demonstrate strong potential in lowering inspection costs and improving safety in practical applications

Image similarity in medical images

Recent experiments have indicated a strong influence of the substrate grain orientation on the self-ordering in anodic porous alumina. Anodic porous alumina with straight pore channels grown in a stable, self-ordered manner is formed on (001) oriented Al grain, while disordered porous pattern is formed on (101) oriented Al grain with tilted pore channels growing in an unstable manner. In this work, numerical simulation of the pore growth process is carried out to understand this phenomenon. The rate-determining step of the oxide growth is assumed to be the Cabrera-Mott barrier at the oxide/electrolyte (o/e) interface, while the substrate is assumed to determine the ratio β between the ionization and oxidation reactions at the metal/oxide (m/o) interface. By numerically solving the electric field inside a growing porous alumina during anodization, the migration rates of the ions and hence the evolution of the o/e and m/o interfaces are computed. The simulated results show that pore growth is more stable when β is higher. A higher β corresponds to more Al ionized and migrating away from the m/o interface rather than being oxidized, and hence a higher retained O:Al ratio in the oxide. Experimentally measured oxygen content in the self-ordered porous alumina on (001) Al is indeed found to be about 3% higher than that in the disordered alumina on (101) Al, in agreement with the theoretical prediction. The results, therefore, suggest that ionization on (001) Al substrate is relatively easier than on (101) Al, and this leads to the more stable growth of the pore channels on (001) Al