Depth Estimation from a Single Holoscopic 3D Image and Image Up-sampling with Deep-learning

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London3D depth information is widely utilized in industries such as security, autonomous vehicles, robotics, 3D printing, AR/VR entertainment, cinematography and medical science. However, state-of-the-art imaging and 3D depth-sensing technologies are rather complicated or expensive and still lack scalability and interoperability. The research identified, entails the development of an innovative technique for reliable and efficient 3D depth estimation that deliver better accuracy. The proposed (1) multilayer Holoscopic 3D encoding technique reduces the computational cost of extracting viewpoint images from complex structured Holoscopic 3D data by 95%, by using labelled multilayer elemental images. It also addresses misplacement of elemental image pixels due to lens distortion error. The multilayer Holoscopic 3D encoding computing efficiency leads to the implementation of real-time 3D depth-dependent applications. Also, (2) an innovative approach of a deep learning-based single image super-resolution framework is developed and evaluated. It identified that learning-based image up-sampling techniques could be used regardless of inadequate 3D training data, as 2D training data can yield the same results. (3) The research is extended further by implementation of an H3D depth disparity -based framework, where a Holoscopic content adaptation technique for extracting semi-segmented stereo viewpoint image is introduced, and the design of a smart 3D depth mapping technique is proposed. Particularly, it provides a somewhat accurate 3D depth estimation from H3D images in near real-time. Holoscopic 3D image has thousands of perspective elemental images from omnidirectional viewpoint images and (4) a novel 3D depth estimation technique is developed to estimates 3D depth information directly from a single Holoscopic 3D image without the loss of any angular information and the introduction of unwanted artefacts. The proposed 3D depth measurement techniques are computationally efficient and robust with high accuracy; these can be incorporated in real-time applications of autonomous vehicles, security and AR/VR for real-time interaction

Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Pedestrian detection and tracking using stereo vision techniques

Automated pedestrian detection, counting and tracking has received significant attention from the computer vision community of late. Many of the person detection techniques described so far in the literature work well in controlled environments, such as laboratory settings with a small number of people. This allows various assumptions to be made that simplify this complex problem. The performance of these techniques, however, tends to deteriorate when presented with unconstrained environments where pedestrian appearances, numbers, orientations, movements, occlusions and lighting conditions violate these convenient assumptions. Recently, 3D stereo information has been proposed as a technique to overcome some of these issues and to guide pedestrian detection. This thesis presents such an approach, whereby after obtaining robust 3D information via a novel disparity estimation technique, pedestrian detection is performed via a 3D point clustering process within a region-growing framework. This clustering process avoids using hard thresholds by using bio-metrically inspired constraints and a number of plan view statistics. This pedestrian detection technique requires no external training and is able to robustly handle challenging real-world unconstrained environments from various camera positions and orientations. In addition, this thesis presents a continuous detect-and-track approach, with additional kinematic constraints and explicit occlusion analysis, to obtain robust temporal tracking of pedestrians over time. These approaches are experimentally validated using challenging datasets consisting of both synthetic data and real-world sequences gathered from a number of environments. In each case, the techniques are evaluated using both 2D and 3D groundtruth methodologies

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov