Saliency-aware Stereoscopic Video Retargeting

Stereo video retargeting aims to resize an image to a desired aspect ratio. The quality of retargeted videos can be significantly impacted by the stereo videos spatial, temporal, and disparity coherence, all of which can be impacted by the retargeting process. Due to the lack of a publicly accessible annotated dataset, there is little research on deep learning-based methods for stereo video retargeting. This paper proposes an unsupervised deep learning-based stereo video retargeting network. Our model first detects the salient objects and shifts and warps all objects such that it minimizes the distortion of the salient parts of the stereo frames. We use 1D convolution for shifting the salient objects and design a stereo video Transformer to assist the retargeting process. To train the network, we use the parallax attention mechanism to fuse the left and right views and feed the retargeted frames to a reconstruction module that reverses the retargeted frames to the input frames. Therefore, the network is trained in an unsupervised manner. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments and ablation studies on KITTI stereo 2012 and 2015 datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/z65451/SVR/.Comment: 8 pages excluding references. CVPRW conferenc

Light field image processing: an overview

Light field imaging has emerged as a technology allowing to capture richer visual information from our world. As opposed to traditional photography, which captures a 2D projection of the light in the scene integrating the angular domain, light fields collect radiance from rays in all directions, demultiplexing the angular information lost in conventional photography. On the one hand, this higher dimensional representation of visual data offers powerful capabilities for scene understanding, and substantially improves the performance of traditional computer vision problems such as depth sensing, post-capture refocusing, segmentation, video stabilization, material classification, etc. On the other hand, the high-dimensionality of light fields also brings up new challenges in terms of data capture, data compression, content editing, and display. Taking these two elements together, research in light field image processing has become increasingly popular in the computer vision, computer graphics, and signal processing communities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview and discussion of research in this field over the past 20 years. We focus on all aspects of light field image processing, including basic light field representation and theory, acquisition, super-resolution, depth estimation, compression, editing, processing algorithms for light field display, and computer vision applications of light field data

Adaptation of Images and Videos for Different Screen Sizes

With the increasing popularity of smartphones and similar mobile devices, the demand for media to consume on the go rises. As most images and videos today are captured with HD or even higher resolutions, there is a need to adapt them in a content-aware fashion before they can be watched comfortably on screens with small sizes and varying aspect ratios. This process is called retargeting. Most distortions during this process are caused by a change of the aspect ratio. Thus, retargeting mainly focuses on adapting the aspect ratio of a video while the rest can be scaled uniformly. The main objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the modern image and video retargeting, especially regarding the potential of the seam carving operator. There are still unsolved problems in this research field that should be addressed in order to improve the quality of the results or speed up the performance of the retargeting process. This dissertation presents novel algorithms that are able to retarget images, videos and stereoscopic videos while dealing with problems like the preservation of straight lines or the reduction of the required memory space and computation time. Additionally, a GPU implementation is used to achieve the retargeting of videos in real-time. Furthermore, an enhancement of face detection is presented which is able to distinguish between faces that are important for the retargeting and faces that are not. Results show that the developed techniques are suitable for the desired scenarios

An Iterative Co-Saliency Framework for RGBD Images

As a newly emerging and significant topic in computer vision community, co-saliency detection aims at discovering the common salient objects in multiple related images. The existing methods often generate the co-saliency map through a direct forward pipeline which is based on the designed cues or initialization, but lack the refinement-cycle scheme. Moreover, they mainly focus on RGB image and ignore the depth information for RGBD images. In this paper, we propose an iterative RGBD co-saliency framework, which utilizes the existing single saliency maps as the initialization, and generates the final RGBD cosaliency map by using a refinement-cycle model. Three schemes are employed in the proposed RGBD co-saliency framework, which include the addition scheme, deletion scheme, and iteration scheme. The addition scheme is used to highlight the salient regions based on intra-image depth propagation and saliency propagation, while the deletion scheme filters the saliency regions and removes the non-common salient regions based on interimage constraint. The iteration scheme is proposed to obtain more homogeneous and consistent co-saliency map. Furthermore, a novel descriptor, named depth shape prior, is proposed in the addition scheme to introduce the depth information to enhance identification of co-salient objects. The proposed method can effectively exploit any existing 2D saliency model to work well in RGBD co-saliency scenarios. The experiments on two RGBD cosaliency datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics 2017. Project URL: https://rmcong.github.io/proj_RGBD_cosal_tcyb.htm

Video Saliency Detection by 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Different from salient object detection methods for still images, a key challenging for video saliency detection is how to extract and combine spatial and temporal features. In this paper, we present a novel and effective approach for salient object detection for video sequences based on 3D convolutional neural networks. First, we design a 3D convolutional network (Conv3DNet) with the input as three video frame to learn the spatiotemporal features for video sequences. Then, we design a 3D deconvolutional network (Deconv3DNet) to combine the spatiotemporal features to predict the final saliency map for video sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed saliency detection model performs better in video saliency prediction compared with the state-of-the-art video saliency detection methods

3D-TV Production from Conventional Cameras for Sports Broadcast

3DTV production of live sports events presents a challenging problem involving conflicting requirements of main- taining broadcast stereo picture quality with practical problems in developing robust systems for cost effective deployment. In this paper we propose an alternative approach to stereo production in sports events using the conventional monocular broadcast cameras for 3D reconstruction of the event and subsequent stereo rendering. This approach has the potential advantage over stereo camera rigs of recovering full scene depth, allowing inter-ocular distance and convergence to be adapted according to the requirements of the target display and enabling stereo coverage from both existing and ‘virtual’ camera positions without additional cameras. A prototype system is presented with results of sports TV production trials for rendering of stereo and free-viewpoint video sequences of soccer and rugby