Toward sparse and geometry adapted video approximations

Video signals are sequences of natural images, where images are often modeled as piecewise-smooth signals. Hence, video can be seen as a 3D piecewise-smooth signal made of piecewise-smooth regions that move through time. Based on the piecewise-smooth model and on related theoretical work on rate-distortion performance of wavelet and oracle based coding schemes, one can better analyze the appropriate coding strategies that adaptive video codecs need to implement in order to be efficient. Efficient video representations for coding purposes require the use of adaptive signal decompositions able to capture appropriately the structure and redundancy appearing in video signals. Adaptivity needs to be such that it allows for proper modeling of signals in order to represent these with the lowest possible coding cost. Video is a very structured signal with high geometric content. This includes temporal geometry (normally represented by motion information) as well as spatial geometry. Clearly, most of past and present strategies used to represent video signals do not exploit properly its spatial geometry. Similarly to the case of images, a very interesting approach seems to be the decomposition of video using large over-complete libraries of basis functions able to represent salient geometric features of the signal. In the framework of video, these features should model 2D geometric video components as well as their temporal evolution, forming spatio-temporal 3D geometric primitives. Through this PhD dissertation, different aspects on the use of adaptivity in video representation are studied looking toward exploiting both aspects of video: its piecewise nature and the geometry. The first part of this work studies the use of localized temporal adaptivity in subband video coding. This is done considering two transformation schemes used for video coding: 3D wavelet representations and motion compensated temporal filtering. A theoretical R-D analysis as well as empirical results demonstrate how temporal adaptivity improves coding performance of moving edges in 3D transform (without motion compensation) based video coding. Adaptivity allows, at the same time, to equally exploit redundancy in non-moving video areas. The analogy between motion compensated video and 1D piecewise-smooth signals is studied as well. This motivates the introduction of local length adaptivity within frame-adaptive motion compensated lifted wavelet decompositions. This allows an optimal rate-distortion performance when video motion trajectories are shorter than the transformation "Group Of Pictures", or when efficient motion compensation can not be ensured. After studying temporal adaptivity, the second part of this thesis is dedicated to understand the fundamentals of how can temporal and spatial geometry be jointly exploited. This work builds on some previous results that considered the representation of spatial geometry in video (but not temporal, i.e, without motion). In order to obtain flexible and efficient (sparse) signal representations, using redundant dictionaries, the use of highly non-linear decomposition algorithms, like Matching Pursuit, is required. General signal representation using these techniques is still quite unexplored. For this reason, previous to the study of video representation, some aspects of non-linear decomposition algorithms and the efficient decomposition of images using Matching Pursuits and a geometric dictionary are investigated. A part of this investigation concerns the study on the influence of using a priori models within approximation non-linear algorithms. Dictionaries with a high internal coherence have some problems to obtain optimally sparse signal representations when used with Matching Pursuits. It is proved, theoretically and empirically, that inserting in this algorithm a priori models allows to improve the capacity to obtain sparse signal approximations, mainly when coherent dictionaries are used. Another point discussed in this preliminary study, on the use of Matching Pursuits, concerns the approach used in this work for the decompositions of video frames and images. The technique proposed in this thesis improves a previous work, where authors had to recur to sub-optimal Matching Pursuit strategies (using Genetic Algorithms), given the size of the functions library. In this work the use of full search strategies is made possible, at the same time that approximation efficiency is significantly improved and computational complexity is reduced. Finally, a priori based Matching Pursuit geometric decompositions are investigated for geometric video representations. Regularity constraints are taken into account to recover the temporal evolution of spatial geometric signal components. The results obtained for coding and multi-modal (audio-visual) signal analysis, clarify many unknowns and show to be promising, encouraging to prosecute research on the subject

Steered mixture-of-experts for light field images and video : representation and coding

Research in light field (LF) processing has heavily increased over the last decade. This is largely driven by the desire to achieve the same level of immersion and navigational freedom for camera-captured scenes as it is currently available for CGI content. Standardization organizations such as MPEG and JPEG continue to follow conventional coding paradigms in which viewpoints are discretely represented on 2-D regular grids. These grids are then further decorrelated through hybrid DPCM/transform techniques. However, these 2-D regular grids are less suited for high-dimensional data, such as LFs. We propose a novel coding framework for higher-dimensional image modalities, called Steered Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE). Coherent areas in the higher-dimensional space are represented by single higher-dimensional entities, called kernels. These kernels hold spatially localized information about light rays at any angle arriving at a certain region. The global model consists thus of a set of kernels which define a continuous approximation of the underlying plenoptic function. We introduce the theory of SMoE and illustrate its application for 2-D images, 4-D LF images, and 5-D LF video. We also propose an efficient coding strategy to convert the model parameters into a bitstream. Even without provisions for high-frequency information, the proposed method performs comparable to the state of the art for low-to-mid range bitrates with respect to subjective visual quality of 4-D LF images. In case of 5-D LF video, we observe superior decorrelation and coding performance with coding gains of a factor of 4x in bitrate for the same quality. At least equally important is the fact that our method inherently has desired functionality for LF rendering which is lacking in other state-of-the-art techniques: (1) full zero-delay random access, (2) light-weight pixel-parallel view reconstruction, and (3) intrinsic view interpolation and super-resolution

Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning

Sparse representation based hyperspectral image compression and classification

Abstract This thesis presents a research work on applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression and hyperspectral image classification. The proposed lossy hyperspectral image compression framework introduces two types of dictionaries distinguished by the terms sparse representation spectral dictionary (SRSD) and multi-scale spectral dictionary (MSSD), respectively. The former is learnt in the spectral domain to exploit the spectral correlations, and the latter in wavelet multi-scale spectral domain to exploit both spatial and spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. To alleviate the computational demand of dictionary learning, either a base dictionary trained offline or an update of the base dictionary is employed in the compression framework. The proposed compression method is evaluated in terms of different objective metrics, and compared to selected state-of-the-art hyperspectral image compression schemes, including JPEG 2000. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of both SRSD and MSSD approaches. For the proposed hyperspectral image classification method, we utilize the sparse coefficients for training support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbour (kNN) classifiers. In particular, the discriminative character of the sparse coefficients is enhanced by incorporating contextual information using local mean filters. The classification performance is evaluated and compared to a number of similar or representative methods. The results show that our approach could outperform other approaches based on SVM or sparse representation. This thesis makes the following contributions. It provides a relatively thorough investigation of applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression. Specifically, it reveals the effectiveness of sparse representation for the exploitation of spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. In addition, we have shown that the discriminative character of sparse coefficients can lead to superior performance in hyperspectral image classification.EM201

Large-scale interactive exploratory visual search

Large scale visual search has been one of the challenging issues in the era of big data. It demands techniques that are not only highly effective and efficient but also allow users conveniently express their information needs and refine their intents. In this thesis, we focus on developing an exploratory framework for large scale visual search. We also develop a number of enabling techniques in this thesis, including compact visual content representation for scalable search, near duplicate video shot detection, and action based event detection. We propose a novel scheme for extremely low bit rate visual search, which sends compressed visual words consisting of vocabulary tree histogram and descriptor orientations rather than descriptors. Compact representation of video data is achieved through identifying keyframes of a video which can also help users comprehend visual content efficiently. We propose a novel Bag-of-Importance model for static video summarization. Near duplicate detection is one of the key issues for large scale visual search, since there exist a large number nearly identical images and videos. We propose an improved near-duplicate video shot detection approach for more effective shot representation. Event detection has been one of the solutions for bridging the semantic gap in visual search. We particular focus on human action centred event detection. We propose an enhanced sparse coding scheme to model human actions. Our proposed approach is able to significantly reduce computational cost while achieving recognition accuracy highly comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. At last, we propose an integrated solution for addressing the prime challenges raised from large-scale interactive visual search. The proposed system is also one of the first attempts for exploratory visual search. It provides users more robust results to satisfy their exploring experiences

Detecção de eventos violentos em sequências de vídeos baseada no operador histograma da transformada census

Orientador: Hélio PedriniDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Sistemas de vigilância em sequências de vídeo têm sido amplamente utilizados para o monitoramento de cenas em diversos ambientes, tais como aeroportos, bancos, escolas, indústrias, estações de ônibus e trens, rodovias e lojas. Devido à grande quantidade de informação obtida pelas câmeras de vigilância, o uso de inspeção visual por operadores de câmera se torna uma tarefa cansativa e sujeita a falhas, além de consumir muito tempo. Um desafio é o desenvolvimento de sistemas inteligentes de vigilância capazes de analisar longas sequências de vídeos capturadas por uma rede de câmeras de modo a identificar um determinado comportamento. Neste trabalho, foram propostas e avaliadas diversas técnicas de classificação, tendo como base o operador CENTRIST (Histograma da Transformada Census), no contexto de identificação de eventos violentos em cenas de vídeo. Adicionalmente, foram avaliados outros descritores tradicionais, como HoG (Histograma de Gradientes Orientados), HOF (Histograma do Fluxo Óptico) e descritores extraídos a partir de modelos de aprendizado de máquina profundo pré-treinados. De modo a permitir a avaliação apenas em regiões de interesse presentes nos quadros dos vídeos, técnicas para remoção do fundo da cena. Uma abordagem baseada em janela deslizante foi utilizada para avaliar regiões menores da cena em combinação com um critério de votação. A janela deslizante é então aplicada juntamente com uma filtragem de blocos utilizando fluxo óptico da cena. Para demonstrar a efetividade de nosso método para discriminar violência em cenas de multidões, os resultados obtidos foram comparados com outras abordagens disponíveis na literatura em duas bases de dados públicas (Violence in Crowds e Hockey Fights). A eficácia da combinação entre CENTRIST e HoG foi demonstrada em comparação com a utilização desses operadores individualmente. A combinação desses operadores obteve aproximadamente 88% contra 81% utilizando apenas HoG e 86% utilizando CENTRIST. A partir do refinamento do método proposto, foi identificado que avaliar blocos do quadro com a abordagem de janela deslizante tornou o método mais eficaz. Técnicas para geração de palavras visuais com codificação esparsa, medida de distância com um modelo de misturas Gaussianas e medida de distância entre agrupamentos também foram avaliadas e discutidas. Além disso, também foi avaliado calcular dinamicamente o limiar de votação, o que trouxe resultados melhores em alguns casos. Finalmente, formas de restringir os atores presentes nas cenas utilizando fluxo óptico foram analisadas. Utilizando o método de Otsu para calcular o limiar do fluxo óptico da cena a eficiência supera nossos resultados mais competitivos: 91,46% de acurácia para a base Violence in Crowds e 92,79% para a base Hockey FightsAbstract: Surveillance systems in video sequences have been widely used to monitor scenes in various environments, such as airports, banks, schools, industries, bus and train stations, highways and stores. Due to the large amount of information obtained via surveillance cameras, the use of visual inspection by camera operators becomes a task subject to fatigue and failure, in addition to consuming a lot of time. One challenge is the development of intelligent surveillance systems capable of analyzing long video sequences captured by a network of cameras in order to identify a certain behavior. In this work, we propose and analyze the use of several classification techniques, based on the CENTRIST (Transformation Census Histogram) operator, in the context of identifying violent events in video scenes. Additionally, we evaluated other traditional descriptors, such as HoG (Oriented Gradient Histogram), HOF (Optical Flow Histogram) and descriptors extracted from pre-trained deep machine learning models. In order to allow the evaluation only in regions of interest present in the video frames, we investigated techniques for removing the background from the scene. A sliding window-based approach was used to assess smaller regions of the scene in combination with a voting criterion. The sliding window is then applied along with block filtering using the optical flow of the scene. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for discriminating violence in crowd scenes, we compared the results to other approaches available in the literature in two public databases (Violence in Crowds and Hockey Fights). The combination of CENTRIST and HoG was demonstrated in comparison to the use of these operators individually. The combination of both operators obtained approximately 88% against 81% using only HoG and 86% using CENTRIST. From the refinement of the proposed method, we identified that evaluating blocks of the frame with the sliding window-based approach made the method more effective. Techniques for generating a codebook with sparse coding, distance measurement with a Gaussian mixture model and distance measurement between clusters were evaluated and discussed. Also we dynamically calculate the threshold for class voting, which obtained superior results in some cases. Finally, strategies for restricting the actors present in the scenes using optical flow were analyzed. By using the Otsu¿s method to calculate the threshold from the optical flow at the scene, the effectiveness surpasses our most competitive results: 91.46% accuracy for the Violence in Crowds dataset and 92.79% for the Hockey Fights datasetMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã