1,956 research outputs found
Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors and Assessing What Machines Really Learn
Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems,
reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly "intelligent" behavior. Here we
apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning
machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This
showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and
short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard
performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse
problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral
Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing
and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to
assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it
was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to
the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and
judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nature Communication
IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Big Data Technology and Applications in Intelligent Transportation
During the last few years, information technology and transportation industries, along with automotive manufacturers and academia, are focusing on leveraging intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to improve services related to driver experience, connected cars, Internet data plans for vehicles, traffic infrastructure, urban transportation systems, traffic collaborative management, road traffic accidents analysis, road traffic flow prediction, public transportation service plan, personal travel route plans, and the development of an effective ecosystem for vehicles, drivers, traffic controllers, city planners, and transportation applications. Moreover, the emerging technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have provided unprecedented opportunities for the development and realization of innovative intelligent transportation systems where sensors and mobile devices can gather information and cloud computing, allowing knowledge discovery, information sharing, and supported decision making. However, the development of such data-driven ITS requires the integration, processing, and analysis of plentiful information obtained from millions of vehicles, traffic infrastructures, smartphones, and other collaborative systems like weather stations and road safety and early warning systems. The huge amount of data generated by ITS devices is only of value if utilized in data analytics for decision-making such as accident prevention and detection, controlling road risks, reducing traffic carbon emissions, and other applications which bring big data analytics into the picture
Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?
Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally
regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution
to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the
rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of
these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the
performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain
removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic
rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on
real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In
this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new
dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad
variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We
propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on
their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance
segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If
successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve
segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked
features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal
algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed
dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and
showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the
best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy
by 7.72%.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System
Learning from Multiple Sources for Video Summarisation
Many visual surveillance tasks, e.g.video summarisation, is conventionally
accomplished through analysing imagerybased features. Relying solely on visual
cues for public surveillance video understanding is unreliable, since visual
observations obtained from public space CCTV video data are often not
sufficiently trustworthy and events of interest can be subtle. On the other
hand, non-visual data sources such as weather reports and traffic sensory
signals are readily accessible but are not explored jointly to complement
visual data for video content analysis and summarisation. In this paper, we
present a novel unsupervised framework to learn jointly from both visual and
independently-drawn non-visual data sources for discovering meaningful latent
structure of surveillance video data. In particular, we investigate ways to
cope with discrepant dimension and representation whist associating these
heterogeneous data sources, and derive effective mechanism to tolerate with
missing and incomplete data from different sources. We show that the proposed
multi-source learning framework not only achieves better video content
clustering than state-of-the-art methods, but also is capable of accurately
inferring missing non-visual semantics from previously unseen videos. In
addition, a comprehensive user study is conducted to validate the quality of
video summarisation generated using the proposed multi-source model
Algorithms for the Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Data from Team Sports
Modern object tracking systems are able to simultaneously record trajectoriesβsequences of time-stamped location pointsβfor large numbers of objects with high frequency and accuracy. The availability of trajectory datasets has resulted in a consequent demand for algorithms and tools to extract information from these data. In this thesis, we present several contributions intended to do this, and in particular, to extract information from trajectories tracking football (soccer) players during matches. Football player trajectories have particular properties that both facilitate and present challenges for the algorithmic approaches to information extraction. The key property that we look to exploit is that the movement of the players reveals information about their objectives through cooperative and adversarial coordinated behaviour, and this, in turn, reveals the tactics and strategies employed to achieve the objectives. While the approaches presented here naturally deal with the application-specific properties of football player trajectories, they also apply to other domains where objects are tracked, for example behavioural ecology, traffic and urban planning
Activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos
PhDComputer scientists have made ceaseless efforts to replicate cognitive video understanding abilities
of human brains onto autonomous vision systems. As video surveillance cameras become
ubiquitous, there is a surge in studies on automated activity understanding and unusual event detection
in surveillance videos. Nevertheless, video content analysis in public scenes remained a
formidable challenge due to intrinsic difficulties such as severe inter-object occlusion in crowded
scene and poor quality of recorded surveillance footage. Moreover, it is nontrivial to achieve
robust detection of unusual events, which are rare, ambiguous, and easily confused with noise.
This thesis proposes solutions for resolving ambiguous visual observations and overcoming unreliability
of conventional activity analysis methods by exploiting multi-camera visual context
and human feedback.
The thesis first demonstrates the importance of learning visual context for establishing reliable
reasoning on observed activity in a camera network. In the proposed approach, a new Cross
Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is formulated to discover and quantify time delayed pairwise
correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views. This
thesis shows that learning time delayed pairwise activity correlations offers valuable contextual
information for (1) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network, (2) robust person
re-identification, and (3) accurate activity-based video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in
contrast to conventional methods, the proposed approach does not rely on either intra-camera or
inter-camera object tracking; it can thus be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featuring
severe inter-object occlusions.
Second, to detect global unusual event across multiple disjoint cameras, this thesis extends
visual context learning from pairwise relationship to global time delayed dependency between
regional activities. Specifically, a Time Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TD-PGM) is
proposed to model the multi-camera activities and their dependencies. Subtle global unusual
events are detected and localised using the model as context-incoherent patterns across multiple
camera views. In the model, different nodes represent activities in different decomposed re3
gions from different camera views, and the directed links between nodes encoding time delayed
dependencies between activities observed within and across camera views. In order to learn optimised
time delayed dependencies in a TD-PGM, a novel two-stage structure learning approach
is formulated by combining both constraint-based and scored-searching based structure learning
methods.
Third, to cope with visual context changes over time, this two-stage structure learning approach
is extended to permit tractable incremental update of both TD-PGM parameters and its
structure. As opposed to most existing studies that assume static model once learned, the proposed
incremental learning allows a model to adapt itself to reflect the changes in the current
visual context, such as subtle behaviour drift over time or removal/addition of cameras. Importantly,
the incremental structure learning is achieved without either exhaustive search in a large
graph structure space or storing all past observations in memory, making the proposed solution
memory and time efficient.
Forth, an active learning approach is presented to incorporate human feedback for on-line
unusual event detection. Contrary to most existing unsupervised methods that perform passive
mining for unusual events, the proposed approach automatically requests supervision for critical
points to resolve ambiguities of interest, leading to more robust detection of subtle unusual
events. The active learning strategy is formulated as a stream-based solution, i.e. it makes decision
on-the-fly on whether to request label for each unlabelled sample observed in sequence.
It selects adaptively two active learning criteria, namely likelihood criterion and uncertainty criterion
to achieve (1) discovery of unknown event classes and (2) refinement of classification
boundary.
The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated using videos captured from busy
public scenes such as underground stations and traffic intersections
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