A novel multispectral and 2.5D/3D image fusion camera system for enhanced face recognition

The fusion of images from the visible and long-wave infrared (thermal) portions of the spectrum produces images that have improved face recognition performance under varying lighting conditions. This is because long-wave infrared images are the result of emitted, rather than reflected, light and are therefore less sensitive to changes in ambient light. Similarly, 3D and 2.5D images have also improved face recognition under varying pose and lighting. The opacity of glass to long-wave infrared light, however, means that the presence of eyeglasses in a face image reduces the recognition performance. This thesis presents the design and performance evaluation of a novel camera system which is capable of capturing spatially registered visible, near-infrared, long-wave infrared and 2.5D depth video images via a common optical path requiring no spatial registration between sensors beyond scaling for differences in sensor sizes. Experiments using a range of established face recognition methods and multi-class SVM classifiers show that the fused output from our camera system not only outperforms the single modality images for face recognition, but that the adaptive fusion methods used produce consistent increases in recognition accuracy under varying pose, lighting and with the presence of eyeglasses

A novel multispectral and 2.5D/3D image fusion camera system for enhanced face recognition

The fusion of images from the visible and long-wave infrared (thermal) portions of the spectrum produces images that have improved face recognition performance under varying lighting conditions. This is because long-wave infrared images are the result of emitted, rather than reflected, light and are therefore less sensitive to changes in ambient light. Similarly, 3D and 2.5D images have also improved face recognition under varying pose and lighting. The opacity of glass to long-wave infrared light, however, means that the presence of eyeglasses in a face image reduces the recognition performance. This thesis presents the design and performance evaluation of a novel camera system which is capable of capturing spatially registered visible, near-infrared, long-wave infrared and 2.5D depth video images via a common optical path requiring no spatial registration between sensors beyond scaling for differences in sensor sizes. Experiments using a range of established face recognition methods and multi-class SVM classifiers show that the fused output from our camera system not only outperforms the single modality images for face recognition, but that the adaptive fusion methods used produce consistent increases in recognition accuracy under varying pose, lighting and with the presence of eyeglasses

Image Simulation in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing is being actively researched in the fields of environment, military and urban planning through technologies such as monitoring of natural climate phenomena on the earth, land cover classification, and object detection. Recently, satellites equipped with observation cameras of various resolutions were launched, and remote sensing images are acquired by various observation methods including cluster satellites. However, the atmospheric and environmental conditions present in the observed scene degrade the quality of images or interrupt the capture of the Earth's surface information. One method to overcome this is by generating synthetic images through image simulation. Synthetic images can be generated by using statistical or knowledge-based models or by using spectral and optic-based models to create a simulated image in place of the unobtained image at a required time. Various proposed methodologies will provide economical utility in the generation of image learning materials and time series data through image simulation. The 6 published articles cover various topics and applications central to Remote sensing image simulation. Although submission to this Special Issue is now closed, the need for further in-depth research and development related to image simulation of High-spatial and spectral resolution, sensor fusion and colorization remains.I would like to take this opportunity to express my most profound appreciation to the MDPI Book staff, the editorial team of Applied Sciences journal, especially Ms. Nimo Lang, the assistant editor of this Special Issue, talented authors, and professional reviewers

Non-Standard Imaging Techniques

The first objective of the thesis is to investigate the problem of reconstructing a small-scale object (a few millimeters or smaller) in 3D. In Chapter 3, we show how this problem can be solved effectively by a new multifocus multiview 3D reconstruction procedure which includes a new Fixed-Lens multifocus image capture and a calibrated image registration technique using analytic homography transformation. The experimental results using the real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions by showing that both the fixed-lens image capture and multifocus stacking with calibrated image alignment significantly reduce the errors in the camera poses and produce more complete 3D reconstructed models as compared with those by the conventional moving lens image capture and multifocus stacking. The second objective of the thesis is modelling the dual-pixel (DP) camera. In Chapter 4, to understand the potential of the DP sensor for computer vision applications, we study the formation of the DP pair which links the blur and the depth information. A mathematical DP model is proposed which can benefit depth estimation by the blur. These explorations motivate us to propose an end-to-end DDDNet (DP-based Depth and Deblur Network) to jointly estimate the depth and restore the image . Moreover, we define a reblur loss, which reflects the relationship of the DP image formation process with depth information, to regularize our depth estimate in training. To meet the requirement of a large amount of data for learning, we propose the first DP image simulator which allows us to create datasets with DP pairs from any existing RGBD dataset. As a side contribution, we collect a real dataset for further research. Extensive experimental evaluation on both synthetic and real datasets shows that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Another (third) objective of this thesis is to tackle the multifocus image fusion problem, particularly for long multifocus image sequences. Multifocus image stacking/fusion produces an in-focus image of a scene from a number of partially focused images of that scene in order to extend the depth of field. One of the limitations of the current state of the art multifocus fusion methods is not considering image registration/alignment before fusion. Consequently, fusing unregistered multifocus images produces an in-focus image containing misalignment artefacts. In Chapter 5, we propose image registration by projective transformation before fusion to remove the misalignment artefacts. We also propose a method based on 3D deconvolution to retrieve the in-focus image by formulating the multifocus image fusion problem as a 3D deconvolution problem. The proposed method achieves superior performance compared to the state of the art methods. It is also shown that, the proposed projective transformation for image registration can improve the quality of the fused images. Moreover, we implement a multifocus simulator to generate synthetic multifocus data from any RGB-D dataset. The fourth objective of this thesis is to explore new ways to detect the polarization state of light. To achieve the objective, in Chapter 6, we investigate a new optical filter namely optical rotation filter for detecting the polarization state with a fewer number of images. The proposed method can estimate polarization state using two images, one with the filter and another without. The accuracy of estimating the polarization parameters using the proposed method is almost similar to that of the existing state of the art method. In addition, the feasibility of detecting the polarization state using only one RGB image captured with the optical rotation filter is also demonstrated by estimating the image without the filter from the image with the filter using a generative adversarial network

Spatio-Temporal Video Analysis and the 3D Shearlet Transform

Abstract The automatic analysis of the content of a video sequence has captured the attention of the computer vision community for a very long time. Indeed, video understanding, which needs to incorporate both semantic and dynamic cues, may be trivial for humans, but it turned out to be a very complex task for a machine. Over the years the signal processing, computer vision, and machine learning communities contributed with algorithms that are today effective building blocks of more and more complex systems. In the meanwhile, theoretical analysis has gained a better understanding of this multifaceted type of data. Indeed, video sequences are not only high dimensional data, but they are also very peculiar, as they include spatial as well as temporal information which should be treated differently, but are both important to the overall process. The work of this thesis builds a new bridge between signal processing theory, and computer vision applications. It considers a novel approach to multi resolution signal processing, the so-called Shearlet Transform, as a reference framework for representing meaningful space-time local information in a video signal. The Shearlet Transform has been shown effective in analyzing multi-dimensional signals, ranging from images to x-ray tomographic data. As a tool for signal denoising, has also been applied to video data. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Shearlet Transform has never been employed to design video analysis algorithms. In this thesis, our broad objective is to explore the capabilities of the Shearlet Transform to extract information from 2D+T-dimensional data. We exploit the properties of the Shearlet decomposition to redesign a variety of classical video processing techniques (including space-time interest point detection and normal flow estimation) and to develop novel methods to better understand the local behavior of video sequences. We provide experimental evidence on the potential of our approach on synthetic as well as real data drawn from publicly available benchmark datasets. The results we obtain show the potential of our approach and encourages further investigations in the near future

Restoration and Domain Adaptation for Unconstrained Face Recognition

Face recognition (FR) has received great attention and tremendous progress has been made during the past two decades. While FR at close range under controlled acquisition conditions has achieved a high level of performance, FR at a distance under unconstrained environment remains a largely unsolved problem. This is because images collected from a distance usually suffer from blur, poor illumination, pose variation etc. In this dissertation, we present models and algorithms to compensate for these variations to improve the performance for FR at a distance. Blur is a common factor contributing to the degradation of images collected from a distance, e.g., defocus blur due to long range acquisition, motion blur due to movement of subjects. For this purpose, we study the image deconvolution problem. This is an ill-posed problem, and solutions are usually obtained by exploiting prior information of desired output image to reduce ambiguity, typically through the Bayesian framework. In this dissertation, we consider the role of an example driven manifold prior to address the deconvolution problem. Specifically, we incorporate unlabeled image data of the object class in the form of a patch manifold to effectively regularize the inverse problem. We propose both parametric and non-parametric approaches to implicitly estimate the manifold prior from the given unlabeled data. Extensive experiments show that our method performs better than many competitive image deconvolution methods. More often, variations from the collected images at a distance are difficult to address through physical models of individual degradations. For this problem, we utilize domain adaptation methods to adapt recognition systems to the test data. Domain adaptation addresses the problem where data instances of a source domain have different distributions from that of a target domain. We focus on the unsupervised domain adaptation problem where labeled data are not available in the target domain. We propose to interpolate subspaces through dictionary learning to link the source and target domains. These subspaces are able to capture the intrinsic domain shift and form a shared feature representation for cross domain recognition. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for face recognition across pose, blur and illumination variations, and cross dataset object classification. Most existing domain adaptation methods assume homogeneous source domain which is usually modeled by a single subspace. Yet in practice, oftentimes we are given mixed source data with different inner characteristics. Modeling these source data as a single domain would potentially deteriorate the adaptation performance, as the adaptation procedure needs to account for the large within class variations in the source domain. For this problem, we propose two approaches to mitigate the heterogeneity in source data. We first present an approach for selecting a subset of source samples which is more similar to the target domain to avoid negative knowledge transfer. We then consider the scenario that the heterogenous source data are due to multiple latent domains. For this purpose, we derive a domain clustering framework to recover the latent domains for improved adaptation. Moreover, we formulate submodular objective functions which can be solved by an efficient greedy method. Experimental results show that our approaches compare favorably with the state-of-the-art

Intelligent Computational Transportation

Transportation is commonplace around our world. Numerous researchers dedicate great efforts to vast transportation research topics. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate and address a couple of transportation problems with respect to geographic discretization, pavement surface automatic examination, and traffic ow simulation, using advanced computational technologies. Many applications require a discretized 2D geographic map such that local information can be accessed efficiently. For example, map matching, which aligns a sequence of observed positions to a real-world road network, needs to find all the nearby road segments to the individual positions. To this end, the map is discretized by cells and each cell retains a list of road segments coincident with this cell. An efficient method is proposed to form such lists for the cells without costly overlapping tests. Furthermore, the method can be easily extended to 3D scenarios for fast triangle mesh voxelization. Pavement surface distress conditions are critical inputs for quantifying roadway infrastructure serviceability. Existing computer-aided automatic examination techniques are mainly based on 2D image analysis or 3D georeferenced data set. The disadvantage of information losses or extremely high costs impedes their effectiveness iv and applicability. In this study, a cost-effective Kinect-based approach is proposed for 3D pavement surface reconstruction and cracking recognition. Various cracking measurements such as alligator cracking, traverse cracking, longitudinal cracking, etc., are identified and recognized for their severity examinations based on associated geometrical features. Smart transportation is one of the core components in modern urbanization processes. Under this context, the Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) system presents a promising solution towards the enhanced traffic safety and mobility through state-of-the-art wireless communications and autonomous driving techniques. Due to the different nature between the CAVs and the conventional Human- Driven-Vehicles (HDVs), it is believed that CAV-enabled transportation systems will revolutionize the existing understanding of network-wide traffic operations and re-establish traffic ow theory. This study presents a new continuum dynamics model for the future CAV-enabled traffic system, realized by encapsulating mutually-coupled vehicle interactions using virtual internal and external forces. A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)-based numerical simulation and an interactive traffic visualization framework are also developed

Advances in Image Processing, Analysis and Recognition Technology

For many decades, researchers have been trying to make computers’ analysis of images as effective as the system of human vision is. For this purpose, many algorithms and systems have previously been created. The whole process covers various stages, including image processing, representation and recognition. The results of this work can be applied to many computer-assisted areas of everyday life. They improve particular activities and provide handy tools, which are sometimes only for entertainment, but quite often, they significantly increase our safety. In fact, the practical implementation of image processing algorithms is particularly wide. Moreover, the rapid growth of computational complexity and computer efficiency has allowed for the development of more sophisticated and effective algorithms and tools. Although significant progress has been made so far, many issues still remain, resulting in the need for the development of novel approaches