Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Generalized Video Deblurring for Dynamic Scenes

Several state-of-the-art video deblurring methods are based on a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. These methods fail to deblur blurry videos in dynamic scenes. We propose a video deblurring method to deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes, contrary to other methods. To handle locally varying and general blurs caused by various sources, such as camera shake, moving objects, and depth variation in a scene, we approximate pixel-wise kernel with bidirectional optical flows. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that simultaneously estimates optical flows and latent frames to solve our deblurring problem. We also provide a framework and efficient solvers to optimize the energy model. By minimizing the proposed energy function, we achieve significant improvements in removing blurs and estimating accurate optical flows in blurry frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in real and challenging videos that state-of-the-art methods fail in either deblurring or optical flow estimation.Comment: CVPR 2015 ora

A robust and efficient video representation for action recognition

This paper introduces a state-of-the-art video representation and applies it to efficient action recognition and detection. We first propose to improve the popular dense trajectory features by explicit camera motion estimation. More specifically, we extract feature point matches between frames using SURF descriptors and dense optical flow. The matches are used to estimate a homography with RANSAC. To improve the robustness of homography estimation, a human detector is employed to remove outlier matches from the human body as human motion is not constrained by the camera. Trajectories consistent with the homography are considered as due to camera motion, and thus removed. We also use the homography to cancel out camera motion from the optical flow. This results in significant improvement on motion-based HOF and MBH descriptors. We further explore the recent Fisher vector as an alternative feature encoding approach to the standard bag-of-words histogram, and consider different ways to include spatial layout information in these encodings. We present a large and varied set of evaluations, considering (i) classification of short basic actions on six datasets, (ii) localization of such actions in feature-length movies, and (iii) large-scale recognition of complex events. We find that our improved trajectory features significantly outperform previous dense trajectories, and that Fisher vectors are superior to bag-of-words encodings for video recognition tasks. In all three tasks, we show substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art results

Video Logo Retrieval based on local Features

Estimation of the frequency and duration of logos in videos is important and challenging in the advertisement industry as a way of estimating the impact of ad purchases. Since logos occupy only a small area in the videos, the popular methods of image retrieval could fail. This paper develops an algorithm called Video Logo Retrieval (VLR), which is an image-to-video retrieval algorithm based on the spatial distribution of local image descriptors that measure the distance between the query image (the logo) and a collection of video images. VLR uses local features to overcome the weakness of global feature-based models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). Meanwhile, VLR is flexible and does not require training after setting some hyper-parameters. The performance of VLR is evaluated on two challenging open benchmark tasks (SoccerNet and Standford I2V), and compared with other state-of-the-art logo retrieval or detection algorithms. Overall, VLR shows significantly higher accuracy compared with the existing methods.Comment: Accepted by ICIP 20. Contact author: Bochen Guan ([email protected]

The design and construction of a movable image-based rendering system and its application to multiview conferencing

Image-based rendering (IBR) is an promising technology for rendering photo-realistic views of scenes from a collection of densely sampled images or videos. It provides a framework for developing revolutionary virtual reality and immersive viewing systems. While there has been considerable progress recently in the capturing, storage and transmission of image-based representations, most multiple camera systems are designed to be stationary and hence their ability to cope with moving objects and dynamic environment is somewhat limited. This paper studies the design and construction of a movable image-based rendering system based on a class of dynamic representations called plenoptic videos, its associated video processing algorithms and an application to multiview audio-visual conferencing. It is constructed by mounting a linear array of 8 video cameras on an electrically controllable wheel chair and its motion is controllable manually or remotely through wireless LAN by means of additional hardware circuitry. We also developed a real-time object tracking algorithm and utilize the motion information computed to adjust continuously the azimuth or rotation angle of the movable IBR system in order to cope with a given moving object in a large environment. Due to imperfection in tracking and mechanical vibration encountered in movable systems, the videos may appear very shaky and a new video stabilization technique is proposed to overcome this problem. The usefulness of the system is illustrated by means of a multiview conferencing application using a multiview TV display. Through this pilot study, we hope to disseminate useful experience for the design and construction of movable IBR systems with improved viewing freedom and ability to cope with moving object in a large environment.published_or_final_versio

Unmanned Aerial Systems for Wildland and Forest Fires

Wildfires represent an important natural risk causing economic losses, human death and important environmental damage. In recent years, we witness an increase in fire intensity and frequency. Research has been conducted towards the development of dedicated solutions for wildland and forest fire assistance and fighting. Systems were proposed for the remote detection and tracking of fires. These systems have shown improvements in the area of efficient data collection and fire characterization within small scale environments. However, wildfires cover large areas making some of the proposed ground-based systems unsuitable for optimal coverage. To tackle this limitation, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) were proposed. UAS have proven to be useful due to their maneuverability, allowing for the implementation of remote sensing, allocation strategies and task planning. They can provide a low-cost alternative for the prevention, detection and real-time support of firefighting. In this paper we review previous work related to the use of UAS in wildfires. Onboard sensor instruments, fire perception algorithms and coordination strategies are considered. In addition, we present some of the recent frameworks proposing the use of both aerial vehicles and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UV) for a more efficient wildland firefighting strategy at a larger scale.Comment: A recent published version of this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/drones501001

Video-based motion detection for stationary and moving cameras

In real world monitoring applications, moving object detection remains to be a challenging task due to factors such as background clutter and motion, illumination variations, weather conditions, noise, and occlusions. As a fundamental first step in many computer vision applications such as object tracking, behavior understanding, object or event recognition, and automated video surveillance, various motion detection algorithms have been developed ranging from simple approaches to more sophisticated ones. In this thesis, we present two moving object detection frameworks. The first framework is designed for robust detection of moving and static objects in videos acquired from stationary cameras. This method exploits the benefits of fusing a motion computation method based on spatio-temporal tensor formulation, a novel foreground and background modeling scheme, and a multi-cue appearance comparison. This hybrid system can handle challenges such as shadows, illumination changes, dynamic background, stopped and removed objects. Extensive testing performed on the CVPR 2014 Change Detection benchmark dataset shows that FTSG outperforms most state-of-the-art methods. The second framework adapts moving object detection to full motion videos acquired from moving airborne platforms. This framework has two main modules. The first module stabilizes the video with respect to a set of base-frames in the sequence. The stabilization is done by estimating four-point homographies using prominent feature (PF) block matching, motion filtering and RANSAC for robust matching. Once the frame to base frame homographies are available the flux tensor motion detection module using local second derivative information is applied to detect moving salient features. Spurious responses from the frame boundaries and other post- processing operations are applied to reduce the false alarms and produce accurate moving blob regions that will be useful for tracking