ImageSpirit: Verbal Guided Image Parsing

Humans describe images in terms of nouns and adjectives while algorithms operate on images represented as sets of pixels. Bridging this gap between how humans would like to access images versus their typical representation is the goal of image parsing, which involves assigning object and attribute labels to pixel. In this paper we propose treating nouns as object labels and adjectives as visual attribute labels. This allows us to formulate the image parsing problem as one of jointly estimating per-pixel object and attribute labels from a set of training images. We propose an efficient (interactive time) solution. Using the extracted labels as handles, our system empowers a user to verbally refine the results. This enables hands-free parsing of an image into pixel-wise object/attribute labels that correspond to human semantics. Verbally selecting objects of interests enables a novel and natural interaction modality that can possibly be used to interact with new generation devices (e.g. smart phones, Google Glass, living room devices). We demonstrate our system on a large number of real-world images with varying complexity. To help understand the tradeoffs compared to traditional mouse based interactions, results are reported for both a large scale quantitative evaluation and a user study.Comment: http://mmcheng.net/imagespirit

Faithful completion of images of scenic landmarks using internet images

Abstract—Previous works on image completion typically aim to produce visually plausible results rather than factually correct ones. In this paper, we propose an approach to faithfully complete the missing regions of an image. We assume that the input image is taken at a well-known landmark, so similar images taken at the same location can be easily found on the Internet. We first download thousands of images from the Internet using a text label provided by the user. Next, we apply two-step filtering to reduce them to a small set of candidate images for use as source images for completion. For each candidate image, a co-matching algorithm is used to find correspondences of both points and lines between the candidate image and the input image. These are used to find an optimal warp relating the two images. A completion result is obtained by blending the warped candidate image into the missing region of the input image. The completion results are ranked according to combination score, which considers both warping and blending energy, and the highest ranked ones are shown to the user. Experiments and results demonstrate that our method can faithfully complete images

Comparative Analysis and Evaluation of Image inpainting Algorithms

Image inpainting refers to the task of filling in the missing or damaged regions of an image in an undetectable manner. There are a large variety of image inpainting algorithms existing in the literature. They can broadly be grouped into two categories such as Partial Differential Equation (PDE) based algorithms and Exemplar based Texture synthesis algorithms. However no recent study has been undertaken for a comparative evaluation of these algorithms. In this paper, we are comparing two different types of image inpainting algorithms. The algorithms analyzed are Marcelo Bertalmio’s PDE based inpainting algorithm and Zhaolin Lu et al’s exemplar based Image inpainting algorithm.Both theoretical analysis and experiments have made to analyze the results of these image inpainting algorithms on the basis of both qualitative and quantitative way. Keywords:Image inpainting, Exemplar based, Texture synthesis, Partial Differential Equation (PDE)

Review on Image Inpainting using Intelligence Mining Techniques

Objective Inpainting is a technique for fixing or removing undesired areas of an image. Methods In present scenario, image plays a vital role in every aspect such as business images, satellite images, and medical images and so on. Results and Conclusion This paper presents a comprehensive review of past traditional image inpainting methods and the present state-of-the-art deep learning methods and also detailed the strengths and weaknesses of each to provide new insights in the field

Video inpainting for non-repetitive motion

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Image inpainting by global structure and texture propagation.

Huang, Ting.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-41).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Related Area --- p.2Chapter 1.2 --- Previous Work --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Proposed Framework --- p.7Chapter 1.4 --- Overview --- p.8Chapter 2 --- Markov Random Fields and Optimization Schemes --- p.9Chapter 2.1 --- MRF Model --- p.10Chapter 2.1.1 --- MAP Understanding --- p.11Chapter 2.2 --- Belief Propagation Optimization Scheme --- p.14Chapter 2.2.1 --- Max-Product BP on MRFs --- p.14Chapter 2.2.2 --- Sum-Product BP on MRFs --- p.15Chapter 3 --- Our Formulation --- p.17Chapter 3.1 --- An MRF Model --- p.18Chapter 3.2 --- Coarse-to-Fine Optimization by BP --- p.21Chapter 3.2.1 --- Coarse-Level Belief Propagation --- p.23Chapter 3.2.2 --- Fine-Level Belief Propagation --- p.24Chapter 3.2.3 --- Performance Enhancement --- p.25Chapter 4 --- Experiments --- p.27Chapter 4.1 --- Comparison --- p.27Chapter 4.2 --- Failure Case --- p.32Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.35Bibliography --- p.3

Depth-Assisted Semantic Segmentation, Image Enhancement and Parametric Modeling

This dissertation addresses the problem of employing 3D depth information on solving a number of traditional challenging computer vision/graphics problems. Humans have the abilities of perceiving the depth information in 3D world, which enable humans to reconstruct layouts, recognize objects and understand the geometric space and semantic meanings of the visual world. Therefore it is significant to explore how the 3D depth information can be utilized by computer vision systems to mimic such abilities of humans. This dissertation aims at employing 3D depth information to solve vision/graphics problems in the following aspects: scene understanding, image enhancements and 3D reconstruction and modeling. In addressing scene understanding problem, we present a framework for semantic segmentation and object recognition on urban video sequence only using dense depth maps recovered from the video. Five view-independent 3D features that vary with object class are extracted from dense depth maps and used for segmenting and recognizing different object classes in street scene images. We demonstrate a scene parsing algorithm that uses only dense 3D depth information to outperform using sparse 3D or 2D appearance features. In addressing image enhancement problem, we present a framework to overcome the imperfections of personal photographs of tourist sites using the rich information provided by large-scale internet photo collections (IPCs). By augmenting personal 2D images with 3D information reconstructed from IPCs, we address a number of traditionally challenging image enhancement techniques and achieve high-quality results using simple and robust algorithms. In addressing 3D reconstruction and modeling problem, we focus on parametric modeling of flower petals, the most distinctive part of a plant. The complex structure, severe occlusions and wide variations make the reconstruction of their 3D models a challenging task. We overcome these challenges by combining data driven modeling techniques with domain knowledge from botany. Taking a 3D point cloud of an input flower scanned from a single view, each segmented petal is fitted with a scale-invariant morphable petal shape model, which is constructed from individually scanned 3D exemplar petals. Novel constraints based on botany studies are incorporated into the fitting process for realistically reconstructing occluded regions and maintaining correct 3D spatial relations. The main contribution of the dissertation is in the intelligent usage of 3D depth information on solving traditional challenging vision/graphics problems. By developing some advanced algorithms either automatically or with minimum user interaction, the goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that computed 3D depth behind the multiple images contains rich information of the visual world and therefore can be intelligently utilized to recognize/ understand semantic meanings of scenes, efficiently enhance and augment single 2D images, and reconstruct high-quality 3D models

Novel Video Completion Approaches and Their Applications

Video completion refers to automatically restoring damaged or removed objects in a video sequence, with applications ranging from sophisticated video removal of undesired static or dynamic objects to correction of missing or corrupted video frames in old movies and synthesis of new video frames to add, modify, or generate a new visual story. The video completion problem can be solved using texture synthesis and/or data interpolation to fill-in the holes of the sequence inward. This thesis makes a distinction between still image completion and video completion. The latter requires visually pleasing consistency by taking into account the temporal information. Based on their applied concepts, video completion techniques are categorized as inpainting and texture synthesis. We present a bandlet transform-based technique for each of these categories of video completion techniques. The proposed inpainting-based technique is a 3D volume regularization scheme that takes advantage of bandlet bases for exploiting the anisotropic regularities to reconstruct a damaged video. The proposed exemplar-based approach, on the other hand, performs video completion using a precise patch fusion in the bandlet domain instead of patch replacement. The video completion task is extended to two important applications in video restoration. First, we develop an automatic video text detection and removal that benefits from the proposed inpainting scheme and a novel video text detector. Second, we propose a novel video super-resolution technique that employs the inpainting algorithm spatially in conjunction with an effective structure tensor, generated using bandlet geometry. The experimental results show a good performance of the proposed video inpainting method and demonstrate the effectiveness of bandlets in video completion tasks. The proposed video text detector and the video super resolution scheme also show a high performance in comparison with existing methods

Single View Modeling and View Synthesis

This thesis develops new algorithms to produce 3D content from a single camera. Today, amateurs can use hand-held camcorders to capture and display the 3D world in 2D, using mature technologies. However, there is always a strong desire to record and re-explore the 3D world in 3D. To achieve this goal, current approaches usually make use of a camera array, which suffers from tedious setup and calibration processes, as well as lack of portability, limiting its application to lab experiments. In this thesis, I try to produce the 3D contents using a single camera, making it as simple as shooting pictures. It requires a new front end capturing device rather than a regular camcorder, as well as more sophisticated algorithms. First, in order to capture the highly detailed object surfaces, I designed and developed a depth camera based on a novel technique called light fall-off stereo (LFS). The LFS depth camera outputs color+depth image sequences and achieves 30 fps, which is necessary for capturing dynamic scenes. Based on the output color+depth images, I developed a new approach that builds 3D models of dynamic and deformable objects. While the camera can only capture part of a whole object at any instance, partial surfaces are assembled together to form a complete 3D model by a novel warping algorithm. Inspired by the success of single view 3D modeling, I extended my exploration into 2D-3D video conversion that does not utilize a depth camera. I developed a semi-automatic system that converts monocular videos into stereoscopic videos, via view synthesis. It combines motion analysis with user interaction, aiming to transfer as much depth inferring work from the user to the computer. I developed two new methods that analyze the optical flow in order to provide additional qualitative depth constraints. The automatically extracted depth information is presented in the user interface to assist with user labeling work. In this thesis, I developed new algorithms to produce 3D contents from a single camera. Depending on the input data, my algorithm can build high fidelity 3D models for dynamic and deformable objects if depth maps are provided. Otherwise, it can turn the video clips into stereoscopic video