2 research outputs found
Enhancing person annotation for personal photo management using content and context based technologies
Rapid technological growth and the decreasing cost of photo capture means that we are all taking more digital photographs than ever before. However, lack of technology for automatically organising personal photo archives has resulted in many users left with poorly annotated photos, causing them great frustration when such photo collections are to be browsed or searched at a later time. As a result, there has recently been significant research interest in technologies for supporting effective annotation.
This thesis addresses an important sub-problem of the broad annotation problem, namely "person annotation" associated with personal digital photo management. Solutions to this problem are provided using content analysis tools in combination with context data within the experimental photo management framework, called “MediAssist”. Readily available image metadata, such as location and date/time, are captured from digital cameras with in-built GPS functionality, and thus provide knowledge about when and where the photos were taken. Such information is then used to identify the "real-world" events corresponding to certain activities in the photo capture process. The
problem of enabling effective person annotation is formulated in such a way that both "within-event" and "cross-event" relationships of persons' appearances are captured.
The research reported in the thesis is built upon a firm foundation of content-based analysis technologies, namely face detection, face recognition, and body-patch matching together with data fusion.
Two annotation models are investigated in this thesis, namely progressive and non-progressive. The effectiveness of each model is evaluated against varying proportions of
initial annotation, and the type of initial annotation based on individual and combined face, body-patch and person-context information sources. The results reported in the thesis strongly validate the use of multiple information sources for person annotation whilst
emphasising the advantage of event-based photo analysis in real-life photo management systems
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Contour and texture for visual recognition of object categories
The recognition of categories of objects in images has become a central
topic in computer vision. Automatic visual recognition systems
are rapidly becoming central to applications such as image search,
robotics, vehicle safety systems, and image editing. This work addresses
three sub-problems of recognition: image classification, object
detection, and semantic segmentation. The task of classification
is to determine whether an object of a particular category is present
or not. Object detection aims to localize any objects of the category.
Semantic segmentation is a more complete image understanding,
whereby an image is partitioned into coherent regions that are assigned
meaningful class labels. This thesis proposes novel discriminative
learning approaches to these problems.
Our primary contributions are threefold. Firstly, we demonstrate
that the contours (the outline and interior edges) of an object are,
alone, sufficient for accurate visual recognition. Secondly, we propose
two powerful new feature types: (i) a learned codebook of contour
fragments matched with an improved oriented chamfer distance,
and (ii) a set of texture-based features that simultaneously exploit
local appearance, approximate shape, and appearance context.
The efficacy of these new features types is evaluated on a wide variety
of datasets. Thirdly, we show how, in combination, these two
largely orthogonal feature types can substantially improve recognition
performance above that achieved by either alone