Multi-Scale Human Pose Tracking in 2D Monocular Images

In this paper we address the problem of tracking human poses in multiple perspective scales in 2D monocular images/videos. In most state-of-the-art 2D tracking approaches, the issue of scale variation is rarely discussed. However in reality, videos often contain human motion with dynamically changed scales. In this paper we pro-pose a tracking framework that can deal with this problem. A scale checking and adjusting algorithm is pro-posed to automatically adjust the perspective scales during the tracking process. Two metrics are proposed for detecting and adjusting the scale change. One metric is from the height value of the tracked target, which is suitable for some sequences where the tracked target is upright and with no limbs stretching. The other metric employed in this algorithm is more generic, which is invariant to motion types. It is the ratio between the pixel counts of the target silhouette and the detected bounding boxes of the target body. The proposed algorithm is tested on the publicly available datasets (HumanEva). The experimental results show that our method demon-strated higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approache

Anomaly activity classification in the grocery stores

Nowadays, because of the growing number of robberies in shopping malls and grocery stores, automatic camera’s applications are vital necessities to detect anomalous actions. These events usually happen quickly and unexpectedly. Therefore, having a robust system which can classify anomalies in a real-time with minimum false alarms is required. Due to this needs, the main objective of this project is to classify anomalies which may happen in grocery stores. This objective is acquired by considering properties, such as; using one fixed camera in the store and the presence of at least one person in the camera view. The actions of human upper body are used to determine the anomalies. Articulated motion model is used as the basis of the anomalies classification design. In the design, the process starts with feature extraction and followed by target model establishment, tracking and action classification. The features such as color and image gradient built the template as the target model. Then, the models of different upper body parts are tracked during consecutive frames by the tracking method which is sum of square differences (SSD) combined with the Kalman filter as the predictor. The spatio-temporal information as the trajectory of limbs gained by tracking part is sent to proposed classification part. For classification, three different scenarios are studied: attacking cash machine, cashier’s attacking and making the store messy. In implementing these scenarios, some events were introduced. These events are; basic (static) events which are the static objects in the scene, spatial events which are those actions depend on coordinates of body parts and spatio-temporal events in which these actions are tracked in consecutive frames. At last, if one of the scenarios happens, an anomalous action will be detected. The results show the robustness of the proposed methods which have the minimum false positive error of 7% for the cash machine attack and minimum false negative error of 19% for the cashier’s attacking scenario

Modified System Design and Implementation of an Intelligent Assistive Robotic Manipulator

This thesis presents three improvements to the current UCF MANUS systems. The first improvement modifies the existing fine motion controller into PI controller that has been optimized to prevent the object from leaving the view of the cameras used for visual servoing. This is achieved by adding a weight matrix to the proportional part of the controller that is constrained by an artificial ROI. When the feature points being used are approaching the boundaries of the ROI, the optimized controller weights are calculated using quadratic programming and added to the nominal proportional gain portion of the controller. The second improvement was a compensatory gross motion method designed to ensure that the desired object can be identified. If the object cannot be identified after the initial gross motion, the end-effector will then be moved to one of three different locations around the object until the object is identified or all possible positions are checked. This framework combines the Kanade-Lucase-Tomasi local tracking method with the ferns global detector/tracker to create a method that utilizes the strengths of both systems to overcome their inherent weaknesses. The last improvement is a particle-filter based tracking algorithm that robustifies the visual servoing function of fine motion. This method performs better than the current global detector/tracker that was being implemented by allowing the tracker to successfully track the object in complex environments with non-ideal conditions

Model-based human upper body tracking using interest points in real-time video

Vision-based human motion analysis has received huge attention from researchers because of the number of applications, such as automated surveillance, video indexing, human machine interaction, traffic monitoring, and vehicle navigation. However, it contains several open problems. To date, despite very promising proposed approaches, no explicit solution has been found to solve these open problems efficiently. In this regard, this thesis presents a model-based human upper body pose estimation and tracking system using interest points (IPs) in real-time video. In the first stage, we propose a novel IP-based background-subtraction algorithm to segment the foreground IPs of each frame from the background ones. Afterwards, the foreground IPs of any two consecutive frames are matched to each other using a dynamic hybrid localspatial IP matching algorithm, proposed in this research. The IP matching algorithm starts by using the local feature descriptors of the IPs to find an initial set of possible matches. Then two filtering steps are applied to the results to increase the precision by deleting the mismatched pairs. To improve the recall, a spatial matching process is applied to the remaining unmatched points. Finally, a two-stage hierarchical-global model-based pose estimation and tracking algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimiation (PSO) is proposed to track the human upper body through consecutive frames. Given the pose and the foreground IPs in the previous frame and the matched points in the current frame, the proposed PSO-based pose estimation and tracking algorithm estimates the current pose hierarchically by minimizing the discrepancy between the hypothesized pose and the real matched observed points in the first stage. Then a global PSO is applied to the pose estimated by the first stage to do a consistency check and pose refinement