7,840 research outputs found
Learning Analysis-by-Synthesis for 6D Pose Estimation in RGB-D Images
Analysis-by-synthesis has been a successful approach for many tasks in
computer vision, such as 6D pose estimation of an object in an RGB-D image
which is the topic of this work. The idea is to compare the observation with
the output of a forward process, such as a rendered image of the object of
interest in a particular pose. Due to occlusion or complicated sensor noise, it
can be difficult to perform this comparison in a meaningful way. We propose an
approach that "learns to compare", while taking these difficulties into
account. This is done by describing the posterior density of a particular
object pose with a convolutional neural network (CNN) that compares an observed
and rendered image. The network is trained with the maximum likelihood
paradigm. We observe empirically that the CNN does not specialize to the
geometry or appearance of specific objects, and it can be used with objects of
vastly different shapes and appearances, and in different backgrounds. Compared
to state-of-the-art, we demonstrate a significant improvement on two different
datasets which include a total of eleven objects, cluttered background, and
heavy occlusion.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure
Review of Person Re-identification Techniques
Person re-identification across different surveillance cameras with disjoint
fields of view has become one of the most interesting and challenging subjects
in the area of intelligent video surveillance. Although several methods have
been developed and proposed, certain limitations and unresolved issues remain.
In all of the existing re-identification approaches, feature vectors are
extracted from segmented still images or video frames. Different similarity or
dissimilarity measures have been applied to these vectors. Some methods have
used simple constant metrics, whereas others have utilised models to obtain
optimised metrics. Some have created models based on local colour or texture
information, and others have built models based on the gait of people. In
general, the main objective of all these approaches is to achieve a
higher-accuracy rate and lowercomputational costs. This study summarises
several developments in recent literature and discusses the various available
methods used in person re-identification. Specifically, their advantages and
disadvantages are mentioned and compared.Comment: Published 201
Single camera pose estimation using Bayesian filtering and Kinect motion priors
Traditional approaches to upper body pose estimation using monocular vision
rely on complex body models and a large variety of geometric constraints. We
argue that this is not ideal and somewhat inelegant as it results in large
processing burdens, and instead attempt to incorporate these constraints
through priors obtained directly from training data. A prior distribution
covering the probability of a human pose occurring is used to incorporate
likely human poses. This distribution is obtained offline, by fitting a
Gaussian mixture model to a large dataset of recorded human body poses, tracked
using a Kinect sensor. We combine this prior information with a random walk
transition model to obtain an upper body model, suitable for use within a
recursive Bayesian filtering framework. Our model can be viewed as a mixture of
discrete Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, in that states behave as random walks,
but drift towards a set of typically observed poses. This model is combined
with measurements of the human head and hand positions, using recursive
Bayesian estimation to incorporate temporal information. Measurements are
obtained using face detection and a simple skin colour hand detector, trained
using the detected face. The suggested model is designed with analytical
tractability in mind and we show that the pose tracking can be
Rao-Blackwellised using the mixture Kalman filter, allowing for computational
efficiency while still incorporating bio-mechanical properties of the upper
body. In addition, the use of the proposed upper body model allows reliable
three-dimensional pose estimates to be obtained indirectly for a number of
joints that are often difficult to detect using traditional object recognition
strategies. Comparisons with Kinect sensor results and the state of the art in
2D pose estimation highlight the efficacy of the proposed approach.Comment: 25 pages, Technical report, related to Burke and Lasenby, AMDO 2014
conference paper. Code sample: https://github.com/mgb45/SignerBodyPose Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJMTSo7-uF
DecideNet: Counting Varying Density Crowds Through Attention Guided Detection and Density Estimation
In real-world crowd counting applications, the crowd densities vary greatly
in spatial and temporal domains. A detection based counting method will
estimate crowds accurately in low density scenes, while its reliability in
congested areas is downgraded. A regression based approach, on the other hand,
captures the general density information in crowded regions. Without knowing
the location of each person, it tends to overestimate the count in low density
areas. Thus, exclusively using either one of them is not sufficient to handle
all kinds of scenes with varying densities. To address this issue, a novel
end-to-end crowd counting framework, named DecideNet (DEteCtIon and Density
Estimation Network) is proposed. It can adaptively decide the appropriate
counting mode for different locations on the image based on its real density
conditions. DecideNet starts with estimating the crowd density by generating
detection and regression based density maps separately. To capture inevitable
variation in densities, it incorporates an attention module, meant to
adaptively assess the reliability of the two types of estimations. The final
crowd counts are obtained with the guidance of the attention module to adopt
suitable estimations from the two kinds of density maps. Experimental results
show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging
crowd counting datasets.Comment: CVPR 201
PixelTrack: A Fast Adaptive Algorithm for Tracking Non-rigid Objects
International audienceIn this paper, we present a novel algorithm for fast tracking of generic objects in videos. The algorithm uses two components: a detector that makes use of the generalised Hough transform with pixel-based descriptors, and a probabilistic segmentation method based on global models for foreground and background. These components are used for tracking in a combined way, and they adapt each other in a co-training manner. Through effective model adaptation and segmentation, the algorithm is able to track objects that undergo rigid and non-rigid deformations and considerable shape and appearance variations. The proposed tracking method has been thoroughly evaluated on challenging standard videos, and outperforms state-of-theart tracking methods designed for the same task. Finally, the proposed models allow for an extremely efficient implementation, and thus tracking is very fast
Robust and real-time hand detection and tracking in monocular video
In recent years, personal computing devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones have become ubiquitous. Moreover, intelligent sensors are being integrated into many consumer devices such as eyeglasses, wristwatches and smart televisions. With the advent of touchscreen technology, a new human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigm arose that allows users to interface with their device in an intuitive manner. Using simple gestures, such as swipe or pinch movements, a touchscreen can be used to directly interact with a virtual environment. Nevertheless, touchscreens still form a physical barrier between the virtual interface and the real world.
An increasingly popular field of research that tries to overcome this limitation, is video based gesture recognition, hand detection and hand tracking. Gesture based interaction allows the user to directly interact with the computer in a natural manner by exploring a virtual reality using nothing but his own body language.
In this dissertation, we investigate how robust hand detection and tracking can be accomplished under real-time constraints. In the context of human-computer interaction, real-time is defined as both low latency and low complexity, such that a complete video frame can be processed before the next one becomes available. Furthermore, for practical applications, the algorithms should be robust to illumination changes, camera motion, and cluttered backgrounds in the scene. Finally, the system should be able to initialize automatically, and to detect and recover from tracking failure. We study a wide variety of existing algorithms, and propose significant improvements and novel methods to build a complete detection and tracking system that meets these requirements.
Hand detection, hand tracking and hand segmentation are related yet technically different challenges. Whereas detection deals with finding an object in a static image, tracking considers temporal information and is used to track the position of an object over time, throughout a video sequence. Hand segmentation is the task of estimating the hand contour, thereby separating the object from its background.
Detection of hands in individual video frames allows us to automatically initialize our tracking algorithm, and to detect and recover from tracking failure. Human hands are highly articulated objects, consisting of finger parts that are connected with joints. As a result, the appearance of a hand can vary greatly, depending on the assumed hand pose. Traditional detection algorithms often assume that the appearance of the object of interest can be described using a rigid model and therefore can not be used to robustly detect human hands. Therefore, we developed an algorithm that detects hands by exploiting their articulated nature. Instead of resorting to a template based approach, we probabilistically model the spatial relations between different hand parts, and the centroid of the hand. Detecting hand parts, such as fingertips, is much easier than detecting a complete hand. Based on our model of the spatial configuration of hand parts, the detected parts can be used to obtain an estimate of the complete hand's position. To comply with the real-time constraints, we developed techniques to speed-up the process by efficiently discarding unimportant information in the image. Experimental results show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in object detection while providing a reduction in computational complexity with a factor 1 000. Furthermore, we showed that our algorithm can also be used to detect other articulated objects such as persons or animals and is therefore not restricted to the task of hand detection.
Once a hand has been detected, a tracking algorithm can be used to continuously track its position in time. We developed a probabilistic tracking method that can cope with uncertainty caused by image noise, incorrect detections, changing illumination, and camera motion. Furthermore, our tracking system automatically determines the number of hands in the scene, and can cope with hands entering or leaving the video canvas. We introduced several novel techniques that greatly increase tracking robustness, and that can also be applied in other domains than hand tracking. To achieve real-time processing, we investigated several techniques to reduce the search space of the problem, and deliberately employ methods that are easily parallelized on modern hardware. Experimental results indicate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art in hand tracking, while providing a much lower computational complexity.
One of the methods used by our probabilistic tracking algorithm, is optical flow estimation. Optical flow is defined as a 2D vector field describing the apparent velocities of objects in a 3D scene, projected onto the image plane. Optical flow is known to be used by many insects and birds to visually track objects and to estimate their ego-motion. However, most optical flow estimation methods described in literature are either too slow to be used in real-time applications, or are not robust to illumination changes and fast motion. We therefore developed an optical flow algorithm that can cope with large displacements, and that is illumination independent.
Furthermore, we introduce a regularization technique that ensures a smooth flow-field. This regularization scheme effectively reduces the number of noisy and incorrect flow-vector estimates, while maintaining the ability to handle motion discontinuities caused by object boundaries in the scene.
The above methods are combined into a hand tracking framework which can be used for interactive applications in unconstrained environments. To demonstrate the possibilities of gesture based human-computer interaction, we developed a new type of computer display. This display is completely transparent, allowing multiple users to perform collaborative tasks while maintaining eye contact. Furthermore, our display produces an image that seems to float in thin air, such that users can touch the virtual image with their hands. This floating imaging display has been showcased on several national and international events and tradeshows.
The research that is described in this dissertation has been evaluated thoroughly by comparing detection and tracking results with those obtained by state-of-the-art algorithms. These comparisons show that the proposed methods outperform most algorithms in terms of accuracy, while achieving a much lower computational complexity, resulting in a real-time implementation. Results are discussed in depth at the end of each chapter. This research further resulted in an international journal publication; a second journal paper that has been submitted and is under review at the time of writing this dissertation; nine international conference publications; a national conference publication; a commercial license agreement concerning the research results; two hardware prototypes of a new type of computer display; and a software demonstrator
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