How Not to Be Seen -- Inpainting Dynamic Objects in Crowded Scenes

Removing dynamic objects from videos is an extremely challenging problem that even visual effects professionals often solve with time-consuming manual frame-by-frame editing. We propose a new approach to video completion that can deal with complex scenes containing dynamic background and non-periodical moving objects. We build upon the idea that the spatio-temporal hole left by a removed object can be filled with data available on other regions of the video where the occluded objects were visible. Video completion is performed by solving a large combinatorial problem that searches for an optimal pattern of pixel offsets from occluded to unoccluded regions. Our contribution includes an energy functional that generalizes well over different scenes with stable parameters, and that has the desirable convergence properties for a graph-cut-based optimization. We provide an interface to guide the completion process that both reduces computation time and allows for efficient correction of small errors in the result. We demonstrate that our approach can effectively complete complex, high-resolution occlusions that are greater in difficulty than what existing methods have shown

Mathematical Approaches for Image Enhancement Problems

This thesis develops novel techniques that can solve some image enhancement problems using theoretically and technically proven and very useful mathematical tools to image processing such as wavelet transforms, partial differential equations, and variational models. Three subtopics are mainly covered. First, color image denoising framework is introduced to achieve high quality denoising results by considering correlations between color components while existing denoising approaches can be plugged in flexibly. Second, a new and efficient framework for image contrast and color enhancement in the compressed wavelet domain is proposed. The proposed approach is capable of enhancing both global and local contrast and brightness as well as preserving color consistency. The framework does not require inverse transform for image enhancement since linear scale factors are directly applied to both scaling and wavelet coefficients in the compressed domain, which results in high computational efficiency. Also contaminated noise in the image can be efficiently reduced by introducing wavelet shrinkage terms adaptively in different scales. The proposed method is able to enhance a wavelet-coded image computationally efficiently with high image quality and less noise or other artifact. The experimental results show that the proposed method produces encouraging results both visually and numerically compared to some existing approaches. Finally, image inpainting problem is discussed. Literature review, psychological analysis, and challenges on image inpainting problem and related topics are described. An inpainting algorithm using energy minimization and texture mapping is proposed. Mumford-Shah energy minimization model detects and preserves edges in the inpainting domain by detecting both the main structure and the detailed edges. This approach utilizes faster hierarchical level set method and guarantees convergence independent of initial conditions. The estimated segmentation results in the inpainting domain are stored in segmentation map, which is referred by a texture mapping algorithm for filling textured regions. We also propose an inpainting algorithm using wavelet transform that can expect better global structure estimation of the unknown region in addition to shape and texture properties since wavelet transforms have been used for various image analysis problems due to its nice multi-resolution properties and decoupling characteristics

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

Advanced editing methods for image and video sequences

In the context of image and video editing, this thesis proposes methods for modifying the semantic content of a recorded scene. Two different editing problems are approached: First, the removal of ghosting artifacts from high dynamic range (HDR) images recovered from exposure sequences, and second, the removal of objects from video sequences recorded with and without camera motion. These editings need to be performed in a way that the result looks plausible to humans, but without having to recover detailed models about the content of the scene, e.g. its geometry, reflectance, or illumination. The proposed editing methods add new key ingredients, such as camera noise models and global optimization frameworks, that help achieving results that surpass the capabilities of state-of-the-art methods. Using these ingredients, each proposed method defines local visual properties that approximate well the specific editing requirements of each task. These properties are then encoded into a energy function that, when globally minimized, produces the required editing results. The optimization of such energy functions corresponds to Bayesian inference problems that are solved efficiently using graph cuts. The proposed methods are demonstrated to outperform other state-ofthe-art methods. Furthermore, they are demonstrated to work well on complex real-world scenarios that have not been previously addressed in the literature, i.e., highly cluttered scenes for HDR deghosting, and highly dynamic scenes and unconstraint camera motion for object removal from videos.Diese Arbeit schlägt Methoden zur Änderung des semantischen Inhalts einer aufgenommenen Szene im Kontext der Bild-und Videobearbeitung vor. Zwei unterschiedliche Bearbeitungsmethoden werden angesprochen: Erstens, das Entfernen von Ghosting Artifacts (Geist-ähnliche Artefakte) aus High Dynamic Range (HDR) Bildern welche von Belichtungsreihen erstellt wurden und zweitens, das Entfernen von Objekten aus Videosequenzen mit und ohne Kamerabewegung. Das Bearbeiten muss in einer Weise durchgeführt werden, dass das Ergebnis für den Menschen plausibel aussieht, aber ohne das detaillierte Modelle des Szeneninhalts rekonstruiert werden müssen, z.B. die Geometrie, das Reflexionsverhalten, oder Beleuchtungseigenschaften. Die vorgeschlagenen Bearbeitungsmethoden beinhalten neuartige Elemente, etwa Kameralärm-Modelle und globale Optimierungs-Systeme, mit deren Hilfe es möglich ist die Eigenschaften der modernsten existierenden Methoden zu übertreffen. Mit Hilfe dieser Elemente definieren die vorgeschlagenen Methoden lokale visuelle Eigenschaften welche die beschriebenen Bearbeitungsmethoden gut annähern. Diese Eigenschaften werden dann als Energiefunktion codiert, welche, nach globalem minimieren, die gewünschten Bearbeitung liefert. Die Optimierung solcher Energiefunktionen entspricht dem Bayes’schen Inferenz Modell welches effizient mittels Graph-Cut Algorithmen gelöst werden kann. Es wird gezeigt, dass die vorgeschlagenen Methoden den heutigen Stand der Technik übertreffen. Darüber hinaus sind sie nachweislich gut auf komplexe natürliche Szenarien anwendbar, welche in der existierenden Literatur bisher noch nicht angegangen wurden, d.h. sehr unübersichtliche Szenen für HDR Deghosting und sehr dynamische Szenen und unbeschränkte Kamerabewegungen für das Entfernen von Objekten aus Videosequenzen

Video Object Inpainting Using Posture Mapping

[[sponsorship]]資訊科學研究所,資訊科技創新研究中心[[note]]已出版;有審查制度;具代表

Video object inpainting using posture mapping

[[abstract]]This paper presents a novel framework for object-based video inpainting. To complete an occluded object, our method first samples a 3-D volume of the video into directional spatio-temporal slices, and then performs patch-based image inpainting to repair the partially damaged object trajectories in the 2-D slices. The completed slices are subsequently combined to obtain a sequence of virtual contours of the damaged object. The virtual contours and a posture sequence retrieval technique are then used to retrieve the most similar sequence of object postures in the available non-occluded postures. Key-posture selection and indexing are performed to reduce the complexity of posture sequence retrieval. We also propose a synthetic posture generation scheme that enriches the collection of key-postures so as to reduce the effect of insufficient key-postures. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain the spatial consistency and temporal motion continuity of an object simultaneously.[[fileno]]2030144030068[[department]]電機工程學

Virtual Contour Guided Video Object Inpainting Using Posture Mapping and Retrieval

[[sponsorship]]資訊科學研究所,資訊科技創新研究中心[[note]]已出版;[SCI];有審查制度;具代表性[[note]]http://gateway.isiknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcAuth=Drexel&SrcApp=hagerty_opac&KeyRecord=1520-9210&DestApp=JCR&RQ=IF_CAT_BOXPLO