Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37 page

Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval

Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

Understanding Traffic Density from Large-Scale Web Camera Data

Understanding traffic density from large-scale web camera (webcam) videos is a challenging problem because such videos have low spatial and temporal resolution, high occlusion and large perspective. To deeply understand traffic density, we explore both deep learning based and optimization based methods. To avoid individual vehicle detection and tracking, both methods map the image into vehicle density map, one based on rank constrained regression and the other one based on fully convolution networks (FCN). The regression based method learns different weights for different blocks in the image to increase freedom degrees of weights and embed perspective information. The FCN based method jointly estimates vehicle density map and vehicle count with a residual learning framework to perform end-to-end dense prediction, allowing arbitrary image resolution, and adapting to different vehicle scales and perspectives. We analyze and compare both methods, and get insights from optimization based method to improve deep model. Since existing datasets do not cover all the challenges in our work, we collected and labelled a large-scale traffic video dataset, containing 60 million frames from 212 webcams. Both methods are extensively evaluated and compared on different counting tasks and datasets. FCN based method significantly reduces the mean absolute error from 10.99 to 5.31 on the public dataset TRANCOS compared with the state-of-the-art baseline.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2017. Preprint version was uploaded on http://welcome.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/publications/understanding-traffic-density-from-large-scale-web-camera-data

Deep Directional Statistics: Pose Estimation with Uncertainty Quantification

Modern deep learning systems successfully solve many perception tasks such as object pose estimation when the input image is of high quality. However, in challenging imaging conditions such as on low-resolution images or when the image is corrupted by imaging artifacts, current systems degrade considerably in accuracy. While a loss in performance is unavoidable, we would like our models to quantify their uncertainty in order to achieve robustness against images of varying quality. Probabilistic deep learning models combine the expressive power of deep learning with uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic deep learning model for the task of angular regression. Our model uses von Mises distributions to predict a distribution over object pose angle. Whereas a single von Mises distribution is making strong assumptions about the shape of the distribution, we extend the basic model to predict a mixture of von Mises distributions. We show how to learn a mixture model using a finite and infinite number of mixture components. Our model allows for likelihood-based training and efficient inference at test time. We demonstrate on a number of challenging pose estimation datasets that our model produces calibrated probability predictions and competitive or superior point estimates compared to the current state-of-the-art

Vision-Based Production of Personalized Video

In this paper we present a novel vision-based system for the automated production of personalised video souvenirs for visitors in leisure and cultural heritage venues. Visitors are visually identified and tracked through a camera network. The system produces a personalized DVD souvenir at the end of a visitor’s stay allowing visitors to relive their experiences. We analyze how we identify visitors by fusing facial and body features, how we track visitors, how the tracker recovers from failures due to occlusions, as well as how we annotate and compile the final product. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Extended Kalman filtering with stochastic nonlinearities and multiple missing measurements

Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierIn this paper, the extended Kalman filtering problem is investigated for a class of nonlinear systems with multiple missing measurements over a finite horizon. Both deterministic and stochastic nonlinearities are included in the system model, where the stochastic nonlinearities are described by statistical means that could reflect the multiplicative stochastic disturbances. The phenomenon of measurement missing occurs in a random way and the missing probability for each sensor is governed by an individual random variable satisfying a certain probability distribution over the interval [0,1]. Such a probability distribution is allowed to be any commonly used distribution over the interval [0,1] with known conditional probability. The aim of the addressed filtering problem is to design a filter such that, in the presence of both the stochastic nonlinearities and multiple missing measurements, there exists an upper bound for the filtering error covariance. Subsequently, such an upper bound is minimized by properly designing the filter gain at each sampling instant. It is shown that the desired filter can be obtained in terms of the solutions to two Riccati-like difference equations that are of a form suitable for recursive computation in online applications. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter design scheme.This work was supported in part by the National 973 Project under Grant 2009CB320600, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61028008, 61134009 and 60825303, the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Automation for the Process Industry (Northeastern University) of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany