Radially-Distorted Conjugate Translations

This paper introduces the first minimal solvers that jointly solve for affine-rectification and radial lens distortion from coplanar repeated patterns. Even with imagery from moderately distorted lenses, plane rectification using the pinhole camera model is inaccurate or invalid. The proposed solvers incorporate lens distortion into the camera model and extend accurate rectification to wide-angle imagery, which is now common from consumer cameras. The solvers are derived from constraints induced by the conjugate translations of an imaged scene plane, which are integrated with the division model for radial lens distortion. The hidden-variable trick with ideal saturation is used to reformulate the constraints so that the solvers generated by the Grobner-basis method are stable, small and fast. Rectification and lens distortion are recovered from either one conjugately translated affine-covariant feature or two independently translated similarity-covariant features. The proposed solvers are used in a \RANSAC-based estimator, which gives accurate rectifications after few iterations. The proposed solvers are evaluated against the state-of-the-art and demonstrate significantly better rectifications on noisy measurements. Qualitative results on diverse imagery demonstrate high-accuracy undistortions and rectifications. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/prittjam/repeats

Coplanar Repeats by Energy Minimization

This paper proposes an automated method to detect, group and rectify arbitrarily-arranged coplanar repeated elements via energy minimization. The proposed energy functional combines several features that model how planes with coplanar repeats are projected into images and captures global interactions between different coplanar repeat groups and scene planes. An inference framework based on a recent variant of $\alpha$-expansion is described and fast convergence is demonstrated. We compare the proposed method to two widely-used geometric multi-model fitting methods using a new dataset of annotated images containing multiple scene planes with coplanar repeats in varied arrangements. The evaluation shows a significant improvement in the accuracy of rectifications computed from coplanar repeats detected with the proposed method versus those detected with the baseline methods.Comment: 14 pages with supplemental materials attache

Efficient Diffusion on Region Manifolds: Recovering Small Objects with Compact CNN Representations

CVPR 2017Query expansion is a popular method to improve the quality of image retrieval with both conventional and CNN representations. It has been so far limited to global image similarity. This work focuses on diffusion, a mechanism that captures the image manifold in the feature space. The diffusion is carried out on descriptors of overlapping image regions rather than on a global image descriptor like in previous approaches. An efficient off-line stage allows optional reduction in the number of stored regions. In the on-line stage, the proposed handling of unseen queries in the indexing stage removes additional computation to adjust the precomputed data. We perform diffusion through a sparse linear system solver, yielding practical query times well below one second. Experimentally, we observe a significant boost in performance of image retrieval with compact CNN descriptors on standard benchmarks, especially when the query object covers only a small part of the image. Small objects have been a common failure case of CNN-based retrieval

Marchés agricoles, Prix. 3/1994. = "Agricultural Markets, Prices. 3/1994.

Despite the success of deep learning on representing images for particular object retrieval, recent studies show that the learned representations still lie on manifolds in a high dimensional space. This makes the Euclidean nearest neighbor search biased for this task. Exploring the mani-folds online remains expensive even if a nearest neighbor graph has been computed offline. This work introduces an explicit embedding reducing manifold search to Euclidean search followed by dot product similarity search. This is equivalent to linear graph filtering of a sparse signal in the frequency domain. To speed up online search, we compute an approximate Fourier basis of the graph offline. We improve the state of art on particular object retrieval datasets including the challenging Instre dataset containing small objects. At a scale of 10 5 images, the offline cost is only a few hours, while query time is comparable to standard similarity search

Identifying the source region of plasmaspheric hiss

The presence of the plasmaspheric hiss emission around the Earth has been known for more than 50 years but its origin has remained unknown in terms of source location and mechanism. The hiss, made of whistler mode waves, exists for most of the time in the plasmasphere and is believed to control the radiation belt surrounding the Earth which makes its understanding very important. This paper presents direct observational evidence that the plasmaspheric hiss originates in the equatorial region of the plasmaspheric drainage plumes. It shows that the emissions propagate along the magnetic field lines and away from the equator in the plumes but towards the equator at lower L shells inside the plasmasphere. The observations also suggest that the hiss waves inside the plasmasphere are absorbed as they cross the equator

The Correspondence Problem in Perspective Images

This thesis proposal addresses the correspondence problem, especially matching of two views of a scene taken with unknown cameras from unknown and arbitrary viewpoints. This task is known under the name of Wide Baseline Stereo Matching. Our recent research related to this field is described and the thesis goals are proposed

Negative evidences and co-occurrences in image retrieval: the benefit of PCA and whitening

International audienceThe paper addresses large scale image retrieval with short vector representations. We study dimensionality reduction by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and propose improvements to its different phases. We show and explicitly exploit relations between i) mean subtraction and the negative evidence, i.e., a visual word that is mutually missing in two descriptions being compared, and ii) the axis de-correlation and the co-occurrences phenomenon. Finally, we propose an effective way to alleviate the quantization artifacts through a joint dimensionality reduction of multiple vocabularies. The proposed techniques are simple, yet significantly and consistently improve over the state of the art on compact image representations. Complementary experiments in image classification show that the methods are generally applicable