Deformation Based Curved Shape Representation

Representation and modelling of an objects' shape is critical in object recognition, synthesis, tracking and many other applications in computer vision. As a result, there is a wide range of approaches in formulating representation space and quantifying the notion of similarity between shapes. A similarity metric between shapes is a basic building block in modelling shape categories, optimizing shape valued functionals, and designing a classifier. Consequently, any subsequent shape based computation is fundamentally dependent on the computational efficiency, robustness, and invariance to shape preserving transformations of the defined similarity metric. In this thesis, we propose a novel finite dimensional shape representation framework that leads to a computationally efficient, closed form solution, and noise tolerant similarity distance function. Several important characteristics of the proposed curved shape representation approach are discussed in relation to earlier works. Subsequently, two different solutions are proposed for optimal parameter estimation of curved shapes. Hence, providing two possible solutions for the point correspondence estimation problem between two curved shapes. Later in the thesis, we show that several statistical models can readily be adapted to the proposed shape representation framework for object category modelling. The thesis finalizes by exploring potential applications of the proposed curved shape representation in 3D facial surface and facial expression representation and modelling

Fast Adaptive Reparametrization (FAR) with Application to Human Action Recognition

In this paper, a fast approach for curve reparametrization, called Fast Adaptive Reparamterization (FAR), is introduced. Instead of computing an optimal matching between two curves such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and elastic distance-based approaches, our method is applied to each curve independently, leading to linear computational complexity. It is based on a simple replacement of the curve parameter by a variable invariant under specific variations of reparametrization. The choice of this variable is heuristically made according to the application of interest. In addition to being fast, the proposed reparametrization can be applied not only to curves observed in Euclidean spaces but also to feature curves living in Riemannian spaces. To validate our approach, we apply it to the scenario of human action recognition using curves living in the Riemannian product Special Euclidean space SE(3) n. The obtained results on three benchmarks for human action recognition (MSRAction3D, Florence3D, and UTKinect) show that our approach competes with state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and computational cost

Deformation Based Curved Shape Representation

In this paper, we introduce a deformation based representation space for curved shapes in Rn. Given an ordered set of points sampled from a curved shape, the proposed method represents the set as an element of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group. Variation due to scale and location are filtered in a preprocessing stage, while shapes that vary only in rotation are identified by an equivalence relationship. The use of a finite dimensional matrix Lie group leads to a similarity metric with an explicit geodesic solution. Subsequently, we discuss some of the properties of the metric and its relationship with a deformation by least action. Furthermore, invariance to reparametrization or estimation of point correspondence between shapes is formulated as an estimation of sampling function. Thereafter, two possible approaches are presented to solve the point correspondence estimation problem. Finally, we propose an adaptation of k-means clustering for shape analysis in the proposed representation space. Experimental results show that the proposed representation is robust to uninformative cues, e.g. local shape perturbation and displacement. In comparison to state of the art methods, it achieves a high precision on the Swedish and the Flavia leaf datasets and a comparable result on MPEG-7, Kimia99 and Kimia216 datasets

Deformation Based 3D Facial Expression Representation

We propose a deformation based representation for analyzing expressions from 3D faces. A point cloud of a 3D face is decomposed into an ordered deformable set of curves that start from a fixed point. Subsequently, a mapping function is defined to identify the set of curves with an element of a high dimensional matrix Lie group, specifically the direct product of SE(3). Representing 3D faces as an element of a high dimensional Lie group has two main advantages. First, using the group structure, facial expressions can be decoupled from a neutral face. Second, an underlying non-linear facial expression manifold can be captured with the Lie group and mapped to a linear space, Lie algebra of the group. This opens up the possibility of classifying facial expressions with linear models without compromising the underlying manifold. Alternatively, linear combinations of linearised facial expressions can be mapped back from the Lie algebra to the Lie group. The approach is tested on the BU-3DFE and the Bosphorus datasets. The results show that the proposed approach performed comparably, on the BU-3DFE dataset, without using features or extensive landmark points

Pose Encoding for Robust Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Some of the main challenges in skeleton-based action recognition systems are redundant and noisy pose transformations. Earlier works in skeleton-based action recognition explored different approaches for filtering linear noise transformations, but neglect to address potential nonlinear transformations. In this paper, we present an unsupervised learning approach for estimating nonlinear noise transformations in pose estimates. Our approach starts by decoupling linear and nonlinear noise transformations. While the linear transformations are modelled explicitly the nonlinear transformations are learned from data. Subsequently, we use an autoencoder with L2-norm reconstruction error and show that it indeed does capture nonlinear noise transformations, and recover a denoised pose estimate which in turn improves performance significantly. We validate our approach on a publicly available dataset, NW-UCLA

Deformation-Based Abnormal Motion Detection using 3D Skeletons

In this paper, we propose a system for abnormal motion detection using 3D skeleton information, where the abnormal motion is not known a priori. To that end, we present a curve-based representation of a sequence, based on few joints of a 3D skeleton, and a deformation-based distance function. We further introduce a time-variation model that is specifically designed for assessing the quality of a motion; we refer to a distance function that is based on such a model as~\emph{motion quality distance}. The overall advantages of the proposed approach are 1) lower dimensional yet representative sequence representation and 2) a distance function that emphasizes time variation, the motion quality distance, which is a particularly important property for quality assessment. We validate our approach using a publicly available dataset, SPHERE-StairCase2014 dataset. Qualitative and quantitative results show promising performance

Visual and human-interpretable feedback for assisting physical activity

Physical activity is essential for stroke survivors for recovering some autonomy in daily life activities. Post-stroke patients are initially subject to physical therapy under the supervision of a health professional, but due to economical aspects, home based rehabilitation is eventually suggested. In order to support the physical activity of stroke patients at home, this paper presents a system for guiding the user in how to properly perform certain actions and movements. This is achieved by presenting feedback in form of visual information and human-interpretable messages. The core of the proposed approach is the analysis of the motion required for aligning body-parts with respect to a template skeleton pose, and how this information can be presented to the user in form of simple recommendations. Experimental results in three datasets show the potential of the proposed framework

Facial Expression Recognition via Joint Deep Learning of RGB-Depth Map Latent Representations

Humans use facial expressions successfully for conveying their emotional states. However, replicating such success in the human-computer interaction domain is an active research problem. In this paper, we propose deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for joint learning of robust facial expression features from fused RGB and depth map latent representations. We posit that learning jointly from both modalities result in a more robust classifier for facial expression recognition (FER) as opposed to learning from either of the modalities independently. Particularly, we construct a learning pipeline that allows us to learn several hierarchical levels of feature representations and then perform the fusion of RGB and depth map latent representations for joint learning of facial expressions. Our experimental results on the BU-3DFE dataset validate the proposed fusion approach, as a model learned from the joint modalities outperforms models learned from either of the modalities

VIEW-INVARIANT ACTION RECOGNITION FROM RGB DATA VIA 3D POSE ESTIMATION

In this paper, we propose a novel view-invariant action recognition method using a single monocular RGB camera. View-invariance remains a very challenging topic in 2D action recognition due to the lack of 3D information in RGB images. Most successful approaches make use of the concept of knowledge transfer by projecting 3D synthetic data to multiple viewpoints. Instead of relying on knowledge transfer, we propose to augment the RGB data by a third dimension by means of 3D skeleton estimation from 2D images using a CNN-based pose estimator. In order to ensure view-invariance, a pre-processing for alignment is applied followed by data expansion as a way for denoising. Finally, a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture is used to model the temporal dependency between skeletons. The proposed network is trained to directly recognize actions from aligned 3D skeletons. The experiments performed on the challenging Northwestern-UCLA dataset show the superiority of our approach as compared to state-of-the-art ones

Localized Trajectories for 2D and 3D Action Recognition

The Dense Trajectories concept is one of the most successful approaches in action recognition, suitable for scenarios involving a significant amount of motion. However, due to noise and background motion, many generated trajectories are irrelevant to the actual human activity and can potentially lead to performance degradation. In this paper, we propose Localized Trajectories as an improved version of Dense Trajectories where motion trajectories are clustered around human body joints provided by RGB-D cameras and then encoded by local Bag-of-Words. As a result, the Localized Trajectories concept provides an advanced discriminative representation of actions. Moreover, we generalize Localized Trajectories to 3D by using the depth modality. One of the main advantages of 3D Localized Trajectories is that they describe radial displacements that are perpendicular to the image plane. Extensive experiments and analysis were carried out on five different datasets