Superquadrics for segmentation and modeling range data

We present a novel approach to reliable and efficient recovery of part-descriptions in terms of superquadric models from range data. We show that superquadrics can directly be recovered from unsegmented data, thus avoiding any presegmentation steps (e.g., in terms of surfaces). The approach is based on the recover-andselect paradigm. We present several experiments on real and synthetic range images, where we demonstrate the stability of the results with respect to viewpoint and noise

Visual object tracking performance measures revisited

The problem of visual tracking evaluation is sporting a large variety of performance measures, and largely suffers from lack of consensus about which measures should be used in experiments. This makes the cross-paper tracker comparison difficult. Furthermore, as some measures may be less effective than others, the tracking results may be skewed or biased towards particular tracking aspects. In this paper we revisit the popular performance measures and tracker performance visualizations and analyze them theoretically and experimentally. We show that several measures are equivalent from the point of information they provide for tracker comparison and, crucially, that some are more brittle than the others. Based on our analysis we narrow down the set of potential measures to only two complementary ones, describing accuracy and robustness, thus pushing towards homogenization of the tracker evaluation methodology. These two measures can be intuitively interpreted and visualized and have been employed by the recent Visual Object Tracking (VOT) challenges as the foundation for the evaluation methodology

To Fall Or Not To Fall: A Visual Approach to Physical Stability Prediction

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel object and their configurations. Developmental psychology has shown that such skills are acquired by infants from observations at a very early stage. In this paper, we contrast a more traditional approach of taking a model-based route with explicit 3D representations and physical simulation by an end-to-end approach that directly predicts stability and related quantities from appearance. We ask the question if and to what extent and quality such a skill can directly be acquired in a data-driven way bypassing the need for an explicit simulation. We present a learning-based approach based on simulated data that predicts stability of towers comprised of wooden blocks under different conditions and quantities related to the potential fall of the towers. The evaluation is carried out on synthetic data and compared to human judgments on the same stimuli

A new refinement method for registration of range images based on segmented data

We present a new method for registration of range images, which is based on the results we obtain from the segmentation process. We need two range images segmented into regions, each of them modeled by a paramteric model and the approximation of the transformation between the two range images. Then two sets of corresponding points, one from each range image, are chosen and the transformation between them is computed to further refine the initial approximation of the transformation. The novelty is how we obtain the a corresponding points for the original set of points from the range image. Namely, to obtain them we project set of points from the first range image onto geometric parametric models that were recovered in the second range image and viceversa. This way we obtain two sets of corresponding points. Then we compute the transformation between the two sets. Few iterations are required to improve the initial approximation of the transformation. The results have shown a significant improvement in precision of the registration in comparison with traditional approaches

Learning Manipulation under Physics Constraints with Visual Perception

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we consider the problem of autonomous block stacking and explore solutions to learning manipulation under physics constraints with visual perception inherent to the task. Inspired by the intuitive physics in humans, we first present an end-to-end learning-based approach to predict stability directly from appearance, contrasting a more traditional model-based approach with explicit 3D representations and physical simulation. We study the model's behavior together with an accompanied human subject test. It is then integrated into a real-world robotic system to guide the placement of a single wood block into the scene without collapsing existing tower structure. To further automate the process of consecutive blocks stacking, we present an alternative approach where the model learns the physics constraint through the interaction with the environment, bypassing the dedicated physics learning as in the former part of this work. In particular, we are interested in the type of tasks that require the agent to reach a given goal state that may be different for every new trial. Thereby we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns policies for stacking tasks which are parametrized by a target structure.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.04861, arXiv:1711.00267, arXiv:1604.0006

Beyond standard benchmarks: Parameterizing performance evaluation in visual object tracking

Object-to-camera motion produces a variety of apparent motion patterns that significantly affect performance of short-term visual trackers. Despite being crucial for designing robust trackers, their influence is poorly explored in standard benchmarks due to weakly defined, biased and overlapping attribute annotations. In this paper we propose to go beyond pre-recorded benchmarks with post-hoc annotations by presenting an approach that utilizes omnidirectional videos to generate realistic, consistently annotated, short-term tracking scenarios with exactly parameterized motion patterns. We have created an evaluation system, constructed a fully annotated dataset of omnidirectional videos and the generators for typical motion patterns. We provide an in-depth analysis of major tracking paradigms which is complementary to the standard benchmarks and confirms the expressiveness of our evaluation approach

Robust Object Detection with Interleaved Categorization and Segmentation

This paper presents a novel method for detecting and localizing objects of a visual category in cluttered real-world scenes. Our approach considers object categorization and figure-ground segmentation as two interleaved processes that closely collaborate towards a common goal. As shown in our work, the tight coupling between those two processes allows them to benefit from each other and improve the combined performance. The core part of our approach is a highly flexible learned representation for object shape that can combine the information observed on different training examples in a probabilistic extension of the Generalized Hough Transform. The resulting approach can detect categorical objects in novel images and automatically infer a probabilistic segmentation from the recognition result. This segmentation is then in turn used to again improve recognition by allowing the system to focus its efforts on object pixels and to discard misleading influences from the background. Moreover, the information from where in the image a hypothesis draws its support is employed in an MDL based hypothesis verification stage to resolve ambiguities between overlapping hypotheses and factor out the effects of partial occlusion. An extensive evaluation on several large data sets shows that the proposed system is applicable to a range of different object categories, including both rigid and articulated objects. In addition, its flexible representation allows it to achieve competitive object detection performance already from training sets that are between one and two orders of magnitude smaller than those used in comparable system

Selecting features for object detection using an AdaBoost-compatible evaluation function

This paper addresses the problem of selecting features in a visual object detection setup where a detection algorithm is applied to an input image represented by a set of features. The set of features to be employed in the test stage is prepared in two training-stage steps. In the first step, a feature extraction algorithm produces a (possibly large) initial set of features. In the second step, on which this paper focuses, the initial set is reduced using a selection procedure. The proposed selection procedure is based on a novel evaluation function that measures the utility of individual features for a certain detection task. Owing to its design, the evaluation function can be seamlessly embedded into an AdaBoost selection framework. The developed selection procedure is integrated with state-of-the-art feature extraction and object detection methods. The presented system was tested on five challenging detection setups. In three of them, a fairly high detection accuracy was effected by as few as six features selected out of several hundred initial candidates

Spatially-Adaptive Filter Units for Compact and Efficient Deep Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks excel in a number of computer vision tasks. One of their most crucial architectural elements is the effective receptive field size, that has to be manually set to accommodate a specific task. Standard solutions involve large kernels, down/up-sampling and dilated convolutions. These require testing a variety of dilation and down/up-sampling factors and result in non-compact representations and excessive number of parameters. We address this issue by proposing a new convolution filter composed of displaced aggregation units (DAU). DAUs learn spatial displacements and adapt the receptive field sizes of individual convolution filters to a given problem, thus eliminating the need for hand-crafted modifications. DAUs provide a seamless substitution of convolutional filters in existing state-of-the-art architectures, which we demonstrate on AlexNet, ResNet50, ResNet101, DeepLab and SRN-DeblurNet. The benefits of this design are demonstrated on a variety of computer vision tasks and datasets, such as image classification (ILSVRC 2012), semantic segmentation (PASCAL VOC 2011, Cityscape) and blind image de-blurring (GOPRO). Results show that DAUs efficiently allocate parameters resulting in up to four times more compact networks at similar or better performance.Comment: Accepted for publication in International Journal of Computer Vision, Jan 02 202