Generic Drone Control Platform for Autonomous Capture of Cinema Scenes

The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool to produce more and more complex and aesthetic camera shots. However, the shooting process currently rely on manual control of the drones which makes it difficult and sometimes inconvenient to work with. In this paper we address the lack of autonomous system to operate generic rotary-wing drones for shooting purposes. We propose a global control architecture based on a high-level generic API used by many UAV. Our solution integrates a compound and coupled model of a generic rotary-wing drone and a Full State Feedback strategy. To address the specific task of capturing cinema scenes, we combine the control architecture with an automatic camera path planning approach that encompasses cinematographic techniques. The possibilities offered by our system are demonstrated through a series of experiments

Potts models and image labelling relaxation by random Markov fields

We show in this paper the deep relationship between classic models from Statistical Physics and Markovian Random Fields models used in image labelling. We present as an application a markovian relaxation method for enhancement and relaxation of previously classified images . An energy function is defined, which depends only on the labels and on their initial value . The main a priori pixel knowledge results from the confusion matrix of the reference samples used for initial classification . The energy to be minimized includes also terms ensuring simultaneous spatial label regularty, growth of some classes and disparition of some others. The method allows for example to reclassify previous rejection class pixels in their spatial environment . Last we present some results on Remote Sensing multispectral and geological ore images, comparing the performances of Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) and Simulated Annealing (SA) . Very low CPU time was obtained due to the principle of the method, working on labels instead of gray levels .Nous montrons dans cet article la relation profonde entre certains modèles d'énergie provenant de la Physique Statistique utilisés et les modèles utilisés en champ de Markov pour l'étiquetage d'images. Nous présentons comme application une méthode markovienne de relaxation et d'amélioration d'images préclassifiées. On définit pour cela une fonction énergie ne dépendant que des labels et de leur valeur initiale, la connaissance a priori sur l'image provenant de la matrice de confusion déduite des échantillons de référence utilisés pour la classification initiale. La fonction à minimiser inclut divers termes assurant la régularité spatiale des labels, la croissance ou la disparition de certaines classe

Levelset and B-spline deformable model techniques for image segmentation: a pragmatic comparative study

International audienceDeformable contours are now widely used in image segmentation, using different models, criteria and numerical schemes. Some theoretical comparisons between some deformable model methods have already been published. Yet, very few experimental comparative studies on real data have been reported. In this paper,we compare a levelset with a B-spline based deformable model approach in order to understand the mechanisms involved in these widely used methods and to compare both evolution and results on various kinds of image segmentation problems. In general, both methods yield similar results. However, specific differences appear when considering particular problems

Narrative-Driven Camera Control for Cinematic Replay of Computer Games

International audienceThis paper presents a system that generates cinematic replays for dialogue-based 3D video games. The system exploits the narrative and geometric information present in these games and automatically computes camera framings and edits to build a coherent cinematic replay of the gaming session. We propose a novel importance-driven approach to cinematic replay. Rather than relying on actions performed by characters to drive the cinematography (as in idiom-based approaches), we rely on the importance of characters in the narrative. We first devise a mechanism to compute the varying importance of the characters. We then map importances of characters with different camera specifications, and propose a novel technique that (i) automatically computes camera positions satisfying given specifications, and (ii) provides smooth camera motions when transitioning between different specifications. We demonstrate the features of our system by implementing three camera behaviors (one for master shots, one for shots on the player character, and one for reverse shots). We present results obtained by interfacing our system with a full-fledged serious game (Nothing for Dinner) containing several hours of 3D animated content

A Diverse and Flexible Teaching Toolkit Facilitates the Human Capacity for Cumulative Culture

© 2017, The Author(s). Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of the reasons for human’s incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture

2D Articulated Human Pose Estimation and Retrieval in (Almost) Unconstrained Still Images

Abstract We present a technique for estimating the spatial layout of humans in still images—the position of the head, torso and arms. The theme we explore is that once a person is localized using an upper body detector, the search for their body parts can be considerably simplified using weak constraints on position and appearance arising from that detection. Our approach is capable of estimating upper body pose in highly challenging uncontrolled images, without prior knowledge of background, clothing, lighting, or the location and scale of the person in the image. People are only required to be upright and seen from the front or the back (not side). We evaluate the stages of our approach experimentally using ground truth layout annotation on a variety of challenging material, such as images from the PASCAL VOC 2008 challenge and video frames from TV shows and feature films. We also propose and evaluate techniques for searching a video dataset for people in a specific pose. To this end, we develop three new pose descriptors and compare their clas