Computing surface-based photo-consistency on graphics hardware

© Copyright 2005 IEEEThis paper describes a novel approach to the problem of recovering information from an image set by comparing the radiance of hypothesised point correspondences. Our algorithm is applicable to a number of problems in computer vision, but is explained particularly in terms of recovering geometry from an image set. It uses the idea of photo-consistency to measure the confidence that a hypothesised scene description generated the reference images. Photo-consistency has been used in volumetric scene reconstruction where a hypothesised surface is evolved by considering one voxel at a time. Our approach is different: it represents the scene as a parameterised surface so decisions can be made about its photo-consistency simultaneously over the entire surface rather than a series of independent decisions. Our approach is further characterised by its ability to execute on graphics hardware. Experiments demonstrate that our cost function minimises at the solution and is not adversely affected by occlusion

Development of serious computer game based training module and its integration into working at heights mine site induction – paper II

This paper reports the findings of a collaborative project that developed and demonstrated a serious computer game (SCG) based simulation training module for mine site inductions. It is the second of two papers. The project was collaboration between the University of New South Wales, the University of Adelaide, BHP Billiton Olympic Dam Expansion, Resources and Engineering Skills Alliance, Training and Further Education South Australia and SkillsDMC. The pilot project was aimed at improving mine site inductions by developing a prototype SCG for trainers to incorporate into their regular training activities. The outcome was a high quality generic SCG that provides an interactive visualisation of an Australian mine site operation under construction. The SCG was tested under controlled conditions and subsequently deployed on site

Activity topology estimation for large networks of cameras

Copyright © 2006 IEEEEstimating the paths that moving objects can take through the fields of view of possibly non-overlapping cameras, also known as their activity topology, is an important step in the effective interpretation of surveillance video. Existing approaches to this problem involve tracking moving objects within cameras, and then attempting to link tracks across views. In contrast we propose an approach which begins by assuming all camera views are potentially linked, and successively eliminates camera topologies that are contradicted by observed motion. Over time, the true patterns of motion emerge as those which are not contradicted by the evidence. These patterns may then be used to initialise a finer level search using other approaches if required. This method thus represents an efficient and effective way to learn activity topology for a large network of cameras, particularly with a limited amount of data.van den Hengel, A.; Dick, A.; Hill, R

Augmented particle filtering for efficient visual tracking

Copyright © 2005 IEEEVisual tracking is one of the key tasks in computer vision. The particle filter algorithm has been extensively used to tackle this problem due to its flexibility. However the conventional particle filter uses system transition as the proposal distribution, frequently resulting in poor priors for the filtering step. The main reason is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately model the target's motion. Such a proposal distribution does not take into account the current observations. It is not a trivial task to devise a satisfactory proposal distribution for the particle filter. In this paper we advance a general augmented particle filtering framework for designing the optimal proposal distribution. The essential idea is to augment a second filter's estimate into the proposal distribution design. We then show that several existing improved particle filters can be rationalised within this general framework. Based on this framework we further propose variant algorithms for robust and efficient visual tracking. Experiments indicate that the augmented particle filters are more efficient and robust than the conventional particle filter.Chunhua Shen Brooks, M.J. van den Hengel, A

Fast global kernel density mode seeking with application to localisation and tracking

Copyright © 2005 IEEE.We address the problem of seeking the global mode of a density function using the mean shift algorithm. Mean shift, like other gradient ascent optimisation methods, is susceptible to local maxima, and hence often fails to find the desired global maximum. In this work, we propose a multi-bandwidth mean shift procedure that alleviates this problem, which we term annealed mean shift, as it shares similarities with the annealed importance sampling procedure. The bandwidth of the algorithm plays the same role as the temperature in annealing. We observe that the over-smoothed density function with a sufficiently large bandwidth is uni-modal. Using a continuation principle, the influence of the global peak in the density function is introduced gradually. In this way the global maximum is more reliably located. Generally, the price of this annealing-like procedure is that more iterations are required. Since it is imperative that the computation complexity is minimal in real-time applications such as visual tracking. We propose an accelerated version of the mean shift algorithm. Compared with the conventional mean shift algorithm, the accelerated mean shift can significantly decrease the number of iterations required for convergence. The proposed algorithm is applied to the problems of visual tracking and object localisation. We empirically show on various data sets that the proposed algorithm can reliably find the true object location when the starting position of mean shift is far away from the global maximum, in contrast with the conventional mean shift algorithm that will usually get trapped in a spurious local maximum.Chunhua Shen, Michael J. Brooks and Anton van den Henge

2D articulated tracking with dynamic Bayesian networks

©2004 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.We present a novel method for tracking the motion of an articulated structure in a video sequence. The analysis of articulated motion is challenging because of the potentially large number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) of an articulated body. For particle filter based algorithms, the number of samples required with high dimensional problems can be computationally prohibitive. To alleviate this problem, we represent the articulated object as an undirected graphical model (or Markov Random Field, MRF) in which soft constraints between adjacent subparts are captured by conditional probability distributions. The graphical model is extended across time frames to implement a tracker. The tracking algorithm can be interpreted as a belief inference procedure on a dynamic Bayesian network. The discretisation of the state vectors makes it possible to utilise the efficient belief propagation (BP) and mean field (MF) algorithms to reason in this network. Experiments on real video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method is computationally efficient and performs well in tracking the human body.Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel, Anthony Dick, Michael J. Brook

Approximate least trimmed sum of squares fitting and applications in image analysis

The least trimmed sum of squares (LTS) regression estimation criterion is a robust statistical method for model fitting in the presence of outliers. Compared with the classical least squares estimator, which uses the entire data set for regression and is consequently sensitive to outliers, LTS identifies the outliers and fits to the remaining data points for improved accuracy. Exactly solving an LTS problem is NP-hard, but as we show here, LTS can be formulated as a concave minimization problem. Since it is usually tractable to globally solve a convex minimization or concave maximization problem in polynomial time, inspired by [1], we instead solve LTS’ approximate complementary problem, which is convex minimization. We show that this complementary problem can be efficiently solved as a second order cone program. We thus propose an iterative procedure to approximately solve the original LTS problem. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is robust, efficient and scalable in dealing with problems where data are contaminated with outliers. We show several applications of our method in image analysis.Fumin Shen, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel and Zhenmin Tan

From FNS to HEIV: A link between two vision parameter estimation methods

Copyright © 2004 IEEEProblems requiring accurate determination of parameters from imagebased quantities arise often in computer vision. Two recent, independently developed frameworks for estimating such parameters are the FNS and HEIV schemes. Here, it is shown that FNS and a core version of HEIV are essentially equivalent, solving a common underlying equation via different means. The analysis is driven by the search for a nondegenerate form of a certain generalized eigenvalue problem and effectively leads to a new derivation of the relevant case of the HEIV algorithm. This work may be seen as an extension of previous efforts to rationalize and interrelate a spectrum of estimators, including the renormalization method of Kanatani and the normalized eight-point method of Hartley.Wojciech Chojnacki, Michael J. Brooks, Anton van den Hengel, and Darren Gawle

Efficient piecewise training of deep structured models for semantic segmentation

Recent advances in semantic image segmentation have mostly been achieved by training deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We show how to improve semantic segmentation through the use of contextual information, specifically, we explore 'patch-patch' context between image regions, and 'patch-background' context. For learning from the patch-patch context, we formulate Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with CNN-based pairwise potential functions to capture semantic correlations between neighboring patches. Efficient piecewise training of the proposed deep structured model is then applied to avoid repeated expensive CRF inference for back propagation. For capturing the patch-background context, we show that a network design with traditional multi-scale image input and sliding pyramid pooling is effective for improving performance. Our experimental results set new state-of-the-art performance on a number of popular semantic segmentation datasets, including NYUDv2, PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL-Context, and SIFT-flow. In particular, we achieve an intersection-overunion score of 78:0 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset.Guosheng Lin, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel, Ian Rei

A voting scheme for estimating the synchrony of moving-camera videos

Copyright © 2003 IEEERecovery of dynamic scene properties from multiple videos usually requires the manipulation of synchronous (simultaneously captured) frames. This paper is concerned with the automated determination of this synchrony when the temporal alignment of sequences is unknown. A cost function characterising departure from synchrony is first evolved for the case in which two videos are generated by cameras that may be moving. A novel voting method is then presented for minimising the cost function in the case where the ratio of the cameras' frame rates is unknown. Experimental results indicate this relatively general approach holds promise.Pooley, D.W.; Brooks, M.J.; van den Hengel, A.J.; Chojnacki, W