OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Active stereo tracking of multiple free-moving targets
Authors: Luis Perdigoto, João Pedro Barreto 0001, Rui Caseiro, Helder Araújo
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

This article presents a general approach for the active stereo tracking of multiple moving targets. The problem is formulated on the plane, where cameras are modeled as “line scan cameras” and targets are described as points with unconstrained motion. We propose to control the active system parameters in such a manner that the images of the targets in the two views are related by an homography. This homography is specified during the design stage and implicitly encodes the tracking behavior. It is shown that this formulation leads to an elegant geometric framework that enables to decide about the feasibility of a particular active tracking task. We apply it to prove that two cameras with rotation and zoom control, can track up to three moving targets, while assuring that the image location of each target is the same for both views. In addition, the framework is also useful for devising tracking strategies and deriving the required control equations. This feature is illustrated through a real experiment on tracking two independent targets using a binocular stereo head.
Modeling images as mixtures of reference images
Authors: Florent Perronnin, Yan Liu 0017
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

A state-of-the-art approach to measure the similarity of two images is to model each image by a continuous distribution, generally a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and to compute a probabilistic similarity between the GMMs. One limitation of traditional measures such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the probability product kernel (PPK) is that they measure a global match of distributions. This paper introduces a novel image representation. We propose to approximate an image, modeled by a GMM, as a convex combination of K reference image GMMs, and then to describe the image as the K-dimensional vector of mixture weights. The computed weights encode a similarity that favors local matches (i.e. matches of individual Gaussians) and is therefore fundamentally different from the KL or PPK. Although the computation of the mixture weights is a convex optimization problem, its direct optimization is difficult. We propose two approximate optimization algorithms: the first one based on traditional sampling methods, the second one based on a variational bound approximation of the true objective function. We apply this novel representation to the image categorization problem and compare its performance to traditional kernel-based methods. We demonstrate on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset a consistent increase in classification accuracy.
A family of contextual measures of similarity between distributions with application to image retrieval
Authors: Florent Perronnin, Yan Liu 0017, Jean-Michel Renders
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

We introduce a novel family of contextual measures of similarity between distributions: the similarity between two distributions q and p is measured in the context of a third distribution u. In our framework any traditional measure of similarity / dissimilarity has its contextual counterpart. We show that for two important families of divergences (Bregman and Csisz'ar), the contextual similarity computation consists in solving a convex optimization problem. We focus on the case of multinomials and explain how to compute in practice the similarity for several well-known measures. These contextual measures are then applied to the image retrieval problem. In such a case, the context u is estimated from the neighbors of a query q. One of the main benefits of our approach lies in the fact that using different contexts, and especially contexts at multiple scales (i.e. broad and narrow contexts), provides different views on the same problem. Combining the different views can improve retrieval accuracy. We will show on two very different datasets (one of photographs, the other of document images) that the proposed measures have a relatively small positive impact on macro Average Precision (which measures purely ranking) and a large positive impact on micro Average Precision (which measures both ranking and consistency of the scores across multiple queries).
What is a camera?
Authors: Jean Ponce
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

This paper addresses the problem of characterizing a general class of cameras under reasonable, “linear” assumptions. Concretely, we use the formalism and terminology of classical projective geometry to model cameras by two-parameter linear families of straight lines-that is, degenerate reguli (rank-3 families) and non-degenerate linear congruences (rank-4 families). This model captures both the general linear cameras of Yu and McMillan and the linear oblique cameras of Pajdla. From a geometric perspective, it affords a simple classification of all possible camera configurations. From an analytical viewpoint, it also provides a simple and unified methodology for deriving general formulas for projection and inverse projection, triangulation, and binocular and trinocular geometry.
Visual loop closing using multi-resolution SIFT grids in metric-topological SLAM
Authors: Vivek Pradeep, Gérard G. Medioni, James D. Weiland
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

We present an image based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework with online, appearance only loop closing. We adopt a layered approach with metric maps over small areas at the local level and a global, graph based abstract topological framework to build consistent maps over large distances. Rao-Blackwellised particle filtering and sparse bundle adjustment are efficiently coupled with a stereo vision based odometry module to construct conditionally independent `submaps' using SIFT features. By extracting keyframes from these submaps, a multiresolution dictionary of distinct features is built online to learn a generative model of appearance and perform loop closure. Creating such a dictionary also enables the system to distinguish between similar regions during loop closure without requiring any offline training, as has been described in other approaches. Furthermore, instead of occupancy or grid maps, we build 3D reconstructions of the world; a model we plan to use as input to a scene interpretation module for providing navigational cues to the visually impaired. We demonstrate the robustness of our SLAM system with indoor and outdoor experiments for full 6 degrees of freedom motion using only a stereo camera in hand, running at 1 Hz on a standard PC.
Linear embeddings in non-rigid structure from motion
Authors: Vincent C. Rabaud, Serge J. Belongie
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

This paper proposes a method to recover the embedding of the possible shapes assumed by a deforming nonrigid object by comparing triplets of frames from an orthographic video sequence. We assume that we are given features tracked with no occlusions and no outliers but possible noise, an orthographic camera and that any 3D shape of a deforming object is a linear combination of several canonical shapes. By exploiting any repetition in the object motion and defining an ordering between triplets of frames in a generalized non-metric multi-dimensional scaling framework, our approach recovers the shape coefficients of the linear combination, independently from other structure and motion parameters. From this point, a good estimate of the remaining unknowns is obtained for a final optimization to perform full non-rigid structure from motion. Results are presented on synthetic and real image sequences and our method is found to perform better than current state of the art.
Holistic context modeling using semantic co-occurrences
Authors: Nikhil Rasiwasia, Nuno Vasconcelos
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

We present a simple framework to model contextual relationships between visual concepts. The new framework combines ideas from previous object-centric methods (which model contextual relationships between objects in an image, such as their co-occurrence patterns) and scene-centric methods (which learn a holistic context model from the entire image, known as its “gist”). This is accomplished without demarcating individual concepts or regions in the image. First, using the output of a generic appearance based concept detection system, a semantic space is formulated, where each axis represents a semantic feature. Next, context models are learned for each of the concepts in the semantic space, using mixtures of Dirichlet distributions. Finally, an image is represented as a vector of posterior concept probabilities under these contextual concept models. It is shown that these posterior probabilities are remarkably noise-free, and an effective model of the contextual relationships between semantic concepts in natural images. This is further demonstrated through an experimental evaluation with respect to two vision tasks, viz. scene classification and image annotation, on benchmark datasets. The results show that, besides quite simple to compute, the proposed context models attain superior performance than state of the art systems in both tasks.
View-invariant dynamic texture recognition using a bag of dynamical systems
Authors: Avinash Ravichandran, Rizwan Chaudhry, René Vidal
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

In this paper, we consider the problem of categorizing videos of dynamic textures under varying view-point. We propose to model each video with a collection of linear dynamics systems (LDSs) describing the dynamics of spatiotemporal video patches. This bag of systems (BoS) representation is analogous to the bag of features (BoF) representation, except that we use LDSs as feature descriptors. This poses several technical challenges to the BoF framework. Most notably, LDSs do not live in a Euclidean space, hence novel methods for clustering LDSs and computing codewords of LDSs need to be developed. Our framework makes use of nonlinear dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques combined with the Martin distance for LDSs for tackling these issues. Our experiments show that our BoS approach can be used for recognizing dynamic textures in challenging scenarios, which could not be handled by existing dynamic texture recognition methods.
Automated feature extraction for early detection of diabetic retinopathy in fundus images
Authors: Saiprasad Ravishankar, Arpit Jain, Anurag Mittal
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

Automated detection of lesions in retinal images can assist in early diagnosis and screening of a common disease: Diabetic Retinopathy. A robust and computationally efficient approach for the localization of the different features and lesions in a fundus retinal image is presented in this paper. Since many features have common intensity properties, geometric features and correlations are used to distinguish between them. We propose a new constraint for optic disk detection where we first detect the major blood vessels and use the intersection of these to find the approximate location of the optic disk. This is further localized using color properties. We also show that many of the features such as the blood vessels, exudates and microaneurysms and hemorrhages can be detected quite accurately using different morphological operations applied appropriately. Extensive evaluation of the algorithm on a database of 516 images with varied contrast, illumination and disease stages yields 97.1% success rate for optic disk localization, a sensitivity and specificity of 95.7%and 94.2%respectively for exudate detection and 95.1% and 90.5% for microaneurysm/hemorrhage detection. These compare very favorably with existing systems and promise real deployment of these systems.
Enforcing integrability by error correction using l1-minimization
Authors: Dikpal Reddy, Amit K. Agrawal, Rama Chellappa
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

Surface reconstruction from gradient fields is an important final step in several applications involving gradient manipulations and estimation. Typically, the resulting gradient field is non-integrable due to linear/non-linear gradient manipulations, or due to presence of noise/outliers in gradient estimation. In this paper, we analyze integrability as error correction, inspired from recent work in compressed sensing, particulary ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> - ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> equivalence. We propose to obtain the surface by finding the gradient field which best fits the corrupted gradient field in ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> sense. We present an exhaustive analysis of the properties of ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution for gradient field integration using linear algebra and graph analogy. We consider three cases: (a) noise, but no outliers (b) no-noise but outliers and (c) presence of both noise and outliers in the given gradient field. We show that ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution performs as well as least squares in the absence of outliers. While previous ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> - ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> equivalence work has focused on the number of errors (outliers), we show that the location of errors is equally important for gradient field integration. We characterize the ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution both in terms of location and number of outliers, and outline scenarios where ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution is equivalent to ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> solution. We also show that when ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution is not able to remove outliers, the property of local error confinement holds: i.e., the errors do not propagate to the entire surface as in least squares. We compare with previous techniques and show that ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> solution performs well across all scenarios without the need for any tunable parameter adjustments.
Learning general optical flow subspaces for egomotion estimation and detection of motion anomalies
Authors: Richard Roberts 0001, Christian Potthast, Frank Dellaert
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

This paper deals with estimation of dense optical flow and ego-motion in a generalized imaging system by exploiting probabilistic linear subspace constraints on the flow. We deal with the extended motion of the imaging system through an environment that we assume to have some degree of statistical regularity. For example, in autonomous ground vehicles the structure of the environment around the vehicle is far from arbitrary, and the depth at each pixel is often approximately constant. The subspace constraints hold not only for perspective cameras, but in fact for a very general class of imaging systems, including catadioptric and multiple-view systems. Using minimal assumptions about the imaging system, we learn a probabilistic subspace constraint that captures the statistical regularity of the scene geometry relative to an imaging system. We propose an extension to probabilistic PCA (Tipping and Bishop, 1999) as a way to robustly learn this subspace from recorded imagery, and demonstrate its use in conjunction with a sparse optical flow algorithm. To deal with the sparseness of the input flow, we use a generative model to estimate the subspace using only the observed flow measurements. Additionally, to identify and cope with image regions that violate subspace constraints, such as moving objects, objects that violate the depth regularity, or gross flow estimation errors, we employ a per-pixel Gaussian mixture outlier process. We demonstrate results of finding the optical flow subspaces and employing them to estimate dense flow and to recover camera motion for a variety of imaging systems in several different environments.
A similarity measure between vector sequences with application to handwritten word image retrieval
Authors: José A. Rodríguez-Serrano, Florent Perronnin, Josep Lladós 0001, Gemma Sánchez
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

This article proposes a novel similarity measure between vector sequences. Recently, a model-based approach was introduced to address this issue. It consists in modeling each sequence with a continuous Hidden Markov Model (CHMM) and computing a probabilistic measure of similarity between C-HMMs. In this paper we propose to model sequences with semi-continuous HMMs (SC-HMMs): the Gaussians of the SC-HMMs are constrained to belong to a shared pool of Gaussians. This constraint provides two major benefits. First, the a priori information contained in the common set of Gaussians leads to a more accurate estimate of the HMM parameters. Second, the computation of a probabilistic similarity between two SC-HMMs can be simplified to a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) between their mixture weight vectors, which reduces significantly the computational cost. Experimental results on a handwritten word retrieval task show that the proposed similarity outperforms the traditional DTW between the original sequences, and the model-based approach which uses C-HMMs. We also show that this increase in accuracy can be traded against a significant reduction of the computational cost (up to 100 times).
Classifier grids for robust adaptive object detection
Authors: Peter M. Roth, Sabine Sternig, Helmut Grabner, Horst Bischof
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

In this paper we present an adaptive but robust object detector for static cameras by introducing classifier grids. Instead of using a sliding window for object detection we propose to train a separate classifier for each image location, obtaining a very specific object detector with a low false alarm rate. For each classifier corresponding to a grid element we estimate two generative representations in parallel, one describing the object's class and one describing the background. These are combined in order to obtain a discriminative model. To enable to adapt to changing environments these classifiers are learned on-line (i.e., boosting). Continuously learning (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) requires a stable system. In our method this is ensured by a fixed object representation while updating only the representation of the background. We demonstrate the stability in a long-term experiment by running the system for a whole week, which shows a stable performance over time. In addition, we compare the proposed approach to state-of-the-art methods in the field of person and car detection. In both cases we obtain competitive results.
Regularized multi-class semi-supervised boosting
Authors: Amir Saffari, Christian Leistner, Horst Bischof
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

Many semi-supervised learning algorithms only deal with binary classification. Their extension to the multi-class problem is usually obtained by repeatedly solving a set of binary problems. Additionally, many of these methods do not scale very well with respect to a large number of unlabeled samples, which limits their applications to large-scale problems with many classes and unlabeled samples. In this paper, we directly address the multi-class semi-supervised learning problem by an efficient boosting method. In particular, we introduce a new multi-class margin-maximizing loss function for the unlabeled data and use the generalized expectation regularization for incorporating cluster priors into the model. Our approach enables efficient usage of very large data sets. The performance and efficiency of our method is demonstrated on both standard machine learning data sets as well as on challenging object categorization tasks.
Non-rigid 2D-3D pose estimation and 2D image segmentation
Authors: Romeil Sandhu, Samuel Dambreville, Anthony J. Yezzi, Allen R. Tannenbaum
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

In this work, we present a non-rigid approach to jointly solve the tasks of 2D-3D pose estimation and 2D image segmentation. In general, most frameworks which couple both pose estimation and segmentation assume that one has the exact knowledge of the 3D object. However, in non-ideal conditions, this assumption may be violated if only a general class to which a given shape belongs to is given (e.g., cars, boats, or planes). Thus, the key contribution in this work is to solve the 2D-3D pose estimation and 2D image segmentation for a general class of objects or deformations for which one may not be able to associate a skeleton model. Moreover, the resulting scheme can be viewed as an extension of the framework presented in, in which we include the knowledge of multiple 3D models rather than assuming the exact knowledge of a single 3D shape prior. We provide experimental results that highlight the algorithm's robustness to noise, clutter, occlusion, and shape recovery on several challenging pose estimation and segmentation scenarios.
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Earth Mover's Distance metric
Authors: Roman Sandler, Michael Lindenbaum
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) approximates a given data matrix as a product of two low rank nonnegative matrices, usually by minimizing the L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> or the KL distance between the data matrix and the matrix product. This factorization was shown to be useful for several important computer vision applications. We propose here a new NMF algorithm that minimizes the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) error between the data and the matrix product. We propose an iterative NMF algorithm (EMD NMF) and prove its convergence. The algorithm is based on linear programming. We discuss the numerical difficulties of the EMD NMF and propose an efficient approximation. Naturally, the matrices obtained with EMD NMF are different from those obtained with L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> NMF. We discuss these differences in the context of two challenging computer vision tasks - texture classification and face recognition - and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.
Efficient planar graph cuts with applications in Computer Vision
Authors: Frank R. Schmidt, Eno Töppe, Daniel Cremers
Venue: CVPR
Year: 2009

We present a fast graph cut algorithm for planar graphs. It is based on the graph theoretical work and leads to an efficient method that we apply on shape matching and image segmentation. In contrast to currently used methods in computer vision, the presented approach provides an upper bound for its runtime behavior that is almost linear. In particular, we are able to match two different planar shapes of N points in O(N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> log N) and segment a given image of N pixels in O(N log N). We present two experimental benchmark studies which demonstrate that the presented method is also in practice faster than previously proposed graph cut methods: On planar shape matching and image segmentation we observe a speed-up of an order of magnitude, depending on resolution.