An active contour model for object tracking using the previous contour

An active contour model is proposed for object tracking using prior information. Conventional algorithms have many problems when applied in object tracking. The proposed active contour algorithm, a model using an edge of an adapted color feature, not only modifies the internal energy function of the conventional algorithm to extend the search range and reduce the computational burden, but also modifies the external energy function to reduce the edge candidates of the object. The algorithm searches normally and uses dynamic programming to solve the energy minimization problem. The main drawbacks of a conventional snake algorithm, i.e., shrinking, a limited search range, sensitivity to outliers, are improved with the proposed algorithm. We illustrate the effectiveness of our scheme using some tracking examples. This work was presented, in part, at the Seventh International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 16–18, 2002     

基于活动基模型的非刚体目标跟踪算法研究

近年来,非刚体目标跟踪技术作为视频目标跟踪中的一个难点受到了广泛关注。为了精确跟踪非刚体目标,克服跟踪过程中目标形状变化和遮挡带来的困难,提出一种基于活动基模型的非刚体目标跟踪算法。首先采用共享草图算法从目标训练样本集中学习得到目标的活动基模型,然后把活动基模型嵌入粒子滤波观测模型中。在对金鱼与企鹅序列跟踪的实验结果表明,与现有算法相比,该算法在非刚体目标形状变化以及存在遮挡的情况下,具有更好的跟踪性能。     

50 Years of object recognition: Directions forward

Object recognition systems constitute a deeply entrenched and omnipresent component of modern intelligent systems. Research on object recognition algorithms has led to advances in factory and office automation through the creation of optical character recognition systems, assembly-line industrial inspection systems, as well as chip defect identification systems. It has also led to significant advances in medical imaging, defence and biometrics. In this paper we discuss the evolution of computer-based object recognition systems over the last fifty years, and overview the successes and failures of proposed solutions to the problem. We survey the breadth of approaches adopted over the years in attempting to solve the problem, and highlight the important role that active and attentive approaches must play in any solution that bridges the semantic gap in the proposed object representations, while simultaneously leading to efficient learning and inference algorithms. From the earliest systems which dealt with the character recognition problem, to modern visually-guided agents that can purposively search entire rooms for objects, we argue that a common thread of all such systems is their fragility and their inability to generalize as well as the human visual system can. At the same time, however, we demonstrate that the performance of such systems in strictly controlled environments often vastly outperforms the capabilities of the human visual system. We conclude our survey by arguing that the next step in the evolution of object recognition algorithms will require radical and bold steps forward in terms of the object representations, as well as the learning and inference algorithms used.     

A graph isomorphism algorithm for object recognition

We present an algorithm to solve the graph isomorphism problem for the purpose of object recognition. Objects, such as those which exist in a robot workspace, may be represented by labelled graphs (graphs with attributes on their nodes and/or edges). Thereafter, object recognition is achieved by matching pairs of these graphs. Assuming that all objects are sufficiently different so that their corresponding representative graphs are distinct, then given a new graph, the algorthm efficiently finds the isomorphic stored graph (if it exists). The algorithm consists of three phases: preprocessing, link construction, and ambiguity resolution. Results from experiments on a wide variety and sizes of graphs are reported. Results are also reported for experiments on recognising graphs that represent protein molecules. The algorithm works for all types of graphs except for a class of highly ambiguous graphs which includes strongly regular graphs. However, members of this class are detected in polynomial time, which leaves the option of switching to a higher complexity algorithm if desired.     

A stochastic graph grammar for compositional object representation and recognition

This paper illustrates a hierarchical generative model for representing and recognizing compositional object categories with large intra-category variance. In this model, objects are broken into their constituent parts and the variability of configurations and relationships between these parts are modeled by stochastic attribute graph grammars, which are embedded in an And-Or graph for each compositional object category. It combines the power of a stochastic context free grammar (SCFG) to express the variability of part configurations, and a Markov random field (MRF) to represent the pictorial spatial relationships between these parts. As a generative model, different object instances of a category can be realized as a traversal through the And-Or graph to arrive at a valid configuration (like a valid sentence in language, by analogy). The inference/recognition procedure is intimately tied to the structure of the model and follows a probabilistic formulation consisting of bottom-up detection steps for the parts, which in turn recursively activate the grammar rules for top-down verification and searches for missing parts. We present experiments comparing our results to state of art methods and demonstrate the potential of our proposed framework on compositional objects with cluttered backgrounds using training and testing data from the public Lotus Hill and Caltech datasets.     

Familiarity based unified visual attention model for fast and robust object recognition

Even though visual attention models using bottom-up saliency can speed up object recognition by predicting object locations, in the presence of multiple salient objects, saliency alone cannot discern target objects from the clutter in a scene. Using a metric named familiarity, we propose a top-down method for guiding attention towards target objects, in addition to bottom-up saliency. To demonstrate the effectiveness of familiarity, the unified visual attention model (UVAM) which combines top-down familiarity and bottom-up saliency is applied to SIFT based object recognition. The UVAM is tested on 3600 artificially generated images containing COIL-100 objects with varying amounts of clutter, and on 126 images of real scenes. The recognition times are reduced by 2.7× and 2×, respectively, with no reduction in recognition accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the familiarity based UVAM.     

Deep active learning with Weighting filter for object detection

Active learning has been demonstrated to be effective in reducing labeling costs by selecting the most valuable data from the unlabeled pool. However, the training data of the first epoch in almost all active learning methods is randomly selected, which will cause an instability learning process. Additionally, current active learning, especially uncertainty-based active learning methods, is prone to the problem of data bias because model learning inevitably prefers partial data. For the above issues, we propose Weighting filter (W-filter) tailored for object detection in this paper, which is an image filtering algorithm that can calculate the contribution of a single image to the neural network training as well as remove similar ones in the entire selected data to optimize the sampling results. We first use W-filter to select the training data of the first epoch, which can guarantee better performance and a more stable learning process. Then, we propose to resample the uncertain data from the perspective of the frequency domain to alleviate the problem of data bias. Finally, we redesign several classical uncertainty methods specifically for classification to make them more suitable for the task of object detection. We do rigorous experiments on standard benchmark datasets to validate our work. Several classical detectors such as Faster R-CNN, SSD, R-FCN, CenterNet, EfficientDet, and effective networks including ResNet, DarkNet, MobileNet are used in experiments, which shows our framework is detector-agnostic and network-agnostic and thus can meet any detection scenario.     

An iterative hough procedure for three-dimensional object recognition

This paper describes an iterative Hough procedure for recognizing images of three-dimensional objects. Straight line segments in the image are matched by finding the parameters of a viewing transformation of a three-dimensional model consisting of line segments. Assuming the scale of the object is known, there are three orientation and two translation parameters to be estimated. Initially a sparse, regular subset of parameters and transformations is evaluated for goodness-of-fit, then the procedure is repeated by successively subdividing the parameter space near current best estimates or peaks.     

Bayesian shape model for facial feature extraction and recognition

A facial feature extraction algorithm using the Bayesian shape model (BSM) is proposed in this paper. A full-face model consisting of the contour points and the control points is designed to describe the face patch, using which the warping/normalization of the extracted face patch can be performed efficiently. First, the BSM is utilized to match and extract the contour points of a face. In BSM, the prototype of the face contour can be adjusted adaptively according to its prior distribution. Moreover, an affine invariant internal energy term is introduced to describe the local shape deformations between the prototype contour in the shape domain and the deformable contour in the image domain. Thus, both global and local shape deformations can be tolerated. Then, the control points are estimated from the matching result of the contour points based on the statistics of the full-face model. Finally, the face patch is extracted and normalized using the piece-wise affine triangle warping algorithm. Experimental results based on real facial feature extraction demonstrate that the proposed BSM facial feature extraction algorithm is more accurate and effective as compared to that of the active shape model (ASM).     

Graph matching for object recognition and recovery

A robust skeleton-based graph matching method for object recognition and recovery applications is presented. The object model uses both a skeleton model and contour segment models, for object recognition and recovery. The presented skeleton-based shape matching method uses a combination of both structural and statistical methods that are applied in a sequential manner, which largely reduce the matching space when compared with previous works. This also provides a good alternate means to alleviate difficulties encountered in segmentation problems. Experiments of object recovery using real biomedical image samples have shown satisfactory results.     

基于随机游走模型的物体识别

针对传统物体识别算法中只依赖于视觉特征进行识别的单一性缺陷,提出了一种结合先验关系的物体识别算法。在训练阶段,通过图模型结构化表示先验关系,分别构建了图像-图像、语义-语义两个子图以及两子图之间的联系,利用该图模型建立随机游走模型;在识别阶段,建立待识别图像与随机游走模型中的图像节点和语义节点的关系,在该概率模型上进行随机游走,将随机游走的结果作为物体识别的结果。实验结果证明了结合先验关系的物体识别算法的有效性;提出的物体识别算法具有较强的识别性能。     

Coupling-and-decoupling: A hierarchical model for occlusion-free object detection

Handling occlusion is a very challenging problem in object detection. This paper presents a method of learning a hierarchical model for X-to-X occlusion-free object detection (e.g., car-to-car and person-to-person occlusions in our experiments). The proposed method is motivated by an intuitive coupling-and-decoupling strategy. In the learning stage, the pair of occluding X?s (e.g., car pairs or person pairs) is represented directly and jointly by a hierarchical And–Or directed acyclic graph (AOG) which accounts for the statistically significant co-occurrence (i.e., coupling). The structure and the parameters of the AOG are learned using the latent structural SVM (LSSVM) framework. In detection, a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is utilized to find the best parse trees for all sliding windows with detection scores being greater than the learned threshold. Then, the two single X?s are decoupled from the declared detections of X-to-X occluding pairs together with some non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing. In experiments, our method is tested on both a roadside-car dataset collected by ourselves (which will be released with this paper) and two public person datasets, the MPII-2Person dataset and the TUD-Crossing dataset. Our method is compared with state-of-the-art deformable part-based methods, and obtains comparable or better detection performance.     

A local approach for 3D object recognition through a set of size functions

In this paper, a local approach for 3D object recognition is presented. It is based on the topological invariants provided by the critical points of the 3D object. The critical points and the links between them are represented by a set of size functions obtained after splitting the 3D object into portions. A suitable similarity measure is used to compare the sets of size functions associated with the 3D objects. In order to validate our approach's recognition performance, we used different collections of 3D objects. The obtained scores are favourably comparable to the related work.     

基于形变模型的红外人脸鲁棒识别*

针对人脸识别中的光照、表情和遮挡变化三大难题,引进热红外人脸克服光照变化,并且采用融合局部形变模型的人脸分类方法克服表情和遮挡变化。该方法将热红外测试人脸看成人脸库的线性组合,并用形变模型表示,通过 最小优化求解组合系数,根据系数的稀疏性进行人脸识别。为了进一步提高算法的鲁棒性,采用人脸分片加权的策略。在Equinox人脸库上通过大量实验表明：基于红外光的人脸识别性能明显高于可见光对光照变化的影响;融合局部形变模型的人脸识别方法可以有效地提高识别率且克服红外人脸识别中的眼镜干扰与表情变化问题。     

Providing views and closure for the object data management group object model

The object data management group (ODMG) object model offers a standard for object-oriented database designers, while attempting to address some issues of interoperability. This research is focused on the viability of using the ODMG data model as a canonical data model in a multidatabase environment, and where weaknesses are identified we have proposed amendments to enable the model to suit the specific needs of this type of distributed database system. This paper describes our efforts to extend its relational style algebra, and to provide query closure and a viewing mechanism for object query language to construct multidatabase schemas.     

Compression and recognition of dance gestures using a deformable model

In this paper, we aim for the recognition of a set of dance gestures from contemporary ballet. Our input data are motion trajectories followed by the joints of a dancing body provided by a motion-capture system. It is obvious that direct use of the original signals is unreliable and expensive. Therefore, we propose a suitable tool for non-uniform sub-sampling of spatiotemporal signals. The key to our approach is the use of a deformable model to provide a compact and efficient representation of motion trajectories. Our dance gesture recognition method involves a set of hidden Markov models (HMMs), each of them being related to a motion trajectory followed by the joints. The recognition of such movements is then achieved by matching the resulting gesture models with the input data via HMMs. We have validated our recognition system on 12 fundamental movements from contemporary ballet performed by four dancers. This revised version was published online in November 2004 with corrections to the section numbers. Ballet Atlantique Régine Chopinot.     

Combining monoSLAM with object recognition for scene augmentation using a wearable camera

In wearable visual computing, maintaining a time-evolving representation of the 3D environment along with the pose of the camera provides the geometrical foundation on which person-centred processing can be built. In this paper, an established method for the recognition of feature clusters is used on live imagery to identify and locate planar objects around the wearer. Objects’ locations are incorporated as additional 3D measurements into a monocular simultaneous localization and mapping process, which routinely uses 2D image measurements to acquire and maintain a map of the surroundings, irrespective of whether objects are present or not. Augmenting the 3D maps with automatically recognized objects enables useful annotations of the surroundings to be presented to the wearer. After demonstrating the geometrical integrity of the method, experiments show its use in two augmented reality applications.