The problem of finding a next best viewpoint for 3D modeling or scene mapping has been explored in computer vision over the last decade. This paper tackles a similar problem, but with different characteristics. It proposes a method for dynamic next best viewpoint recovery of a target point while avoiding possible occlusions. Since the environment can change, the method has to iteratively find the next best view with a global understanding of the free and occupied parts. We model the problem as a set of possible viewpoints which correspond to the centers of the facets of a virtual tessellated hemisphere covering the scene. Taking into account occlusions, distances between current and future viewpoints, quality of the viewpoint and joint constraints (robot arm joint distances or limits), we evaluate the next best viewpoint. The proposal has been evaluated on 8 different scenarios with different occlusions and a short 3D video sequence to validate its dynamic performance.
In our case, we are not focused on tracking the occlusions themselves. Our goal is to track the free views. Some authors have studied planning methods to achieve best camera positions, also called camera planning. @cite_13 presented a proposal with a recursive path planner to perform NBV. However, the environment does not change in their case, whereas we have to re-estimate the new position in terms of new occlusions, distance between current and future point and viewpoint quality.
@cite_13
2161481633 1980495828 1968381457 1979838576
This paper considers the problem of sustained multicamera tracking in the presence of occlusion and changes in the target motion model. The key insight of the proposed method is the fact that, under mild conditions, the 2D trajectories of the target in the image planes of each of the cameras are constrained to evolve in the same subspace. This observation allows for identifying, at each time instant, a single (piecewise) linear model that explains all the available 2D measurements. In turn, this model can be used in the context of a modified particle filter to predict future target locations. In the case where the target is occluded to some of the cameras, the missing measurements can be estimated using the facts that they must lie both in the subspace spanned by previous measurements and satisfy epipolar constraints. Hence, by exploiting both dynamical and geometrical constraints the proposed method can robustly handle substantial occlusion, without the need for performing 3D reconstruction, calibrated cameras or constraints on sensor separation. The performance of the proposed tracker is illustrated with several challenging examples involving targets that substantially change appearance and motion models while occluded to some of the cameras. Many traditional challenges in reconstructing 3D motion, such as matching across wide baselines and handling occlusion, reduce in significance as the number of unique viewpoints increases. However, to obtain this benefit, a new challenge arises: estimating precisely which cameras observe which points at each instant in time. We present a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the time-varying visibility of the target points to reconstruct the 3D motion of an event from a large number of cameras. Our algorithm takes, as input, camera poses and image sequences, and outputs the time-varying set of the cameras in which a target patch is visibile and its reconstructed trajectory. We model visibility estimation as a MAP estimate by incorporating various cues including photometric consistency, motion consistency, and geometric consistency, in conjunction with a prior that rewards consistent visibilities in proximal cameras. An optimal estimate of visibility is obtained by finding the minimum cut of a capacitated graph over cameras. We demonstrate that our method estimates visibility with greater accuracy, and increases tracking performance producing longer trajectories, at more locations, and at higher accuracies than methods that ignore visibility or use photometric consistency alone. Tracking across cameras with non-overlapping views is a challenging problem. Firstly, the observations of an object are often widely separated in time and space when viewed from non-overlapping cameras. Secondly, the appearance of an object in one camera view might be very different from its appearance in another camera view due to the differences in illumination, pose and camera properties. To deal with the first problem, we observe that people or vehicles tend to follow the same paths in most cases, i.e., roads, walkways, corridors etc. The proposed algorithm uses this conformity in the traversed paths to establish correspondence. The algorithm learns this conformity and hence the inter-camera relationships in the form of multivariate probability density of space-time variables (entry and exit locations, velocities, and transition times) using kernel density estimation. To handle the appearance change of an object as it moves from one camera to another, we show that all brightness transfer functions from a given camera to another camera lie in a low dimensional subspace. This subspace is learned by using probabilistic principal component analysis and used for appearance matching. The proposed approach does not require explicit inter-camera calibration, rather the system learns the camera topology and subspace of inter-camera brightness transfer functions during a training phase. Once the training is complete, correspondences are assigned using the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation framework using both location and appearance cues. Experiments with real world videos are reported which validate the proposed approach. We propose a novel approach to understanding activities from their partial observations monitored through multiple non-overlapping cameras separated by unknown time gaps. In our approach, each camera view is first decomposed automatically into regions based on the correlation of object dynamics across different spatial locations in all camera views. A new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is then formulated to discover and quantify the time delayed correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views in a single common reference space. We show that learning the time delayed activity correlations offers important contextual information for (i) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network; (ii) robust person re-identification and (iii) global activity interpretation and video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, our approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it thus can be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featured with severe inter-object occlusions. The effectiveness and robustness of our approach are demonstrated through experiments on 330 hours of videos captured from 17 cameras installed at two busy underground stations with complex and diverse scenes.