For tiny obstacle discovery in a monocular image, edge is a fundamental visual element. Nevertheless, because of various reasons, e.g., noise and similar color distribution with background, it is still difficult to detect the edges of tiny obstacles at long distance. In this paper, we propose an obstacle-aware discovery method to recover the missing contours of these obstacles, which helps to obtain obstacle proposals as much as possible. First, by using visual cues in monocular images, several multi-layer regions are elaborately inferred to reveal the distances from the camera. Second, several novel obstacle-aware occlusion edge maps are constructed to well capture the contours of tiny obstacles, which combines cues from each layer. Third, to ensure the existence of the tiny obstacle proposals, the maps from all layers are used for proposals extraction. Finally, based on these proposals containing tiny obstacles, a novel obstacle-aware regressor is proposed to generate an obstacle occupied probability map with high confidence. The convincing experimental results with comparisons on the Lost and Found dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving around 9.5 improvement on the accuracy than FPHT and PHT, it even gets comparable performance to MergeNet. Moreover, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms and significantly improves the discovery ability for tiny obstacles at long distance.
@cite_17 aims to find the edge revealling the depth discontinuity between obstacle and background. It takes the edges between adjacent regions of over-segmented image as inputs, and classifies all the edges into two subsets: occlusion edges and trivial edges. Compared to other edge cues @cite_7 @cite_5 , the occlusion edge has stronger response to obstacle contour, especially for tiny obstacles. The reason is that the surface cue is additionally taken into account. Hence, the occlusion edge is more proper for obstacle discovery.
@cite_5 @cite_7 @cite_17
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The paper studies the problem of combining region and boundary cues for natural image segmentation. We employ a large database of manually segmented images in order to learn an optimal affinity function between pairs of pixels. These pairwise affinities can then be used to cluster the pixels into visually coherent groups. Region cues are computed as the similarity in brightness, color, and texture between image patches. Boundary cues are incorporated by looking for the presence of an "intervening contour", a large gradient along a straight line connecting two pixels. We first use the dataset of human segmentations to individually optimize parameters of the patch and gradient features for brightness, color, and texture cues. We then quantitatively measure the power of different feature combinations by computing the precision and recall of classifiers trained using those features. The mutual information between the output of the classifiers and the same-segment indicator function provides an alternative evaluation technique that yields identical conclusions. As expected, the best classifier makes use of brightness, color, and texture features, in both patch and gradient forms. We find that for brightness, the gradient cue outperforms the patch similarity. In contrast, using color patch similarity yields better results than using color gradients. Texture is the most powerful of the three channels, with both patches and gradients carrying significant independent information. Interestingly, the proximity of the two pixels does not add any information beyond that provided by the similarity cues. We also find that the convexity assumptions made by the intervening contour approach are supported by the ecological statistics of the dataset. Text detection in videos is challenging due to low resolution and complex background of videos. Besides, an arbitrary orientation of scene text lines in video makes the problem more complex and challenging. This paper presents a new method that extracts text lines of any orientations based on gradient vector flow (GVF) and neighbor component grouping. The GVF of edge pixels in the Sobel edge map of the input frame is explored to identify the dominant edge pixels which represent text components. The method extracts edge components corresponding to dominant pixels in the Sobel edge map, which we call text candidates (TC) of the text lines. We propose two grouping schemes. The first finds nearest neighbors based on geometrical properties of TC to group broken segments and neighboring characters which results in word patches. The end and junction points of skeleton of the word patches are considered to eliminate false positives, which output the candidate text components (CTC). The second is based on the direction and the size of the CTC to extract neighboring CTC and to restore missing CTC, which enables arbitrarily oriented text line detection in video frame. Experimental results on different datasets, including arbitrarily oriented text data, nonhorizontal and horizontal text data, Hua's data and ICDAR-03 data (camera images), show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of recall, precision and f-measure. Common techniques in structure from motion do not explicitly handle foreground occlusions and disocclusions, leading to several trajectories of a single 3D point. Hence, different discontinued trajectories induce a set of (more inaccurate) 3D points instead of a single 3D point, so that it is highly desirable to enforce long continuous trajectories which automatically bridge occlusions after a re-identification step. The solution proposed in this paper is to connect features in the current image to trajectories which discontinued earlier during the tracking. This is done using a correspondence analysis which is designed for wide baselines and an outlier elimination strategy using the epipolar geometry. The reference to the 3D object points can be used as a new constraint in the bundle adjustment. The feature localization is done using the SIFT detector extended by a Gaussian approximation of the gradient image signal. This technique provides the robustness of SIFT coupled with increased localization accuracy. Our results show that the reconstruction can be drastically improved and the drift is reduced, especially in sequences with occlusions resulting from foreground objects. In scenarios with large occlusions, the new approach leads to reliable and accurate results while a standard reference method fails. This paper is about the detection and inference of road boundaries from mono-images. Our goal is to trace out, in an image, the projection of road boundaries irrespective of whether or not the boundary is actually visible. Large scale occlusion by vehicles prohibits direct approaches - many scenes present 100 occlusion and so we must infer the boundary location using scene context. Such a problem is well suited to CNN derived approaches but the sinuous structure of a hidden narrow continuous curve running through the image presents challenges for conventional NN-architectures. We approach this as a coupled, two class detection problem-solving for occluded and non-occluded curve partitions with a continuity constraint. Our network output is in a hybrid discrete-continuous form which we interpret as measurements of segments of the true road boundary. These measurements are passed to a model selection stage which associates measurements to minimal number of a-priori unknown set of geometric primitives (cubic curves) representing road boundaries. We present a semi-supervised method which leverages a visual localisation to generate 25 thousand labelled images for training and testing - the results of which are presented in the conclusion of the paper.