18448866
Estimation of Multiple Illuminants from a Single Image of Arbitrary Known Geometry
We present a new method for the detection and estimation of multiple illuminants, using one image of any object with known geometry and Lambertian reflectance. Our method obviates the need to modify the imaged scene by inserting calibration objects of any particular geometry, relying instead on partial knowledge of the geometry of the scene. Thus, the recovered multiple illuminants can be used both for image-based rendering and for shape reconstruction. We first develop our method for the case of a sphere with known size, illuminated by a set of directional light sources. In general, each point of such a sphere will be illuminated by a subset of these sources. We propose a novel, robust way to segment the surface into regions, with each region illuminated by a different set of sources. The regions are separated by boundaries consisting of critical points (points where one illuminant is perpendicular to the normal). Our region-based recursive least-squares method is impervious to noise and missing data and significantly outperforms a previous boundary-based method using spheres[21]. This robustness to missing data is crucial to extending the method to surfaces of arbitrary smooth geometry, other than spheres. We map the normals of the arbitrary shape onto a sphere, which we can then segment, even when only a subset of the normals is available on the scene. We demonstrate experimentally the accuracy of our method, both in detecting the number of light sources and in estimating their directions, by testing on images of a variety of synthetic and real objects.
2947494
High Resolution Tracking of Non-Rigid Motion of Densely Sampled 3D Data Using Harmonic Maps
Abstract
We present a novel automatic method for high resolution, non-rigid dense 3D point tracking. High quality dense point clouds of non-rigid geometry moving at video speeds are acquired using a phase-shifting structured light ranging technique. To use such data for the temporal study of subtle motions such as those seen in facial expressions, an efficient non-rigid 3D motion tracking algorithm is needed to establish inter-frame correspondences. The novelty of this paper is the development of an algorithmic framework for 3D tracking that unifies tracking of intensity and geometric features, using harmonic maps with added feature correspondence constraints. While the previous uses of harmonic maps provided only global alignment, the proposed introduction of interior feature constraints allows to track non-rigid deformations accurately as well. The harmonic map between two topological disks is a diffeomorphism with minimal stretching energy and bounded angle distortion. The map is stable, insensitive to resolution changes and is robust to noise. Due to the strong implicit and explicit smoothness constraints imposed by the algorithm and the high-resolution data, the resulting registration/deformation field is smooth, continuous and gives dense one-to-one inter-frame correspondences. Our method is validated through a series of experiments demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency.

9142519
Utilizing field usage patterns for Java heap space optimization
This research studies the characteristics of field usage patterns in the SpecJVM98 benchmarks. It finds that multiple object instances of the same class often exhibit different field-usage patterns. Motivated by this observation, we designed a heap compression mechanism that classifies object instances at runtime based on their field-usage patterns and eliminates unused fields to save space. To achieve the maximum space savings while minimizing the space and time overhead, our design combines three interrelated techniques in a novel manner: runtime object instance classification, field virtualization, and bidirectional object layout. An experimental evaluation reveals that this mechanism can reduce the maximum heap occupancy of SpecJVM98 benchmarks by up to 18% and 14% on average while keeping the application execution overhead low.
46437694
Estimation of multiple directional illuminants from a single image
We present a new method for the detection and estimation of multiple directional illuminants, using only one single image of an object with known geometry. It obviates the need to modify the imaged scene by inserting calibration objects of any particular geometry, relying instead on partial knowledge of the geometry of the scene. We first develop our method for the case of a Lambertian sphere with known size, illuminated by a set of directional light sources. A novel and robust way is proposed to segment the surface into regions, with each region illuminated by a different set of sources. Our region-based least-squares method is impervious to noise and missing data, which is crucial to extending the method to arbitrary smooth geometry and to surfaces having both Lambertian and specular properties. We propose a novel methodology that integrates information from shadows and shading in the presence of strong directional sources of illumination, even when significant non-directional sources exist in the scene and the object surface is not Lambertian. We demonstrate experimentally the accuracy of our method, both in detecting the number of light sources and in estimating their directions, by testing on images of a variety of synthetic and real objects.
13511504
Non-Rigid Object Alignment with a Mismatch Template Based on Exhaustive Local Search
Non-rigid object alignment is especially challenging when only a single appearance template is available and target and template images fail to match. Two sources of discrepancy between target and template are changes in illumination and non-rigid motion. Because most existing methods rely on a holistic representation for the alignment process, they require multiple training images to capture appearance variance. We developed a patch-based method that requires only a single appearance template of the object. Specifically, we fit the patch-based face model to an unseen image using an exhaustive local search and constrain the local warp updates within a global warping space. Our approach is not limited to intensity values or gradients, and therefore offers a natural framework to integrate multiple local features, such as filter responses, to increase robustness to large initialization error, illumination changes and non-rigid deformations. This approach was evaluated experimentally on more than 100 subjects for multiple illumination conditions and facial expressions. In all the experiments, our patch-based method outperforms the holistic gradient descent method in terms of accuracy and robustness of feature alignment and image registration.
20945105
Real-Time Moving Vehicle Detection With Cast Shadow Removal in Video Based on Conditional Random Field
This paper presents an approach of moving vehicle detection and cast shadow removal for video based traffic monitoring. Based on conditional random field, spatial and temporal dependencies in traffic scenes are formulated under a probabilistic discriminative framework, where contextual constraints during the detection process can be adaptively adjusted in terms of data-dependent neighborhood interaction. Computationally efficient algorithm has been developed to discriminate moving cast shadows and handle nonstationary background processes for real-time vehicle detection in video streams. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively fuses contextual dependencies and robustly detects moving vehicles under heavy shadows even in grayscale video.
18703752
Video editing based on object movement and camera motion
The advancement of computer technology makes video devices/equipments powerful and inexpensive, and thereby the number of applications that can effectively utilize digital videos is increasing.In this paper, the authors propose a new type of video editing, which is based on the movement of objects. A video shot is automatically edited so that the selected objects are placed and kept at the center of the frames to make the resultant video more attractive. Ideally this is interpreted as applying pan, tilt, and/or zoom operations into a source video as post-conditions in video editing. Implementation issues for realization of this facility are also presented in this paper.
1878790
Unsupervised Discovery of Action Classes
In this paper we consider the problem of describing the action being performed by human figures in still images. We will attack this problem using an unsupervised learning approach, attempting to discover the set of action classes present in a large collection of training images. These action classes will then be used to label test images. Our approach uses the coarse shape of the human figures to match pairs of images. The distance between a pair of images is computed using a linear programming relaxation technique. This is a computationally expensive process, and we employ a fast pruning method to enable its use on a large collection of images. Spectral clustering is then performed using the resulting distances. We present clustering and image labeling results on a variety of datasets.
23190531
Algorithm for yield driven correction of layout
As the development of VLSI technique, the critical dimension of IC has become smaller than the exposure wavelength. Due to the diffraction and interaction of optical waves, deformations between the image on wafer and the feature on layout are undeniable. This results in bad performance or even invalid circuits of the chips. OPC is critical compensation technique to correct the deformations on wafer images. This work presents a layout correction and optimization algorithm called MOPC; it's a flexible and efficient core for the model-based OPC system. Since we divide the target features into different types before correction, the OPE between the target features and the environment features and the OPE between the neighboring segments of the inside feature are both considered during the correction.
6194383
Deep Web Navigation by Example
An arc furnace for quickly and continuously melting directly reduced iron ore so as to make steel, wherein the furnace wall above the hearth line and the furnace roof have partly spherical inner surfaces, the spherical surface defining these inner surfaces having the center located adjacent to the point equidistantly spaced apart from the lower ends of electrodes, and the electrodes are inclined at an angle to the vertical so that the distance between the lower ends thereof may be reduced to a minimum.
2358468
Human Action Recognition by Semilatent Topic Models
We propose two new models for human action recognition from video sequences using topic models. Video sequences are represented by a novel "bag-of-words" representation, where each frame corresponds to a "word". Our models differ from previous latent topic models for visual recognition in two major aspects: first of all, the latent topics in our models directly correspond to class labels; second, some of the latent variables in previous topic models become observed in our case. Our models have several advantages over other latent topic models used in visual recognition. First of all, the training is much easier due to the decoupling of the model parameters. Second, it alleviates the issue of how to choose the appropriate number of latent topics. Third, it achieves much better performance by utilizing the information provided by the class labels in the training set. We present action classification results on five different data sets. Our results are either comparable to, or significantly better than previously published results on these data sets.