2078231
The 2005 PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge
The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge ran from February to March 2005. The goal of the challenge was to recognize objects from a number of visual object classes in realistic scenes (i.e. not pre-segmented objects). Four object classes were selected: motorbikes, bicycles, cars and people. Twelve teams entered the challenge. In this chapter we provide details of the datasets, algorithms used by the teams, evaluation criteria, and results achieved.
1555335
Video Mining with Frequent Itemset Configurations
We present a method for mining frequently occurring objects and scenes from videos. Object candidates are detected by finding recurring spatial arrangements of affine covariant regions. Our mining method is based on the class of frequent itemset mining algorithms, which have proven their efficiency in other domains, but have not been applied to video mining before. In this work we show how to express vector-quantized features and their spatial relations as itemsets. Furthermore, a fast motion segmentation method is introduced as an attention filter for the mining algorithm. Results are shown on real world data consisting of music video clips.
359644
Analysis of Human Locomotion based on Partial Measurements
A lot of computer vision applications have to deal with occlusions. In such settings only a subset of the features of interest can be observed, i.e. only incomplete or partial measurements are available. In this article we show how a learned statistical model can be used to make a prediction of the unknown (occluded) features. The probabilistic nature of the framework also allows to compute the remaining uncertainty given an incomplete observation. The resulting posterior probability distribution can then be used for inference. Additional unknowns such as alignment or scale are easily incorporated into the framework. Instead of computing the alignment in a preprocessing step, it is left as an additional uncertainty, similar to the uncertainty introduced by the missing values of the measurement. It is shown how the technique can be applied to the analysis of human loco-motion, when body parts are occluded. Experiments show how the unobserved body locations are predicted and how it can be inferred whether the measurements come from a running or walking sequence.
18072110
Fast Compact City Modeling for Navigation Pre-Visualization
Nowadays, GPS-based car navigation systems mainly use speech and aerial views of simplified road maps to guide drivers to their destination. However, drivers often experience difficulties in linking the simple 2D aerial map with the visual impression that they get from the real environment, which is inherently ground-level based. Therefore, supplying realistically textured 3D city models at ground-level proves very useful for pre-visualizing an upcoming traffic situation. Because this pre-visualization can be rendered from the expected future viewpoints of the driver, the latter will more easily understand the required maneuver. 3D city models can be reconstructed from the imagery recorded by surveying vehicles. The vastness of image material gathered by these vehicles, however, puts extreme demands on vision algorithms to ensure their practical usability. Algorithms need to be as fast as possible and should result in compact, memory efficient 3D city models for future ease of distribution and visualization. For the considered application, these are not contradictory demands. Simplified geometry assumptions can speed up vision algorithms while automatically guaranteeing compact geometry models. We present a novel city modeling framework which builds upon this philosophy to create 3D content at high speed which could allow for pre-visualization of any conceivable traffic situation by car navigation modules.
13029631
Vision and Lie's approach to invariance
The application of invariance theory has gained a renewed interest in the computer vision community. Recent results show that it offers a strong, unifying framework that helps in tackling problems such as calibration-less vision, efficient matching, shape-from-motion, grouping, and several other problems considered crucial to intelligent vision. Nonetheless, a systematic approach to the problem of extracting invariants is far from trivial. This paper describes one such approach, the theory of Lie groups. After a concise and non-rigorous account on the method itself, typical problems that arise in vision are discussed. For each of these problems, one or more relevant examples are given.
21899782
Composite Texture Synthesis
Many textures require complex models to describe their intricate structures. Their modeling can be simplified if they are considered composites of simpler subtextures. After an initial, unsupervised segmentation of the composite texture into the subtextures, it can be described at two levels. One is a label map texture, which captures the layout of the different subtextures. The other consists of the different subtextures. This scheme has to be refined to also include mutual influences between textures, mainly found near their boundaries. The proposed composite texture model also includes these. The paper describes an improved implementation of this idea. Whereas in a previous implementation subtextures and their interactions were synthesized sequentially, this paper proposes a parallel implementation, which yields results of higher quality.
8972364
A Specification Model for Interface Suites
The paper describes a model and tool support for a UMLbased specification approach, extending UML with templates for structured specifications deriving from the ISpec approach. The approach is component-oriented where the unit of description is an interface suite: a coherent collection of interfaces defining interactions that transcend component boundaries. To handle complexity, descriptions from various points of view are necessary, expressed by UML diagrams, templates, etc. The issue is to ensure that the views are consistent. For this, we provide a model to integrate the views. The model is sequence-based; the elements of the sequences are carefully designed tuples that reflect the interface suite approach. Abstractions from the model reflect the views. The model provides the underlying structure for tooling. We developed extensions to Rational Rose by customizing specifications, automating diagram generation and enabling some consistency checks.
14100761
Modeling scenes with local descriptors and latent aspects
We present a new approach to model visual scenes in image collections, based on local invariant features and probabilistic latent space models. Our formulation provides answers to three open questions:(l) whether the invariant local features are suitable for scene (rather than object) classification; (2) whether unsupennsed latent space models can be used for feature extraction in the classification task; and (3) whether the latent space formulation can discover visual co-occurrence patterns, motivating novel approaches for image organization and segmentation. Using a 9500-image dataset, our approach is validated on each of these issues. First, we show with extensive experiments on binary and multi-class scene classification tasks, that a bag-of-visterm representation, derived from local invariant descriptors, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Second, we show that probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) generates a compact scene representation, discriminative for accurate classification, and significantly more robust when less training data are available. Third, we have exploited the ability of PLSA to automatically extract visually meaningful aspects, to propose new algorithms for aspect-based image ranking and context-sensitive image segmentation.