8649500
3D Non-rigid Surface Matching and Registration Based on Holomorphic Differentials
3D surface matching is fundamental for shape registration, deformable 3D non-rigid tracking, recognition and classification. In this paper we describe a novel approach for generating an efficient and optimal combined matching from multiple boundary-constrained conformal parameterizations for multiply connected domains (i.e., genus zero open surface with multiple boundaries), which always come from imperfect 3D data acquisition (holes, partial occlusions, change of pose and non-rigid deformation between scans). This optimality criterion is also used to assess how consistent each boundary is, and thus decide to enforce or relax boundary constraints across the two surfaces to be matched. The linear boundary-constrained conformal parameterization is based on the holomorphic differential forms, which map a surface with n boundaries conformally to a planar rectangle with (n - 2) horizontal slits, other two boundaries as constraints. The mapping is a diffeomorphism and intrinsic to the geometry, handles an open surface with arbitrary number of boundaries, and can be implemented as a linear system. Experimental results are given for real facial surface matching, deformable cloth non-rigid tracking, which demonstrate the efficiency of our method, especially for 3D non-rigid surfaces with significantly inconsistent boundaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2281946
The Determinants of Passenger Load Factor for Chinese Airline Industry
Identification of Load Factor’s Determinants is an important issue for airline industry management. This paper discusses the influence element of Chinese Airline Industry load factor based on the historical high frequency data. We set a SVAR model for the analysis and apply a TARCH-M model to discuss its ARCH effect. Our research finds that one competitor’s current and lagged PLF may affect others, and branch and associated operation also affects PLF’s fluctuation. For the branch companies competing in the same city, the effects of the positive impact and the negative impact are just opposite. The conclusions have important implications to the whole industry.
117805231
Hierarchical methods for three-dimensional surface reconstruction
Surface reconstruction from raw data such as volume data, implicit functions, and scattered data in three-dimensional space is very useful in medical imaging, scientific visualization, and geometric modeling. In this study, several surface reconstruction techniques are investigated. A new surface reconstruction technique and several interpolation schemes are introduced for processing the volume data. A new hierarchical scheme for extracting three-dimensional surfaces from volume data is presented. The hierarchical scheme is used to visualize different levels of surface detail allowing a user to explore different features of the surface at different scales. Estimated surface curvature is used as a smoothness condition, and the distance measurement between different levels of surfaces constructed is used as a stopping criterion. The volume pyramid used by the hierarchical scheme was built and tested by two different data structures: an octree and wavelet transforms. The hierarchical method using three-dimensional wavelet transforms is also useful in multiresolution surface analysis. An adaptive hierarchical method using an octree is implemented to increase the accuracy of the surface by adaptively subdividing regions of high curvature using an appropriate interpolation scheme without substantially increasing the number of polygons.
27110930
Solving the Group Priority Inversion Problem in a Timed Asynchronous System
Considers the priority inversion problem in an actively replicated system. Priority inversion was originally defined in the context of nonreplicated systems. Therefore, we first introduce the concept of group priority inversion, which extends the concept of (local) priority inversion to the context of a group of processors that perform an actively replicated processing. We then present the properties of a request scheduling protocol to enforce a total ordering for the processing of requests while avoiding group priority inversions. These properties have been implemented in a protocol that relies on a timed asynchronous system model equipped with a failure detector of the class /spl diams/S. The proposed solution allows us to replicate a critical server while ensuring that the processing of all the incoming requests is consistent (mechanisms for solving the atomic broadcast problem) and predictable (mechanisms for solving the group priority inversion problem). Thus, the described request scheduling protocol is a key component which can be used to develop fault-tolerant real-time applications in a timed asynchronous system.
9823069
Multiple Tree Models for Occlusion and Spatial Constraints in Human Pose Estimation
Tree-structured models have been widely used for human pose estimation, in either 2D or 3D. While such models allow efficient learning and inference, they fail to capture additional dependencies between body parts, other than kinematic constraints between connected parts. In this paper, we consider the use of multiple tree models, rather than a single tree model for human pose estimation. Our model can alleviate the limitations of a single tree-structured model by combining information provided across different tree models. The parameters of each individual tree model are trained via standard learning algorithms in a single tree-structured model. Different tree models can be combined in a discriminative fashion by a boosting procedure. We present experimental results showing the improvement of our approaches on two different datasets. On the first dataset, we use our multiple tree framework for occlusion reasoning. On the second dataset, we combine multiple deformable trees for capturing spatial constraints between non-connected body parts.
12030912
Local optimization of triangular surface meshes for general quadrics in lp norm
For a set S of distinct points in the x-y plane and a 3-dimensional surface with the general quadratic equation f ey dx cxy by ax z + + + + + = 2 2 we study the problem of finding a locally optimal triangulation of S for the linear approximation of the surface under the Lp norm. We show that the Lp norm error is independent of the translation and rotation by 180 degrees of a single triangle in the x-y plane. This observation allows us to substantially simply the local optimization procedure, and in particular allows us to explicitly compute the separation curves. Locally optimal triangulations are important in the data dependent approximation methods. The paper generalizes earlier results by P. Desnogues and O. Devillers (presented at the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry CCCG ‘95), who studied optimal local triangulations for the unit hyperbolic paraboloid in the L2 norm error.