Developer-friendly segmentation using OpenVL, a high-level task-based abstraction

The goal of this book was to introduce the reader to the recent advances in the field of uncertainty quantification and error propagation for computer vision, image processing, and image analysis that are based on partial differential equations (PDEs). Our original motivation was the observation that more and more often, measured data in the form of images are being used as part of the simulation pipeline, and that error propagation and uncertainty quantification—starting from images but then moving through the pipeline—are important to understanding the ending result of this scientific or engineering process. To analyze the image processing pipeline, we have presented concepts that enable error propagation to be formulated with a set of basic operations: the idea of stochastic images and corresponding (numerical PDE) operations on those images. From this perspective, one approach commonly used within the engineering literature is to employ Monte Carlo sampling techniques to attempt to quantify the impact of errors and variability on an engineering pipeline. Within the uncertainty quantification world, alternative approaches such as the class of generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) methods, which make assumptions about the ability to approximate the process of interest through polynomial approximations, have gained traction as a way of accelerating the convergence of the error and uncertainty quantification process in a computationally tractable way. In this book, we have shown the results of our exploration of the use of the gPC methodology for image processing and computer vision problems. We have relied on the fact that all the prerequisites of the gPC framework (e.g., finite variance, smoothness in the stochastic space, etc.) are intrinsically satisfied in the image processing context. In particular, we have shown how the generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) approach and its corresponding rules for computation (e.g., sums, products, projections on the gPC space, etc.) lead to straightforward generalizations to image processing and computer vision techniques. We have shown that the gPC methodology, when combined with image processing and computer vision techniques, provides a powerful approach to error propagation and uncertainty quantification, and to accessing system sensitivity.

Advances and applications of computer vision techniques in vehicle trajectory generation and surrogate traffic safety indicators

There has been much research on computer vision in last three decades. Computer vision methods have been developed for different situations. One example is a detection of human face. For computers face detection is hard. Faces look different from different viewing directions. Facial expressions affect to the look of the face. Each individual person has a unique face. The lightning conditions can vary and so on.However, face detection is currently possible in limited conditions. In addition, there are some methods that can be used for gender recognition [3], face recognition [5] and facial expression recognition [2].Nonetheless, there has been very little research on how to combine these methods. There has also been quite little research on how to apply these methods in human-computer interaction (HCI).Finding sets of techniques that complement each other in a useful way is one research challenge. There are some applications that take advantage of one or two computer vision techniques. For example, Christian and Avery [1] have developed an information kiosk that uses computer vision to detect potential users from a distance. A similar kiosk has been developed by us in the University of Tampere [4]. There are also some games that use simple computer vision techniques for the interaction. However, there are very few applications that use several computer vision techniques together such as face detection, facial expression recognition and gender recognition. Overall, there has been very little effort in combining different techniques.In my research I develop computer vision methods and combine them, so that the combined method can detect face, recognize gender and facial expressions. After successfully combining the methods, it is easier to develop HCI applications that take advantage of computer vision. Applications that can be used by small group of people are my specific interest. These applications allow me to build adaptive user interfaces and analyze the use of computer vision techniques in improving human-computer interaction.

Evaluation of Surface Finish Quality Using Computer Vision Techniques

Novel view synthesis is a classic problem in computer vision. It refers to the generation of previously unseen views of a scene from a set of sparse input images taken from different viewpoints. One example of novel view synthesis is the interpolation of views in between the two images of a stereo camera. Another classic problem in computer vision is video frame interpolation, which is important for video processing. It refers to the generation of video frames in between existing ones and is commonly used to increase the frame rate of a video or to match the frame rate to the refresh rate of the monitor that the video is being displayed on. Interestingly, off-the-shelf video frame interpolation can directly be employed to successfully perform view interpolation to address the aforementioned stereo view interpolation problem. Video frame interpolation can be seen as temporal novel view synthesis. However, this perspective is usually not considered and novel view synthesis generally concerns generating unseen views in space rather than time. For this reason, the set of sparse input images that is used for spatial novel view synthesis is commonly either captured at the same time, or it is assumed that the scene is static. This paradigm limits the applicability of novel view synthesis in real-world scenarios though. This thesis addresses three applications of novel view synthesis and provides practical solutions that do not require difficult-to-acquire multi-view imagery: video frame interpolation which performs temporal video-to-video synthesis, synthesizing the 3D Ken Burns effect from a single image which performs spatial image-to-video synthesis, synthesizing video action shots which performs spatiotemporal video-to-video and video-to-image synthesis. These applications not only explore different dimensions of time and space, they also perform novel view synthesis on everyday image and video footage. This is in stark contrast to the large body of existing work which focuses on spatial novel view synthesis while requiring multiple input views that were either captured at the same time or under the assumption of a static scene.

Rice is one of the most cultivated cereal in Asian countries and Vietnam in particular. Good seed germination is important for rice seed quality, that impacts the rice production and crop yield. Currently, seed germination evaluation is carried out manually by experienced persons. This is a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we present a system for automatic evaluation of rice seed germination rate based on advanced techniques in computer vision and machine learning. We propose to use U-Net - a convolutional neural network - for segmentation and separation of rice seeds. Further processing such as computing distance transform and thresholding will be applied on the segmented regions for rice seed detection. Finally, ResNet is utilized to classify segmented rice seed regions into two classes: germinated and non- germinated seeds. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold. Firstly, we propose a framework which confirms that convolutional neural networks are better than traditional methods for both segmentation and classification tasks (with F1- scores of 93.38\% and 95.66\% respectively). Secondly, we deploy successfully the automatic tool in a real application for estimating rice germination rate. Finally, we introduce a new dataset of 1276 images of rice seeds from 7 to 8 seed varieties germinated during 6 to 10 days. This dataset is publicly available for research purpose.

In the areas of computer vision and computer graphics, analyzing information about three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional images is essential. Shape from shading is a very fundamental problem in computer vision, which uses features and patterns in images to infer the shape of the object in our viewing direction. The influence of solving this problem is significant. For example, a typical application of shape from shading is in astronomy, in which we can obtain landscape features of a planet by analyzing the information from the image we get.

The simultaneous recovery of three-dimensional (3D) structure from motion (SfM) for the sequences of images, is one of the more difficult problems in computer vision. Classical approaches to the problem rely on using algebraic techniques to solve for these unknowns given two or more image. Motion analysis and 3D shape estimation based on the estimated motion is an important problem in computer vision. The correspondence problem is an important tool in SfM where in this paper a general 3D motion based on a simple rotation, tilt, roll and translation is proposed, and then is used for 3D shape estimation. The current work expands the 2D motion estimation (shift, rotation) to accommodate general 3D motion (shift, rotation, tilt and roll). The proposed work in this paper of motion estimation of moving object is based on Fourier Descriptor Transformation (FDT) analysis before and after motion. The FDT is also used to resolve the correspondence problem in a sequence of images. We test our method on several large-scale photo collections, show the efficacy of the introduced approach to improve reconstruction accuracy.

Which parts of an image evoke emotions in an observer? To answer this question, we introduce a novel problem in computer vision — predicting an Emotion Stimuli Map (ESM), which describes pixel-wise contribution to evoked emotions. Building a new image database, EmotionROI, as a benchmark for predicting the ESM, we find that the regions selected by saliency and objectness detection do not correctly predict the image regions which evoke emotion. Although objects represent important regions for evoking emotion, parts of the background are also important. Based on this fact, we propose using fully convolutional networks for predicting the ESM. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results confirm that our method can predict the regions which evoke emotion better than both saliency and objectness detection.

Abstract: Amidst the rapid evolution of autonomous vehicle technologies, ensuring road safety remains a paramount challenge. Effective detection of lanes and potential hazards, including speed breakers and potholes, is critical for safe autonomous driving. In this study, we introduce an innovative Lane, Speed Breaker, and Pothole Detection System (LSPDS) utilizing YOLOv4 Tiny, a state-of-the-art object detection algorithm and computer vision techniques. Our system integrates computer vision and machine learning techniques for analysis of road conditions. By employing camera sensors, we capture the road scene and apply image processing algorithms to identify lanes, speed breakers, and potholes. Moreover, the system incorporates Firebase for user authentication and SMS services for real-time alerts. YOLOv4 Tiny is employed for accurate detection and classification of these features within the captured images, thereby enhancing the perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles.

Recognizing roads and intersections in aerial images is a challenging problem in computer vision with many real world applications, such as localization and navigation for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem is currently gaining momentum in computer vision and is still far from being solved. While recent approaches have greatly improved due to the advances in deep learning, they provide only pixel-level semantic segmentations. In this paper, we argue that roads and intersections should be recognized at the higher semantic level of road graphs - with roads being edges that connect nodes. Towards this goal we present a method consisting of two stages. During the first stage, we detect roads and intersections with a novel, dual-hop generative adversarial network (DH-GAN) that segments images at the level of pixels. At the second stage, given the pixelwise road segmentation, we find its best covering road graph by applying a smoothing-based graph optimization procedure. Our approach is able to outperform recent published methods and baselines on a large dataset with European roads.

One of the fundamental problems of computer vision is to extract 3D shape and motion from images. This can be achieved when a scene or object is observed from different viewpoints or over a period of time. There is a wide range of applications, ranging from digitizing cultural heritage to vision-based autonomous robot navigation. This talk will present several approaches to solve this problem. First, we’ll discuss techniques for 3D shape recovery for static objects and scenes. One particular case is the 3D mapping and localization in large environments from images, e.g. urban 3D reconstruction from vehicleborne cameras or localization from cell-phone images. Next, we’ll shift our focus to modeling dynamic scenes, e.g. people who are moving around. In addition to explicitly 3D modeling an event, we'll consider the possibility to perform video-based rendering from casually captured videos. Speaker Bio-Sketch: Marc Pollefeys is a full professor in the Dept. of Computer Science of ETH Zurich since 2007 where he is the head of the Institute for Visual Computing and leads the Computer Vision and Geometry lab. He currently also remains associated with the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he started as an assistant professor in 2002 and became an associate professor in 2005. Before this he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he also received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1994 and 1999, respectively. His main area of research is computer vision. One of his main research goals is to develop flexible approaches to capture visual representations of real world objects, scenes and events. Dr. Pollefeys has received several prizes for his research, including a Marr prize, an NSF CAREER award, a Packard Fellowship and a European Research Council Starting Grant. He is the author or co-author of more than 130 peer-reviewed publications. He is the General Chair for the European Conference on Computer Vision 2014 (ECCV), was a Program Co-Chair for the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2009 (CVPR), was general/program co-chair of the Third Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization and Transmission and has organized workshops and courses at major vision and graphics conferences and has served on the program committees of many conferences. Prof. Pollefeys is/was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the International Journal of Computer Vision as well as several other journals in computer vision, graphics and robotics.

\n Hand pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision with a wide range of applications, especially in human-computer interface. With the development of inexpensive consumer-level depth cameras and the evolution on deep learning techniques, the current state-of-art in the problem is continuously developing and several new methods have been proposed in recent years. Those methods are mostly data-driven and reach good results in standard datasets such as NYU, ICVL and HANDS17. An application that would benefit from the use of computer vision techniques is hand occupational therapy. In chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the evaluation of the hand functional state is fundamental for the treatment and prevention of finger deformities. One of the procedures for deformity diagnosis is the measurement of movement angles i.e. flexion/extension and abduction/addution, made using goniometers in a process that can be time-consuming and invasive for the patient. The main proposal of this PhD is to fill a gap in the literature by proposing and evaluating the viability of using a framework composed of a 3D low-cost sensor and a 3D hand pose estimation state-of-art method for automatic assessment of rheumatoid arthritis patients. Given depth maps as input, our framework estimates 3D hand joint positions using a deep convolutional neural network. The proposed pose estimation algorithm can be executed in real-time, allowing users to visualise 3D skeleton tracking results at the same time as the depth images are acquired. Once 3D joint poses are obtained, our framework estimates flexion/extension and abduction/adduction angles by applying computational geometry oper- ations. The absence of public datasets with RA patients in the literature makes the estimation of hand poses of patients a challenge for computer vision data-driven methods. We therefore proposed a protocol to acquire new data from groups of patients and control. We performed experiments of identification of RA patients and control sets and also performed comparison with goniometer data. Results show that a method based on Fourier descriptors is able to perform automatic discrimination of hands with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and healthy pa- tients. The angle between joints can be used as an indicative of current movement capabilities and function. The acquisition is much easier, non-invasive and patient-friendly, significantly reducing the evaluation time and offering real-time data for the dynamic movement.\n

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. – Elizabeth Bowen Introduction There are two fundamentally different philosophies concerning understanding the brain. (1) Understand the brain first. If we can understand how the brain works, we can build smart machines. (2) Using any technique we can think of, make a smart machine. If we can accomplish that, it will give us some hints about how the brain works. This book is all about the second approach, although it draws from current understanding of biological computing. In this chapter, however, we define a few terms, introduce the greater localglobal problem, and then give a very brief introduction to the function of the mammalian brain. • (Section 1.2) From signal and systems perspective, we describe the differences between Computer Vision and some other closely related fields of studies, including, e.g., image processing and pattern recognition. • (Section 1.3) Since almost all problems in Computer Vision involve the issue of localness versus globalness, we briefly explain the “local-global” problem and the “consistency” principle used to solve this problem. • (Section 1.4) Computer Vision is deep-rooted in biological vision. Therefore, in this section, we discuss the biological motivation of Computer Vision and some amazing discoveries from the study of the human visual system. Some Definitions Computer Vision is the process whereby a machine, usually a digital computer, automatically processes an image and reports “what is in the image.” That is, it recognizes the content of the image. For example, the content may be a machined part, and the objective may be not only to locate the part but to inspect it as well. Students tend to get confused by other terms that often appear in the literature, such as Image Processing , Machine Vision , Image Understanding , and Pattern Recognition . We can divide the entire process of Image Processing into Low-Level Image Processing and High-Level Image Processing . If we interpret these processes from signal and systems perspective, it is more clear to describe their difference and similarity from the format of input/output of the system. When a Low-Level Image Processing system processes an input image, the output is still an image, but a somewhat different image. For example, it may be an image with noise removed, an image that does not take as much storage space as the input image, an image that is sharper than the input image, etc.

High-level attributes modeling for indoor scenes classification