We propose a new method to analyze scattering light transport in homogeneous translucent media. The incident light undergoes multiple bounces in translucent media, and produces a complex light field. Our method analyzes the light transport in two steps. First, single and multiple scatterings are separated by projecting high-frequency stripe patterns. Then, the light field for each bounce scattering is recursively estimated based on a forward rendering process. Experimental results show that scattering light fields can be analyzed and visualized for each bounce.

A method for detecting moving objects using a Markov random field (MRF) model is proposed, based on background subtraction. We aim at overcoming two major drawbacks of existing methods: dynamic background changes such as swinging trees and camera shaking tend to yield false positives, and the existence of similar colors in objects and their backgrounds tends to yield false negatives. One characteristic of our method is the background subtraction using the nearest neighbor method with multiple background images to cope with dynamic backgrounds. Another characteristic is the estimation of object movement, which provides robustness for similar colors in objects and background regions. From the viewpoint of the MRF, we define the energy function by considering these characteristics and optimize the function by graph cut. In most cases of our experiments, the proposed method can be implemented in (nearly) real time, and experimental results show favorable detection performance even in difficult cases in which methods of previous studies have failed.

Human detection and action recognition form the basis for understanding human behaviors. Human detection is used to detect the positions of humans, and action recognition is able to recognize the action of specific humans. However, numerous approaches have been used to handle action recognition and human detection separately. Therefore, three main issues still exist when independent methods of human detection and action recognition are combined, 1) intrinsic errors in object detection impact the performance of action recognition, 2) features common to action recognition and object detection are missed, 3) the combination also has an impact on processing speed. We propose a single framework for human detection and action recognition to solve these issues. It is based on a hierarchical structure called Boosted Randomized Trees. The nodes are trained such that the upper nodes detect humans from the background, while the lower nodes recognize action. We were able to improve both human detection and action recognition rates over earlier hierarchical structure approaches with the proposed method.

Object detection is an important task for computer vision applications. Many researchers have proposed a number of methods to detect the objects through background modeling. To adapt to “illumination changes” in the background, local feature-based background models are proposed. They assume that local features are not affected by background changes. However, “motion changes”, such as the movement of trees, affect the local features in the background significantly. Therefore, it is difficult for local feature-based models to handle motion changes in the background. To solve this problem, we propose a new background model in this paper by applying a statistical framework to a local feature-based approach. Our proposed method combines the concepts of statistical and local feature-based approaches into a single framework. In particular, we use illumination invariant local features and describe their distribution by Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). The local feature has the ability to tolerate the effects of “illumination changes”, and the GMM can learn the variety of “motion changes”. As a result, this method can handle both background changes. Some experimental results show that the proposed method can detect the foreground objects robustly against both illumination changes and motion changes in the background.

We present a novel technique for enhancing an image captured in low light by using near-infrared flash images. The main idea is to combine a color image with near-infrared flash images captured at the same time without causing any interference with the color image. In this work, near-infrared flash images are effectively used for removing annoying effects that are commonly observed in images of dimly lit environments, namely, image noise and motion blur. Our denoising method uses a pair of color and near-infrared flash images captured simultaneously. Therefore it is applicable to dynamic scenes, whereas existing methods assume stationary scenes and require a pair of flash and no-flash color images captured sequentially. Our deblurring method utilizes a set of near-infrared flash images captured during the exposure time of a single color image and directly acquires a motion blur kernel based on optical flow. We implemented a multispectral imaging system and confirmed the effectiveness of our technique through experiments using real images.

We present a simple and practical approach for segmenting un-occluded items in a scene by actively casting shadows. By ‘items’, we refer to objects (or part of objects) enclosed by depth edges. Our approach utilizes the fact that under varying illumination, un-occluded items will cast shadows on occluded items or background, but will not be shadowed themselves. We employ an active illumination approach by taking multiple images under different illumination directions, with illumination source close to the camera. Our approach ignores the texture edges in the scene and uses only the shadow and silhouette information to determine the occlusions. We show that such a segmentation does not require the estimation of a depth map or 3D information, which can be cumbersome, expensive and often fails due to the lack of texture and presence of specular objects in the scene. Our approach can handle complex scenes with self-shadows and specularities. In addition, we show how to identify regions belonging to occluded objects and segment the scene into multiple layers. Our approach is able to recover the shape of occluded objects if none of its depth edges are occluded. Results on several real scenes along with the analysis of failure cases are presented.

In statistical pattern recognition, it is important to avoid density estimation since density estimation is often more difficult than pattern recognition itself. Following this idea—known as Vapnik’s principle, a statistical data processing framework that employs the ratio of two probability density functions has been developed recently and is gathering a lot of attention in the machine learning and data mining communities. The purpose of this paper is to introduce to the computer vision community recent advances in density ratio estimation methods and their usage in various statistical data processing tasks such as nonstationarity adaptation, outlier detection, feature selection, and independent component analysis.

This paper presents a fast registration method based on solving an energy minimization problem derived by implicit polynomials (IPs). Once a target object is encoded by an IP, it will be driven fast towards a corresponding source object along the IP’s gradient flow without using point-wise correspondences. This registration process is accelerated by a new IP transformation method. Instead of the time-consuming transformation to a large discrete data set, the new method can transform the polynomial coefficients to maintain the same Euclidean transformation. Its computational efficiency enables us to improve a new application for real-time Ultrasound (US) pose estimation. The reported experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of our method in overcoming the limitations of a noisy, unconstrained, and freehand US image, resulting in fast and robust registration.