Mobile Augmented Reality: Fast, Precise, and Smooth Planar Object Tracking

Dmitrii Matveichev, Daw-Tung Lin

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Planar Object Tracking with Sparse Optical Flow Tracking and Descriptor Matching

Slides Poster

We propose an innovative method for combining sparse optical flow tracking and descriptor matching algorithms. The proposed approach solves the following problems that are inherent to keypoint-based and optical flow based tracking algorithms: spatial jitter, extreme scale transformation, extreme perspective transformation, degradation in the number of tracking points, and drifting of tracking points. Our algorithm provides smooth object-position tracking under six degrees of freedom transformations with a small computational cost for providing a high-quality real-time AR experience on mobile platforms. We experimentally demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms while offering faster computational time. A mobile augmented reality (AR) application, which is developed using our approach, delivers planar object tracking with 30 FPS on modern mobile phones for a camera resolution of 1280$\times$720. Finally, we compare the performance of our AR application with that of the Vuforia-based AR application on the same planar objects database. The test results show that our AR application delivers better AR experience than Vuforia in terms of smooth transition of object-pose between video frames.

Similar papers

Visual Saliency Oriented Vehicle Scale Estimation

Qixin Chen, Tie Liu, Jiali Ding, Zejian Yuan, Yuanyuan Shang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Regularized Intensity Matching for Vehicle Scale Estimation with salient object detection

Slides Poster Similar

Vehicle scale estimation with a single camera is a typical application for intelligent transportation and it faces the challenges from visual computing while intensity-based method and descriptor-based method should be balanced. This paper proposed a vehicle scale estimation method based on salient object detection to resolve this problem. The regularized intensity matching method is proposed in Lie Algebra to achieve robust and accurate scale estimation, and descriptor matching and intensity matching are combined to minimize the proposed loss function. The visual attention mechanism is designed to select image patches with texture and remove the occluded image patches. Then the weights are assigned to pixels from the selected image patches which alleviates the influence of noise-corrupted pixels. The experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with regard to the robustness and accuracy of vehicle scale estimation.

Siamese Fully Convolutional Tracker with Motion Correction

Mathew Francis, Prithwijit Guha

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Siamese Ensemble for Visual Tracking with Appearance and Motion Components

Slides Poster Similar

Visual tracking algorithms use cues like appearance, structure, motion etc. for locating an object in a video. We propose an ensemble tracker with appearance and motion components. A siamese tracker that learns object appearance from a static image and motion vectors computed between consecutive frames with a flow network forms the ensemble. Motion predicted object localization is used to correct the appearance component in the ensemble. Complementary nature of the components bring performance improvement as observed in experiments performed on VOT2018 and VOT2019 datasets.

Multi-Scale Keypoint Matching

Sina Lotfian, Hassan Foroosh

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Scale Keypoint Matching Using Multi-Scale Information

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a new hierarchical method to match keypoints by exploiting information across multiple scales. Traditionally, for each keypoint a single scale is detected and the matching process is done in the specific scale. We replace this approach with matching across scale-space. The holistic information from higher scales are used for early rejection of candidates that are far away in the feature space. The more localized and finer details of lower scale are then used to decide between remaining possible points. The proposed multi-scale solution is more consistent with the multi-scale processing that is present in the human visual system and is therefore biologically plausible. We evaluate our method on several datasets and achieve state of the art accuracy, while significantly outperforming others in extraction time.

Learning Knowledge-Rich Sequential Model for Planar Homography Estimation in Aerial Video

Pu Li, Xiaobai Liu

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Sequential Estimation of Planar Homographic Transformations over Aerial Videos

Slides Poster Similar

This paper presents an unsupervised approach that leverages raw aerial videos to learn to estimate planar homographic transformation between consecutive video frames. Previous learning-based estimators work on pairs of images to estimate their planar homographic transformations but suffer from severe over-fitting issues, especially when applying over aerial videos. To address this concern, we develop a sequential estimator that directly processes a sequence of video frames and estimates their pairwise planar homographic transformations in batches. We also incorporate a set of spatial-temporal knowledge to regularize the learning of such a sequence-to-sequence model. We collect a set of challenging aerial videos and compare the proposed method to the alternative algorithms. Empirical studies suggest that our sequential model achieves significant improvement over alternative image-based methods and the knowledge-rich regularization further boosts our system performance. Our codes and dataset could be found at https://github.com/Paul-LiPu/DeepVideoHomography

Edge-Aware Monocular Dense Depth Estimation with Morphology

Zhi Li, Xiaoyang Zhu, Haitao Yu, Qi Zhang, Yongshi Jiang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Spatio-Temporally Smooth Dense Depth Maps Using Only a CPU

Slides Poster Similar

Dense depth maps play an important role in Computer Vision and AR (Augmented Reality). For CV applications, a dense depth map is the cornerstone of 3D reconstruction allowing real objects to be precisely displayed in the computer. And Dense depth maps can handle correct occlusion relationships between virtual content and real objects for better user experience in AR. However, the complicated computation limits the development of computing dense depth maps. We present a novel algorithm that produces low latency, spatio-temporally smooth dense depth maps using only a CPU. The depth maps exhibit sharp discontinuities at depth edges in low computational complexity ways. Our algorithm obtains the sparse SLAM reconstruction first, then extracts coarse depth edges from a down-sampled RGB image by morphology operations. Next, we thin the depth edges and align them with image edges. Finally, a Warm-Start initialization scheme and an improved optimization solver are adopted to accelerate convergence. We evaluate our proposal quantitatively and the result shows improvements on the accuracy of depth map with respect to other state-of-the-art and baseline techniques.

DAL: A Deep Depth-Aware Long-Term Tracker

Yanlin Qian, Song Yan, Alan Lukežič, Matej Kristan, Joni-Kristian Kamarainen, Jiri Matas

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Depth-Aware Long-Term RGBD Tracking with Deep Discriminative Correlation Filter

Slides Poster Similar

The best RGBD trackers provide high accuracy but are slow to run. On the other hand, the best RGB trackers are fast but clearly inferior on the RGBD datasets. In this work, we propose a deep depth-aware long-term tracker that achieves state-of-the-art RGBD tracking performance and is fast to run. We reformulate deep discriminative correlation filter (DCF) to embed the depth information into deep features. Moreover, the same depth-aware correlation filter is used for target re- detection. Comprehensive evaluations show that the proposed tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Princeton RGBD, STC, and the newly-released CDTB benchmarks and runs 20 fps.

A Two-Step Approach to Lidar-Camera Calibration

Yingna Su, Yaqing Ding, Jian Yang, Hui Kong

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Closed-Form Calibration of Lidar-camera System for Ego-motion Estimation and Scene Understanding

Slides Poster Similar

Autonomous vehicles and robots are typically equipped with Lidar and camera. Hence, calibrating the Lidar-camera system is of extreme importance for ego-motion estimation and scene understanding. In this paper, we propose a two-step approach (coarse + fine) for the external calibration between a camera and a multiple-line Lidar. First, a new closed-form solution is proposed to obtain the initial calibration parameters. We compare our solution with the state-of-the-art SVD-based algorithm, and show the benefits of both the efficiency and stability. With the initial calibration parameters, the ICP-based calibration framework is used to register the point clouds which extracted from the camera and Lidar coordinate frames, respectively. Our method has been applied to two Lidar-camera systems: an HDL-64E Lidar-camera system, and a VLP-16 Lidar-camera system. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves promising performance and higher accuracy than two open-source methods.

A Plane-Based Approach for Indoor Point Clouds Registration

Ketty Favre, Muriel Pressigout, Luce Morin, Eric Marchand

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A plane-based registration approach for indoor environments based on LiDAR data

Slides Poster Similar

Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is one of the mostly used algorithms for 3D point clouds registration. This classical approach can be impacted by the large number of points contained in a point cloud. Planar structures, which are less numerous than points, can be used in well-structured man-made environment. In this paper we propose a registration method inspired by the ICP algorithm in a plane-based registration approach for indoor environments. This method is based solely on data acquired with a LiDAR sensor. A new metric based on plane characteristics is introduced to find the best plane correspondences. The optimal transformation is estimated through a two-step minimization approach, successively performing robust plane-to-plane minimization and non-linear robust point-to-plane registration. Experiments on the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) dataset show that the proposed method enables to successfully register 100% of the scans from the three indoor sequences. Experiments also show that the proposed method is more robust in large motion scenarios than other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Siamese Dynamic Mask Estimation Network for Fast Video Object Segmentation

Dexiang Hong, Guorong Li, Kai Xu, Li Su, Qingming Huang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Siamese Dynamic Mask Estimation for Video Object Segmentation

Slides Poster Similar

Video object segmentation(VOS) has been a fundamental topic in recent years, and many deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. However, most of these methods rely on pixel-level matching between the template and the searched frames on the whole image while the targets only occupy a small region. Calculating on the entire image brings lots of additional computation cost. Besides, the whole image may contain some distracting information resulting in many false-positive matching points. To address this issue, motivated by one-stage instance object segmentation methods, we propose an efficient siamese dynamic mask estimation network for fast video object segmentation. The VOS is decoupled into two tasks, i.e. mask feature learning and dynamic kernel prediction. The former is responsible for learning high-quality features to preserve structural geometric information, and the latter learns a dynamic kernel which is used to convolve with the mask feature to generate a mask output. We use Siamese neural network as a feature extractor and directly predict masks after correlation. In this way, we can avoid using pixel-level matching, making our framework more simple and efficient. Experiment results on DAVIS 2016 /2017 datasets show that our proposed methods can run at 35 frames per second on NVIDIA RTX TITAN while preserving competitive accuracy.

Deep Homography-Based Video Stabilization

Maria Silvia Ito, Ebroul Izquierdo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Video Stabilization using Deep Learning and Spatial Transformer Networks

Slides Poster Similar

Video stabilization is fundamental for providing good Quality of Experience for viewers and generating suitable content for video applications. In this scenario, Digital Video Stabilization (DVS) is convenient and economical for casual or amateur recording because it neither requires specific equipment nor demands knowledge of the device used for recording. Although DVS has been a research topic for decades, with a number of proposals from industry and academia, traditional methods tend to fail in a number of scenarios, e.g. with occlusion, textureless areas, parallax, dark areas, amongst others. On the other hand, defining a smooth camera path is a hard task in Deep Learning scenarios. This paper proposes a video stabilization system based on traditional and Deep Learning methods. First, we leverage Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs) to learn transformation parameters between image pairs, then utilize this knowledge to stabilize videos: we obtain the motion parameters between frame pairs and then smooth the camera path using moving averages. Our approach aims at combining the strengths of both Deep Learning and traditional methods: the ability of STNs to estimate motion parameters between two frames and the effectiveness of moving averages to smooth camera paths. Experimental results show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art proposals and a commercial solution.

User-Independent Gaze Estimation by Extracting Pupil Parameter and Its Mapping to the Gaze Angle

Sang Yoon Han, Nam Ik Cho

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Gaze Point Estimation using Pupil Shape for Generalization

Slides Poster Similar

Since gaze estimation plays a crucial role in recognizing human intentions, it has been researched for a long time, and its accuracy is ever increasing. However, due to the wide variation in eye shapes and focusing abilities between the individuals, accuracies of most algorithms vary depending on each person in the test group, especially when the initial calibration is not well performed. To alleviate the user-dependency, we attempt to derive features that are general for most people and use them as the input to a deep network instead of using the images as the input. Specifically, we use the pupil shape as the core feature because it is directly related to the 3D eyeball rotation, and thus the gaze direction. While existing deep learning methods learn the gaze point by extracting various features from the image, we focus on the mapping function from the eyeball rotation to the gaze point by using the pupil shape as the input. It is shown that the accuracy of gaze point estimation also becomes robust for the uncalibrated points by following the characteristics of the mapping function. Also, our gaze network learns the gaze difference to facilitate the re-calibration process to fix the calibration-drift problem that typically occurs with glass-type or head-mount devices.

Visual Object Tracking in Drone Images with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Derya Gözen, Sedat Ozer

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Single Object Tracker for Drone Applications

Slides Poster Similar

There is an increasing demand on utilizing camera equipped drones and their applications in many domains varying from agriculture to entertainment and from sports events to surveillance. In such drone applications, an essential and a common task is tracking an object of interest visually. Drone (or UAV) images have different properties when compared to the ground taken (natural) images and those differences introduce additional complexities to the existing object trackers to be directly applied on drone applications. Some important differences among those complexities include (i) smaller object sizes to be tracked and (ii) different orientations and viewing angles yielding different texture and features to be observed. Therefore, new algorithms trained on drone images are needed for the drone-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based single object tracker that tracks an object of interest in drone images by estimating a series of actions to find the location of the object in the next frame. This is the first work introducing a single object tracker using a deep RL-based technique for drone images. Our proposed solution introduces a novel reward function that aims to reduce the total number of actions taken to estimate the object's location in the next frame and also introduces a different backbone network to be used on low resolution images. Additionally, we introduce a set of new actions into the action library to better deal with the above-mentioned complexities. We compare our proposed solutions to a state of the art tracking algorithm from the recent literature and demonstrate up to 3.87\% improvement in precision and 3.6\% improvement in IoU values on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We also provide additional results on OTB-100 dataset and show up to 3.15\% improvement in precision on the OTB-100 dataset when compared to the same previous state of the art algorithm. Lastly, we analyze the ability to handle some of the challenges faced during tracking, including but not limited to occlusion, deformation, and scale variation for our proposed solutions.

RSINet: Rotation-Scale Invariant Network for Online Visual Tracking

Yang Fang, Geunsik Jo, Chang-Hee Lee

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; RSINet: Rotation-Scale Invariant Network for Adaptive Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

Most Siamese network-based trackers perform the tracking process without model update, and cannot learn target-specific variation adaptively. Moreover, Siamese-based trackers infer the new state of tracked objects by generating axis-aligned bounding boxes, which contain extra background noise, and are unable to accurately estimate the rotation and scale transformation of moving objects, thus potentially reducing tracking performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Scale Invariant Network (RSINet) to address the above problem. Our RSINet tracker consists of a target-distractor discrimination branch and a rotation-scale estimation branch, the rotation and scale knowledge can be explicitly learned by a multi-task learning method in an end-to-end manner. In addtion, the tracking model is adaptively optimized and updated under spatio-temporal energy control, which ensures model stability and reliability, as well as high tracking efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on OTB-100, VOT2018, and LaSOT benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed RSINet tracker yields new state-of-the-art performance compared with recent trackers, while running at real-time speed about 45 FPS.

Improving Image Matching with Varied Illumination

Sarah Braeger, Hassan Foroosh

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Optimizing Feature Matching for Stereo Image Pairs by Stereo Illumination

Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to maximize feature matching performance across stereo image pairs by varying illumination. We perform matching between views per lighting condition, finding unique SIFT correspondences for each condition. These feature matches are then collected together into a single set, selecting those features which present the highest quality match. Instead of capturing each view under each illumination, we approximate lighting changes with a pretrained relighting convo- lutional neural network which only requires each view captured under a single specified lighting condition. We then collect the best of these feature matches over all lighting conditions offered by the relighting network. We further present an optimization to limit the number of lighting conditions evaluated to gain a specified number of matches. Our method is evaluated on a set of indoor scenes excluded from training the network with comparison to features extracted from pretrained VGG16. Our method offers an average 5.5× improvement in number of correct matches while retaining similar precision than by the original lit image pair per scene alone.

Benchmarking Cameras for OpenVSLAM Indoors

Kevin Chappellet, Guillaume Caron, Fumio Kanehiro, Ken Sakurada, Abderrahmane Kheddar

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; OpenVSLAM: Benchmarking Camera Types for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we benchmark different types of cameras and evaluate their performance in terms of reliable localization reliability and precision in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM). Such benchmarking is merely found for visual odometry, but never for vSLAM. Existing studies usually compare several algorithms for a given camera. %This work is the first to handle the dual of the latter, i.e. comparing several cameras for a given SLAM algorithm. The evaluation methodology we propose is applied to the recent OpenVSLAM framework. The latter is versatile enough to natively deal with perspective, fisheye, 360 cameras in a monocular or stereoscopic setup, an in RGB or RGB-D modalities. Results in various sequences containing light variation and scenery modifications in the scene assess quantitatively the maximum localization rate for 360 vision. In the contrary, RGB-D vision shows the lowest localization rate, but highest precision when localization is possible. Stereo-fisheye trades-off with localization rates and precision between 360 vision and RGB-D vision. The dataset with ground truth will be made available in open access to allow evaluating other/future vSLAM algorithms with respect to these camera types.

Dynamic Resource-Aware Corner Detection for Bio-Inspired Vision Sensors

Sherif Abdelmonem Sayed Mohamed, Jawad Yasin, Mohammad-Hashem Haghbayan, Antonio Miele, Jukka Veikko Heikkonen, Hannu Tenhunen, Juha Plosila

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Three Layer Filtering-Harris Algorithm for Event-based Cameras in Real-Time

Slides Similar

Event-based cameras are vision devices that transmit only brightness changes with low latency and ultra-low power consumption. Such characteristics make event-based cameras attractive in the field of localization and object tracking in resource-constrained systems. Since the number of generated events in such cameras is huge, the selection and filtering of the incoming events are beneficial from both increasing the accuracy of the features and reducing the computational load. In this paper, we present an algorithm to detect asynchronous corners form a stream of events in real-time on embedded systems. The algorithm is called the Three Layer Filtering-Harris or TLF-Harris algorithm. The algorithm is based on an events' filtering strategy whose purpose is 1) to increase the accuracy by deliberately eliminating some incoming events, i.e., noise and 2) to improve the real-time performance of the system, i.e., preserving a constant throughput in terms of input events per second, by discarding unnecessary events with a limited accuracy loss. An approximation of the Harris algorithm, in turn, is used to exploit its high-quality detection capability with a low-complexity implementation to enable seamless real-time performance on embedded computing platforms. The proposed algorithm is capable of selecting the best corner candidate among neighbors and achieves an average execution time savings of 59 % compared with the conventional Harris score. Moreover, our approach outperforms the competing methods, such as eFAST, eHarris, and FA-Harris, in terms of real-time performance, and surpasses Arc* in terms of accuracy.

Tracking Fast Moving Objects by Segmentation Network

Ales Zita, Filip Sroubek

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Fast Moving Objects Tracking by Segmentation Using Deep Learning

Slides Poster Similar

Tracking Fast Moving Objects (FMO), which appear as blurred streaks in video sequences, is a difficult task for standard trackers, as the object position does not overlap in consecutive video frames and texture information of the objects is blurred. Up-to-date approaches tuned for this task are based on background subtraction with a static background and slow deblurring algorithms. In this article, we present a tracking-by-segmentation approach implemented using modern deep learning methods that perform near real-time tracking on real-world video sequences. We have developed a physically plausible FMO sequence generator to be a robust foundation for our training pipeline and demonstrate straightforward network adaptation for different FMO scenarios with varying foreground.

Learning to Find Good Correspondences of Multiple Objects

Youye Xie, Yingheng Tang, Gongguo Tang, William Hoff

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Object Inliers and Outliers for Perspective-n-Point and Object Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

Given a set of 3D to 2D putative matches, labeling the correspondences as inliers or outliers plays a critical role in a wide range of computer vision applications including the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) and object recognition. In this paper, we study a more generalized problem which allows the matches to belong to multiple objects with distinct poses. We propose a deep architecture to simultaneously label the correspondences as inliers or outliers and classify the inliers into multiple objects. Specifically, we discretize the 3D rotation space into twenty convex cones based on the facets of a regular icosahedron. For each facet, a facet classifier is trained to predict the probability of a correspondence being an inlier for a pose whose rotation normal vector points towards this facet. An efficient RANSAC-based post-processing algorithm is also proposed to further process the prediction results and detect the objects. Experiments demonstrate that our method is very efficient compared to existing methods and is capable of simultaneously labeling and classifying the inliers of multiple objects with high precision.

Efficient Correlation Filter Tracking with Adaptive Training Sample Update Scheme

Shan Jiang, Shuxiao Li, Chengfei Zhu, Nan Yan

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Training Sample Update Scheme of Correlation Filter Based Trackers for Visual Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

Visual tracking serves as a significant module in many applications. However, the heavy computation and low speed of many recent trackers restrict their applications in some computing power restricted scenarios. On the other hand, the simple update scheme of most correlation filter based trackers limits their robustness during target deformation and occlusion. In this paper, we explore the update scheme of correlation filter based trackers and propose an efficient and adaptive training sample update scheme. Training sample extracted in each frame is updated to the training set according to its distance between existing samples measured with difference hashing algorithm(DHA) or discarded according to tracking result reliability. Experiments on OTB-2015, Temple Color 128 and UAV123 demonstrate our tracker performs favourably against state-of-the-art trackers with light computation and runs over 100 fps on desktop computer with Intel i7-8700 CPU(3.2GHz).

Compact and Discriminative Multi-Object Tracking with Siamese CNNs

Claire Labit-Bonis, Jérôme Thomas, Frederic Lerasle

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Fast, Light-Weight and All-in-One Single Object Tracking for Multi-Target Management

Slides Poster Similar

Following the tracking-by-detection paradigm, multiple object tracking deals with challenging scenarios, occlusions or even missing detections; the priority is often given to quality measures instead of speed, and a good trade-off between the two is hard to achieve. Based on recent work, we propose a fast, light-weight tracker able to predict targets position and reidentify them at once, when it is usually done with two sequential steps. To do so, we combine a bounding box regressor with a target-oriented appearance learner in a newly designed and unified architecture. This way, our tracker can infer the targets' image pose but also provide us with a confidence level about target identity. Most of the time, it is also common to filter out the detector outputs with a preprocessing step, throwing away precious information about what has been seen in the image. We propose a tracks management strategy able to balance efficiently between detection and tracking outputs and their associated likelihoods. Simply put, we spotlight a full siamese based single object tracker able to predict both position and appearance features at once with a light-weight and all-in-one architecture, within a balanced overall multi-target management strategy. We demonstrate the efficiency and speed of our system w.r.t the literature on the well-known MOT17 challenge benchmark, and bring to the fore qualitative evaluations as well as state-of-the-art quantitative results.

SynDHN: Multi-Object Fish Tracker Trained on Synthetic Underwater Videos

Mygel Andrei Martija, Prospero Naval

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Underwater Multi-Object Tracking in the Wild with Deep Hungarian Network

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we seek to extend multi-object tracking research on a relatively less explored domain, that of, underwater multi-object tracking in the wild. Multi-object fish tracking is an important task because it can provide fish monitoring systems with richer information (e.g. multiple views of the same fish) as compared to detections and it can be an invaluable input to fish behavior analysis. However, there is a lack of an annotated benchmark dataset with enough samples for this task. To circumvent the need for manual ground truth tracking annotation, we craft a synthetic dataset. Using this synthetic dataset, we train an integrated detector and tracker called SynDHN. SynDHN uses the Deep Hungarian Network (DHN), which is a differentiable approximation of the Hungarian assignment algorithm. We repurpose DHN to become the tracking component of our algorithm by performing the task of affinity estimation between detector predictions. We consider both spatial and appearance features for affinity estimation. Our results show that despite being trained on a synthetic dataset, SynDHN generalizes well to real underwater video tracking and performs better against our baseline algorithms.

ID Documents Matching and Localization with Multi-Hypothesis Constraints

Guillaume Chiron, Nabil Ghanmi, Ahmad Montaser Awal

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Identity Document Localization in the Wild Using Multi-hypothesis Exploration

Slides Poster Similar

This paper presents an approach for spotting and accurately localizing identity documents in the wild. Contrary to blind solutions that often rely on borders and corners detection, the proposed approach requires a classification a priori along with a list of predefined models. The matching and accurate localization are performed using specific ID document features. This process is especially difficult due to the intrinsic variable nature of ID models (text fields, multi-pass printing with offset, unstable layouts, added artifacts, blinking security elements, non-rigid materials). We tackle the problem by putting different combinations of features in competition within a multi-hypothesis exploration where only the best document quadrilateral candidate is retained thanks to a custom visual similarity metric. The idea is to find, in a given context, at least one feature able to correctly crop the document. The proposed solution has been tested and has shown its benefits on both the MIDV-500 academic dataset and an industrial one supposedly more representative of a real-life application.

Robust Visual Object Tracking with Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Networks

Ning Zhang, Jingen Liu, Ke Wang, Dan Zeng, Tao Mei

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Network for Visual Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

The current deep learning based visual tracking approaches have been very successful by learning the target classification and/or estimation model from a large amount of supervised training data in offline mode. However, most of them can still fail in tracking objects due to some more challenging issues such as dense distractor objects, confusing background, motion blurs, and so on. Inspired by the human ``visual tracking'' capability which leverages motion cues to distinguish the target from the background, we propose a Two-Stream Residual Convolutional Network (TS-RCN) for visual tracking, which successfully exploits both appearance and motion features for model update. Our TS-RCN can be integrated with existing deep learning based visual trackers. To further improve the tracking performance, we adopt a ``wider'' residual network ResNeXt as its feature extraction backbone. To the best of our knowledge, TS-RCN is the first end-to-end trainable two-stream visual tracking system, which makes full use of both appearance and motion features of the target. We have extensively evaluated the TS-RCN on most widely used benchmark datasets including VOT2018, VOT2019, and GOT-10K. The experiment results have successfully demonstrated that our two-stream model can greatly outperform the appearance based tracker, and it also achieves state-of-the-art performance. The tracking system can run at up to 38.1 FPS.

RISEdb: A Novel Indoor Localization Dataset

Carlos Sanchez Belenguer, Erik Wolfart, Álvaro Casado Coscollá, Vitor Sequeira

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Indoor Localization Using LiDAR SLAM and Smartphones: A Benchmarking Dataset

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we introduce a novel public dataset for developing and benchmarking indoor localization systems. We have selected and 3D mapped a set of representative indoor environments including a large office building, a conference room, a workshop, an exhibition area and a restaurant. Our acquisition pipeline is based on a portable LiDAR SLAM backpack to map the buildings and to accurately track the pose of the user as it moves freely inside them. We introduce the calibration procedures that enable us to acquire and geo-reference live data coming from different independent sensors rigidly attached to the backpack. This has allowed us to collect long sequences of spherical and stereo images, together with all the sensor readings coming from a consumer smartphone and locate them inside the map with centimetre accuracy. The dataset addresses many of the limitations of existing indoor localization datasets regarding the scale and diversity of the mapped buildings; the number of acquired sequences under varying conditions; the accuracy of the ground-truth trajectory; the availability of a detailed 3D model and the availability of different sensor types. It enables the benchmarking of existing and the development of new indoor localization approaches, in particular for deep learning based systems that require large amounts of labeled training data.

AerialMPTNet: Multi-Pedestrian Tracking in Aerial Imagery Using Temporal and Graphical Features

Maximilian Kraus, Seyed Majid Azimi, Emec Ercelik, Reza Bahmanyar, Peter Reinartz, Alois Knoll

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; AerialMPTNet: A novel approach for multi-pedestrian tracking in geo-referenced aerial imagery by fusing appearance features

Slides Poster Similar

Multi-pedestrian tracking in aerial imagery has several applications such as large-scale event monitoring, disaster management, search-and-rescue missions, and as input into predictive crowd dynamic models. Due to the challenges such as the large number and the tiny size of the pedestrians (e.g., 4 x 4 pixels) with their similar appearances as well as different scales and atmospheric conditions of the images with their extremely low frame rates (e.g., 2 fps), current state-of-the-art algorithms including the deep learning-based ones are unable to perform well. In this paper, we propose AerialMPTNet, a novel approach for multi-pedestrian tracking in geo-referenced aerial imagery by fusing appearance features from a Siamese Neural Network, movement predictions from a Long Short-Term Memory, and pedestrian interconnections from a GraphCNN. In addition, to address the lack of diverse aerial multi-pedestrian tracking datasets, we introduce the Aerial Multi-Pedestrian Tracking (AerialMPT) dataset consisting of 307 frames and 44,740 pedestrians annotated. To the best of our knowledge, AerialMPT is the largest and most diverse dataset to this date and will be released publicly. We evaluate AerialMPTNet on AerialMPT and KIT AIS, and benchmark with several state-of-the-art tracking methods. Results indicate that AerialMPTNet significantly outperforms other methods on accuracy and time-efficiency.

Reducing False Positives in Object Tracking with Siamese Network

Takuya Ogawa, Takashi Shibata, Shoji Yachida, Toshinori Hosoi

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Robust Long-Term Object Tracking with Adaptive Search based on Motion Models

Slides Poster Similar

We have developed a robust long-term object tracking method that resolves the fundamental cause of the drift and loss of a target in visual object tracking. The proposed method consists of “sampling area extension”, which prevents a tracking result from drifting to other objects by learning false positive samples in advance (before they enter the search region of the target), and “adaptive search based on motion models”, which prevents a tracking result from drifting to other objects and avoids the loss of the target by using not only appearance features but also motion models to adaptively search for the target. Experiments conducted on long-term tracking dataset showed that our first technique improved robustness by 16.6% while the second technique improved robustness by 15.3%. By combining both, our method achieved 21.7% and 9.1% improvement for the robustness and precision, and the processing speed became 3.3 times faster. Additional experiments showed that our method achieved the top robustness among state-of-the-art methods on three long-term tracking datasets. These findings demonstrate that our method is effective for long-term object tracking and that its performance and speed are promising for use in practical applications of various technologies underlying object tracking.

SiamMT: Real-Time Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking

Lorenzo Vaquero, Manuel Mucientes, Victor Brea

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; SiamMT: A Deep-Learning-based Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking System for Video

Slides Poster Similar

Visual object tracking is of great interest in many applications, as it preserves the identity of an object throughout a video. However, while real applications demand systems capable of real-time-tracking multiple objects, multi-object tracking solutions usually follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, thus they depend on running a costly detector in each frame, and they do not allow the tracking of arbitrary objects, i.e., they require training for specific classes. In response to this need, this work presents the architecture of SiamMT, a system capable of efficiently applying individual visual tracking techniques to multiple objects in real-time. This makes it the first deep-learning-based arbitrary multi-object tracker. To achieve this, we propose the global frame features extraction by using a fully-convolutional neural network, followed by the cropping and resizing of the different object search areas. The final similarity operation between these search areas and the target exemplars is carried out with an optimized pairwise cross-correlation. These novelties allow the system to track multiple targets in a scalable manner, achieving 25 fps with 60 simultaneous objects for VGA videos and 40 objects for HD720 videos, all with a tracking quality similar to SiamFC.

Two-Stage Adaptive Object Scene Flow Using Hybrid CNN-CRF Model

Congcong Li, Haoyu Ma, Qingmin Liao

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive object scene flow estimation using a hybrid CNN-CRF model and adaptive iteration

Slides Poster Similar

Scene flow estimation based on stereo sequences is a comprehensive task relevant to disparity and optical flow. Some existing methods are time-consuming and often fail in the presence of reflective surfaces. In this paper, we propose a two-stage adaptive object scene flow estimation method using a hybrid CNN-CRF model (ACOSF), which benefits from high-quality features and the structured modelling capability. Meanwhile, in order to balance the computational efficiency and accuracy, we employ adaptive iteration for energy function optimization, which is flexible and efficient for various scenes. Besides, we utilize high-quality pixel selection to reduce the computation time with only a slight decrease in accuracy. Our method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art, which ranks second on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark.

TSDM: Tracking by SiamRPN++ with a Depth-Refiner and a Mask-Generator

Pengyao Zhao, Quanli Liu, Wei Wang, Qiang Guo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; TSDM: A Depth-D Tracker for 3D Object Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

In a generic object tracking, depth (D) information provides informative cues for foreground-background separation and target bounding box regression. However, so far, few trackers have used depth information to play the important role aforementioned due to the lack of a suitable model. In this paper, a RGB-D tracker named TSDM is proposed, which is composed of a Mask-generator (M-g), SiamRPN++ and a Depth-refiner (D-r). The M-g generates the background masks, and updates them as the target 3D position changes. The D-r optimizes the target bounding box estimated by SiamRPN++, based on the spatial depth distribution difference between the target and the surrounding background. Extensive evaluation on the Princeton Tracking Benchmark and the Visual Object Tracking challenge shows that our tracker outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin while achieving 23 FPS. In addition, a light-weight variant can run at 31 FPS and thus it is practical for real world applications. Code and models of TSDM are available at https://github.com/lql-team/TSDM.

Approach for Document Detection by Contours and Contrasts

Daniil Tropin, Sergey Ilyuhin, Dmitry Nikolaev, Vladimir V. Arlazarov

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A countor-based method for arbitrary document detection on a mobile device

Slides Poster Similar

This paper considers the task of arbitrary document detection performed on a mobile device. The classical contour-based approach often mishandles cases with occlusion, complex background, or blur. Region-based approach, which relies on the contrast between object and background, does not have limitations, however its known implementations are highly resource-consuming. We propose a modification of a countor-based method, in which the competing hypotheses of the contour location are ranked according to the contrast between the areas inside and outside the border. In the performed experiments such modification leads to the 40% decrease of alternatives ordering errors and 10% decrease of the overall number of detection errors. We updated state-of-the-art performance on the open MIDV-500 dataset and demonstrated competitive results with the state-of-the-art on the SmartDoc dataset.

MFST: Multi-Features Siamese Tracker

Zhenxi Li, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Wassim Bouachir

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Features Siamese Tracker for Robust Deep Similarity Tracking

Slides Similar

Siamese trackers have recently achieved interesting results due to their balanced accuracy-speed. This success is mainly due to the fact that deep similarity networks were specifically designed to address the image similarity problem. Therefore, they are inherently more appropriate than classical CNNs for the tracking task. However, Siamese trackers rely on the last convolutional layers for similarity analysis and target search, which restricts their performance. In this paper, we argue that using a single convolutional layer as feature representation is not the optimal choice within the deep similarity framework, as multiple convolutional layers provide several abstraction levels in characterizing an object. Starting from this motivation, we present the Multi-Features Siamese Tracker (MFST), a novel tracking algorithm exploiting several hierarchical feature maps for robust deep similarity tracking. MFST proceeds by fusing hierarchical features to ensure a richer and more efficient representation. Moreover, we handle appearance variation by calibrating deep features extracted from two different CNN models. Based on this advanced feature representation, our algorithm achieves high tracking accuracy, while outperforming several state-of-the-art trackers, including standard Siamese trackers.

Adaptive Context-Aware Discriminative Correlation Filters for Robust Visual Object Tracking

Tianyang Xu, Zhenhua Feng, Xiaojun Wu, Josef Kittler

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; ACA-DCF: Adaptive Context-Aware Discriminative Correlation Filter with complementary attention mechanisms

Slides Poster Similar

In recent years, Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCFs) have gained popularity due to their superior performance in visual object tracking. However, existing DCF trackers usually learn filters using fixed attention mechanisms that focus on the centre of an image and suppresses filter amplitudes in surroundings. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Context-Aware Discriminative Correlation Filter (ACA-DCF) that is able to improve the existing DCF formulation with complementary attention mechanisms. Our ACA-DCF integrates foreground attention and background attention for complementary context-aware filter learning. More importantly, we ameliorate the design using an adaptive weighting strategy that takes complex appearance variations into account. The experimental results obtained on several well-known benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Effective Deployment of CNNs for 3DoF Pose Estimation and Grasping in Industrial Settings

Daniele De Gregorio, Riccardo Zanella, Gianluca Palli, Luigi Di Stefano

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automated Deep Learning for Robotic Grasping Applications

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we investigate how to effectively deploy deep learning in practical industrial settings, such as robotic grasping applications. When a deep-learning based solution is proposed, usually lacks of any simple method to generate the training data. In the industrial field, where automation is the main goal, not bridging this gap is one of the main reasons why deep learning is not as widespread as it is in the academic world. For this reason, in this work we developed a system composed by a 3-DoF Pose Estimator based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and an effective procedure to gather massive amounts of training images in the field with minimal human intervention. By automating the labeling stage, we also obtain very robust systems suitable for production-level usage. An open source implementation of our solution is provided, alongside with the dataset used for the experimental evaluation.

Learning to Segment Dynamic Objects Using SLAM Outliers

Dupont Romain, Mohamed Tamaazousti, Hervé Le Borgne

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Segmentation of Dynamic Objects Using SLAM Outliers Using Consensus Inversion

Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to automatically learn to segment dynamic objects using SLAM outliers. It requires only one monocular sequence per dynamic object for training and consists in localizing dynamic objects using SLAM outliers, creating their masks, and using these masks to train a semantic segmentation network. We integrate the trained network in ORB-SLAM 2 and LDSO. At runtime we remove features on dynamic objects, making the SLAM unaffected by them. We also propose a new stereo dataset and new metrics to evaluate SLAM robustness. Our dataset includes consensus inversions, i.e., situations where the SLAM uses more features on dynamic objects that on the static background. Consensus inversions are challenging for SLAM as they may cause major SLAM failures. Our approach performs better than the State-of-the-Art on the TUM RGB-D dataset in monocular mode and on our dataset in both monocular and stereo modes.

Model Decay in Long-Term Tracking

Efstratios Gavves, Ran Tao, Deepak Gupta, Arnold Smeulders

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Model Bias in Long-Term Tracking

Slides Poster Similar

To account for appearance variations, tracking models need to be updated during the course of inference. However, updating the tracker model with adverse bounding box predictions adds an unavoidable bias term to the learning. This bias term, which we refer to as model decay, offsets the learning and causes tracking drift. While its adverse affect might not be visible in short-term tracking, accumulation of this bias over a long-term can eventually lead to a permanent loss of the target. In this paper, we look at the problem of model bias from a mathematical perspective. Further, we briefly examine the effect of various sources of tracking error on model decay, using a correlation filter (ECO) and a Siamese (SINT) tracker. Based on observations and insights, we propose simple additions that help to reduce model decay in long-term tracking. The proposed tracker is evaluated on four long-term and one short-term tracking benchmarks, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness, even on 30 minute long videos.

Minimal Solvers for Indoor UAV Positioning

Marcus Valtonen Örnhag, Patrik Persson, Mårten Wadenbäck, Kalle Åström, Anders Heyden

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Relative Pose Solvers for Visual Indoor UAV Navigation

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we consider a collection of relative pose problems which arise naturally in applications for visual indoor UAV navigation. We focus on cases where additional information from an onboard IMU is available and thus provides a partial extrinsic calibration through the gravitational vector. The solvers are designed for a partially calibrated camera, for a variety of realistic indoor scenarios, which makes it possible to navigate using images of the ground floor. Current state-of-the-art solvers use more general assumptions, such as using arbitrary planar structures; however, these solvers do not yield adequate reconstructions for real scenes, nor do they perform fast enough to be incorporated in real-time systems. We show that the proposed solvers enjoy better numerical stability, are faster, and require fewer point correspondences, compared to state-of-the-art solvers. These properties are vital components for robust navigation in real-time systems, and we demonstrate on both synthetic and real data that our method outperforms other methods, and yields superior motion estimation.

Inner Eye Canthus Localization for Human Body Temperature Screening

Claudio Ferrari, Lorenzo Berlincioni, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Localization of the Inner Eye Canthus in Thermal Face Images using 3D Morphable Face Model

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for localizing the inner eye canthus in thermal face images. We first coarsely detect 5 facial keypoints corresponding to the center of the eyes, the nosetip and the ears. Then we compute a sparse 2D-3D points correspondence using a 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM). This correspondence is used to project the entire 3D face onto the image, and subsequently locate the inner eye canthus. Detecting this location allows to obtain the most precise body temperature measurement for a person using a thermal camera. We evaluated the approach on a thermal face dataset provided with manually annotated landmarks. However, such manual annotations are normally conceived to identify facial parts such as eyes, nose and mouth, and are not specifically tailored for localizing the eye canthus region. As additional contribution, we enrich the original dataset by using the annotated landmarks to deform and project the 3DMM onto the images. Then, by manually selecting a small region corresponding to the eye canthus, we enrich the dataset with additional annotations. By using the manual landmarks, we ensure the correctness of the 3DMM projection, which can be used as ground-truth for future evaluations. Moreover, we supply the dataset with the 3D head poses and per-point visibility masks for detecting self-occlusions. The data will be publicly released.

Better Prior Knowledge Improves Human-Pose-Based Extrinsic Camera Calibration

Olivier Moliner, Sangxia Huang, Kalle Åström

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Improving Human-pose-based Extrinsic Calibration for Multi-Camera Systems

Slides Poster Similar

Accurate extrinsic calibration of wide baseline multi-camera systems enables better understanding of 3D scenes for many applications and is of great practical importance. Classical Structure-from-Motion calibration methods require special calibration equipment so that accurate point correspondences can be detected between different views. In addition, an operator with some training is usually needed to ensure that data is collected in a way that leads to good calibration accuracy. This limits the ease of adoption of such technologies. Recently, methods have been proposed to use human pose estimation models to establish point correspondences, thus removing the need for any special equipment. The challenge with this approach is that human pose estimation algorithms typically produce much less accurate feature points compared to classical patch-based methods. Another problem is that ambient human motion might not be optimal for calibration. We build upon prior works and introduce several novel ideas to improve the accuracy of human-pose-based extrinsic calibration. Our first contribution is a robust reprojection loss based on a better understanding of the sources of pose estimation error. Our second contribution is a 3D human pose likelihood model learned from motion capture data. We demonstrate significant improvements in calibration accuracy by evaluating our method on four publicly available datasets.

IPT: A Dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking in Closed Domains

Thomas Heitzinger, Martin Kampel

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Identity Preserved Tracking Using Depth Data for Privacy and Privacy

Slides Poster Similar

We present a public dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking (IPT) consisting of sequences of depth data recorded using an Orbbec Astra depth sensor. The dataset features sequences in ten different locations with a high amount of background variation and is designed to be applicable to a wide range of tasks. Its labeling is versatile, allowing for tracking in either 3d space or image coordinates. Next to frame-by-frame 3d and inferred bounding box labeling we provide supplementary annotation of camera poses and room layouts, split in multiple semantically distinct categories. Intended use-cases are applications where both a high level understanding of scene understanding and privacy are central points of consideration, such as active and assisted living (AAL), security and industrial safety. Compared to similar public datasets IPT distinguishes itself with its sequential data format, 3d instance labeling and room layout annotation. We present baseline object detection results in image coordinates using a YOLOv3 network architecture and implement a background model suitable for online tracking applications to increase detection accuracy. Additionally we propose a novel volumetric non-maximum suppression (V-NMS) approach, taking advantage of known room geometry. Last we provide baseline person tracking results utilizing Multiple Object Tracking Challenge (MOTChallenge) evaluation metrics of the CVPR19 benchmark.

NetCalib: A Novel Approach for LiDAR-Camera Auto-Calibration Based on Deep Learning

Shan Wu, Amnir Hadachi, Damien Vivet, Yadu Prabhakar

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Calibration of LiDAR and Cameras using Deep Neural Network

Slides Poster Similar

A fusion of LiDAR and cameras have been widely used in many robotics applications such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and autonomous driving. It is essential that the LiDAR sensor can measure distances accurately, which is a good complement to the cameras. Hence, calibrating sensors before deployment is a mandatory step. The conventional methods include checkerboards, specific patterns, or human labeling, which is trivial and human-labor extensive if we do the same calibration process every time. The main propose of this research work is to build a deep neural network that is capable of automatically finding the geometric transformation between LiDAR and cameras. The results show that our model manages to find the transformations from randomly sampled artificial errors. Besides, our work is open-sourced for the community to fully utilize the advances of the methodology for developing more the approach, initiating collaboration, and innovation in the topic.

One Step Clustering Based on A-Contrario Framework for Detection of Alterations in Historical Violins

Alireza Rezaei, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Emanuel Aldea, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

Slides Poster Similar

Preventive conservation is an important practice in Cultural Heritage. The constant monitoring of the state of conservation of an artwork helps us reduce the risk of damage and number of interventions necessary. In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection of alterations on the surface of historical violins based on an a-contrario framework. Our method is a one step NFA clustering solution which considers grey-level and spatial density information in one background model. The proposed method is robust to noise and avoids parameter tuning and any assumption about the quantity of the worn out areas. We have used as input UV induced fluorescence (UVIFL) images for considering details not perceivable with visible light. Tests were conducted on image sequences included in the ``Violins UVIFL imagery'' dataset. Results illustrate the ability of the algorithm to distinguish the worn area from the surrounding regions. Comparisons with the state of the art clustering methods shows improved overall precision and recall.

Object Segmentation Tracking from Generic Video Cues

Amirhossein Kardoost, Sabine Müller, Joachim Weickert, Margret Keuper

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Light-Weight Variational Framework for Video Object Segmentation in Videos

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple method can provide competitive results compared to the costly CNN-based methods with parameter tuning. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be combined with state-of-the-art CNN-based segmentations in order to improve over their respective results. We evaluate our method on the datasets DAVIS 16,17 and SegTrack v2.

OmniFlowNet: A Perspective Neural Network Adaptation for Optical Flow Estimation in Omnidirectional Images

Charles-Olivier Artizzu, Haozhou Zhang, Guillaume Allibert, Cédric Demonceaux

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; OmniFlowNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for Omnidirectional Optical Flow Estimation

Slides Poster Similar

Spherical cameras and the latest image processing techniques open up new horizons. In particular, methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) now give excellent results for optical flow estimation on perspective images. However, these approaches are highly dependent on their architectures and training datasets. This paper proposes to benefit from years of improvement in perspective images optical flow estimation and to apply it to omnidirectional ones without training on new datasets. Our network, OmniFlowNet, is built on a CNN specialized in perspective images. Its convolution operation is adapted to be consistent with the equirectangular projection. Tested on spherical datasets created with Blender and several equirectangular videos realized from real indoor and outdoor scenes, OmniFlowNet shows better performance than its original network.

Learning Non-Rigid Surface Reconstruction from Spatio-Temporal Image Patches

Matteo Pedone, Abdelrahman Mostafa, Janne Heikkilä

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Dense Spatio-Temporal Depth Maps of Deformable Objects from Video Sequences

Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to reconstruct a dense spatio-temporal depth map of a non-rigidly deformable object directly from a video sequence. The estimation of depth is performed locally on spatio-temporal patches of the video, and then the full depth video of the entire shape is recovered by combining them together. Since the geometric complexity of a local spatio-temporal patch of a deforming non-rigid object is often simple enough to be faithfully represented with a parametric model, we artificially generate a database of small deforming rectangular meshes rendered with different material properties and light conditions, along with their corresponding depth videos, and use such data to train a convolutional neural network. We tested our method on both synthetic and Kinect data and experimentally observed that the reconstruction error is significantly lower than the one obtained using other approaches like conventional non-rigid structure from motion.

Unsupervised Moving Object Detection through Background Models for PTZ Camera

Kimin Yun, Hyung-Il Kim, Kangmin Bae, Jongyoul Park

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Moving Object Detection in a PTZ Camera through Two Background Models

Slides Poster Similar

Moving object detection in a video plays an important role in many vision applications. Recently, moving object detection using appearance modeling based on a convolutional neural network has been actively developed. However, the CNN-based methods usually require the user's supervision of the first frame so that it becomes highly dependent on the training dataset. In contrast, the method of finding a foreground, which models a background occupying a large proportion in an image, can detect a moving object efficiently in an unsupervised manner. However, existing methods based on background modeling in a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera suffer many false positives or loss of moving objects due to the estimation error of camera motion. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a moving object detection method for a PTZ camera through two background models. In an unsupervised way, our method builds the two background models that have different roles: 1) a coarse background model for detecting large changes, and 2) a fine background model for detecting small changes. In more detail, the coarse background model builds a block-based Gaussian model, and the fine model builds a sample consensus model. Both models are adaptively updated according to the estimated camera motion in the video recorded by a PTZ camera. Then, each foreground result from two background models is incorporated to fill the moving object region. Through experiments, the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods and operates in real-time without parallel processing. In addition, we showed the effectiveness of the proposed model through improved results of moving object detection through combination with the latest supervised method.

Unconstrained Vision Guided UAV Based Safe Helicopter Landing

Arindam Sikdar, Abhimanyu Sahu, Debajit Sen, Rohit Mahajan, Ananda Chowdhury

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Autonomous Helicopter Landing in Hazardous Environments from Unmanned Aerial Images Using Constrained Graph Clustering

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we have addressed the problem of automated detection of safe zone(s) for helicopter landing in hazardous environments from images captured by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The unconstrained motion of the image capturing drone (the UAV in our case) makes the problem further difficult. The solution pipeline consists of natural landmark detection and tracking, stereo-pair generation using constrained graph clustering, digital terrain map construction and safe landing zone detection. The main methodological contribution lies in mathematically formulating epipolar constraint and then using it in a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) based graph clustering approach. We have also made publicly available AHL (Autonomous Helicopter Landing) dataset, a new aerial video dataset captured by a drone, with annotated ground-truths. Experimental comparisons with other competing clustering methods i) in terms of Dunn Index and Davies Bouldin Index as well as ii) for frame-level safe zone detection in terms of F-measure and confusion matrix clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation.

Learning Object Deformation and Motion Adaption for Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation

Xiaoyang Zheng, Xin Tan, Jianming Guo, Lizhuang Ma

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation with Mask-propagation-based Model

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a novel method to solve the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation in this paper, where the mask annotation is only given at the first frame of the video sequence. A mask-propagation-based model is applied to learn the past and current information for segmentation. Besides, due to the scarcity of training data, image/mask pairs that model object deformation and shape variance are generated for the training phase. In addition, we generate the key flips between two adjacent frames for motion adaptation. The method works in an end-to-end way, without any online fine-tuning on test videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark datasets, covering cases with single object or multiple objects. We also conduct extensive ablation experiments to analyze the effectiveness of our proposed method.

AV-SLAM: Autonomous Vehicle SLAM with Gravity Direction Initialization

Kaan Yilmaz, Baris Suslu, Sohini Roychowdhury, L. Srikar Muppirisetty

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; VI-SLAM with AGI: A combination of three SLAM algorithms for autonomous vehicles

Slides Poster Similar

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms that are aimed at autonomous vehicles (AVs) are required to utilize sensor redundancies specific to AVs and enable accurate, fast and repeatable estimations of pose and path trajectories. In this work, we present a combination of three SLAM algorithms that utilize a different subset of available sensors such as inertial measurement unit (IMU), a gray-scale mono-camera, and a Lidar. Also, we propose a novel acceleration-based gravity direction initialization (AGI) method for the visual-inertial SLAM algorithm. We analyze the SLAM algorithms and initialization methods for pose estimation accuracy, speed of convergence and repeatability on the KITTI odometry sequences. The proposed VI-SLAM with AGI method achieves relative pose errors less than 2\%, convergence in half a minute or less and convergence time variability less than 3s, which makes it preferable for AVs.