Despite recent advances in video segmentation, many opportunities remain to improve it using a variety of low and mid-level visual cues. We propose improvements to the leading streaming graph-based hierarchical video segmentation (streamGBH) method based on early and mid level visual processing. The extensive experimental analysis of our approach validates the improvement of hierarchical supervoxel representation by incorporating motion and color with effective filtering. We also pose and illuminate some open questions towards intermediate level video analysis as further extension to streamGBH. We exploit the supervoxels as an initialization towards estimation of dominant affine motion regions, followed by merging of such motion regions in order to hierarchically segment a video in a novel motion-segmentation framework which aims at subsequent applications such as foreground recognition.
We consider the problem of subspace clustering: given points that lie on or near the union of many low-dimensional linear subspaces, recover the subspaces. To this end, one first identifies sets of points close to the same subspace and uses the sets to estimate the subspaces. As the geometric structure of the clusters (linear subspaces) forbids proper performance of general distance based approaches such as K-means, many model-specific methods have been proposed. In this paper, we provide new simple and efficient algorithms for this problem. Our statistical analysis shows that the algorithms are guaranteed exact (perfect) clustering performance under certain conditions on the number of points and the affinity between subspaces. These conditions are weaker than those considered in the standard statistical literature. Experimental results on synthetic data generated from the standard unions of subspaces model demonstrate our theory. We also show that our algorithm performs competitively against state-of-the-art algorithms on real-world applications such as motion segmentation and face clustering, with much simpler implementation and lower computational cost.
We present an unsupervised framework for simultaneous appearance-based object discovery, detection, tracking and reconstruction using RGBD cameras and a robot manipulator. The system performs dense 3D simultaneous localization and mapping concurrently with unsupervised object discovery. Putative objects that are spatially and visually coherent are manipulated by the robot to gain additional motion-cues. The robot uses appearance alone, followed by structure and motion cues, to jointly discover, verify, learn and improve models of objects. Induced motion segmentation reinforces learned models which are represented implicitly as 2D and 3D level sets to capture both shape and appearance. We compare three different approaches for appearance-based object discovery and find that a novel form of spatio-temporal super-pixels gives the highest quality candidate object models in terms of precision and recall. Live experiments with a Baxter robot demonstrate a holistic pipeline capable of automatic discovery, verification, detection, tracking and reconstruction of unknown objects.
Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices have become popular to encode image information. Accounting for the geometry of the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices has proven key to the success of many algorithms. However, most existing methods only approximate the true shape of the manifold locally by its tangent plane. In this paper, inspired by kernel methods, we propose to map SPD matrices to a high dimensional Hilbert space where Euclidean geometry applies. To encode the geometry of the manifold in the mapping, we introduce a family of provably positive definite kernels on the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices. These kernels are derived from the Gaussian ker- nel, but exploit different metrics on the manifold. This lets us extend kernel-based algorithms developed for Euclidean spaces, such as SVM and kernel PCA, to the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the problems of pedestrian detection, ob- ject categorization, texture analysis, 2D motion segmentation and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) segmentation.
Under the framework of graph-based learning, the key to robust subspace clustering and subspace learning is to obtain a good similarity graph that eliminates the effects of errors and retains only connections between the data points from the same subspace (i.e., intra-subspace data points). Recent works achieve good performance by modeling errors into their objective functions to remove the errors from the inputs. However, these approaches face the limitations that the structure of errors should be known prior and a complex convex problem must be solved. In this paper, we present a novel method to eliminate the effects of the errors from the projection space (representation) rather than from the input space. We first prove that $\ell_1$-, $\ell_2$-, $\ell_{\infty}$-, and nuclear-norm based linear projection spaces share the property of Intra-subspace Projection Dominance (IPD), i.e., the coefficients over intra-subspace data points are larger than those over inter-subspace data points. Based on this property, we introduce a method to construct a sparse similarity graph, called L2-Graph. The subspace clustering and subspace learning algorithms are developed upon L2-Graph. Experiments show that L2-Graph algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art methods for feature extraction, image clustering, and motion segmentation in terms of accuracy, robustness, and time efficiency.
Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel office chairs. A robotic mobile manipulator would benefit from the ability to acquire kinematic models of such objects from observation. This paper describes a method by which a robot can acquire an object model by capturing depth imagery of the object as a human moves it through its range of motion. We envision that in future, a machine newly introduced to an environment could be shown by its human user the articulated objects particular to that environment, inferring from these "visual demonstrations" enough information to actuate each object independently of the user. Our method employs sparse (markerless) feature tracking, motion segmentation, component pose estimation, and articulation learning; it does not require prior object models. Using the method, a robot can observe an object being exercised, infer a kinematic model incorporating rigid, prismatic and revolute joints, then use the model to predict the object's motion from a novel vantage point. We evaluate the method's performance, and compare it to that of a previously published technique, for a variety of household objects.
Feature-based object matching is a fundamental problem for many applications in computer vision, such as object recognition, 3D reconstruction, tracking, and motion segmentation. In this work, we consider simultaneously matching object instances in a set of images, where both inlier and outlier features are extracted. The task is to identify the inlier features and establish their consistent correspondences across the image set. This is a challenging combinatorial problem, and the problem complexity grows exponentially with the image number. To this end, we propose a novel framework, termed ROML, to address this problem. ROML optimizes simultaneously a partial permutation matrix (PPM) for each image, and feature correspondences are established by the obtained PPMs. Two of our key contributions are summarized as follows. (1) We formulate the problem as rank and sparsity minimization for PPM optimization, and treat simultaneous optimization of multiple PPMs as a regularized consensus problem in the context of distributed optimization. (2) We use the ADMM method to solve the thus formulated ROML problem, in which a subproblem associated with a single PPM optimization appears to be a difficult integer quadratic program (IQP). We prove that under wildly applicable conditions, this IQP is equivalent to a linear sum assignment problem (LSAP), which can be efficiently solved to an exact solution. Extensive experiments on rigid/non-rigid object matching, matching instances of a common object category, and common object localization show the efficacy of our proposed method.
While the literature has been fairly dense in the areas of scene understanding and semantic labeling there have been few works that make use of motion cues to embellish semantic performance and vice versa. In this paper, we address the problem of semantic motion segmentation, and show how semantic and motion priors augments performance. We pro- pose an algorithm that jointly infers the semantic class and motion labels of an object. Integrating semantic, geometric and optical ow based constraints into a dense CRF-model we infer both the object class as well as motion class, for each pixel. We found improvement in performance using a fully connected CRF as compared to a standard clique-based CRFs. For inference, we use a Mean Field approximation based algorithm. Our method outperforms recently pro- posed motion detection algorithms and also improves the semantic labeling compared to the state-of-the-art Automatic Labeling Environment algorithm on the challenging KITTI dataset especially for object classes such as pedestrians and cars that are critical to an outdoor robotic navigation scenario.
Image based reconstruction of urban environments is a challenging problem that deals with optimization of large number of variables, and has several sources of errors like the presence of dynamic objects. Since most large scale approaches make the assumption of observing static scenes, dynamic objects are relegated to the noise modeling section of such systems. This is an approach of convenience since the RANSAC based framework used to compute most multiview geometric quantities for static scenes naturally confine dynamic objects to the class of outlier measurements. However, reconstructing dynamic objects along with the static environment helps us get a complete picture of an urban environment. Such understanding can then be used for important robotic tasks like path planning for autonomous navigation, obstacle tracking and avoidance, and other areas. In this paper, we propose a system for robust SLAM that works in both static and dynamic environments. To overcome the challenge of dynamic objects in the scene, we propose a new model to incorporate semantic constraints into the reconstruction algorithm. While some of these constraints are based on multi-layered dense CRFs trained over appearance as well as motion cues, other proposed constraints can be expressed as additional terms in the bundle adjustment optimization process that does iterative refinement of 3D structure and camera / object motion trajectories. We show results on the challenging KITTI urban dataset for accuracy of motion segmentation and reconstruction of the trajectory and shape of moving objects relative to ground truth. We are able to show average relative error reduction by a significant amount for moving object trajectory reconstruction relative to state-of-the-art methods like VISO 2, as well as standard bundle adjustment algorithms.
Low-rank matrix is desired in many machine learning and computer vision problems. Most of the recent studies use the nuclear norm as a convex surrogate of the rank operator. However, all singular values are simply added together by the nuclear norm, and thus the rank may not be well approximated in practical problems. In this paper, we propose to use a log-determinant (LogDet) function as a smooth and closer, though non-convex, approximation to rank for obtaining a low-rank representation in subspace clustering. Augmented Lagrange multipliers strategy is applied to iteratively optimize the LogDet-based non-convex objective function on potentially large-scale data. By making use of the angular information of principal directions of the resultant low-rank representation, an affinity graph matrix is constructed for spectral clustering. Experimental results on motion segmentation and face clustering data demonstrate that the proposed method often outperforms state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms.
Matrix rank minimizing subject to affine constraints arises in many application areas, ranging from signal processing to machine learning. Nuclear norm is a convex relaxation for this problem which can recover the rank exactly under some restricted and theoretically interesting conditions. However, for many real-world applications, nuclear norm approximation to the rank function can only produce a result far from the optimum. To seek a solution of higher accuracy than the nuclear norm, in this paper, we propose a rank approximation based on Logarithm-Determinant. We consider using this rank approximation for subspace clustering application. Our framework can model different kinds of errors and noise. Effective optimization strategy is developed with theoretical guarantee to converge to a stationary point. The proposed method gives promising results on face clustering and motion segmentation tasks compared to the state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms.
Motion is a fundamental cue for scene analysis and human activity understan- ding in videos. It can be encoded in trajectories for tracking objects and for action recognition, or in form of flow to address behaviour analysis in crowded scenes. Each approach can only be applied on limited scenarios. We propose a motion-based system that represents the spatial and temporal features of the flow in terms of long-range trajectories. The novelty resides on the system formulation, its generic approach to handle scene variability and motion variations, motion integration from local and global representations, and the resulting long-range trajectories that overcome trajectory-based approach problems. We report the results and conclusions that state its pertinence on different scenarios, comparing and correlating the extracted trajectories of individual pedestrians, manually annotated. We also propose an evaluation framework and stress the diverse system characteristics that can be used for human activity tasks, namely on motion segmentation.
Matrix rank minimization problem is in general NP-hard. The nuclear norm is used to substitute the rank function in many recent studies. Nevertheless, the nuclear norm approximation adds all singular values together and the approximation error may depend heavily on the magnitudes of singular values. This might restrict its capability in dealing with many practical problems. In this paper, an arctangent function is used as a tighter approximation to the rank function. We use it on the challenging subspace clustering problem. For this nonconvex minimization problem, we develop an effective optimization procedure based on a type of augmented Lagrange multipliers (ALM) method. Extensive experiments on face clustering and motion segmentation show that the proposed method is effective for rank approximation.
In moving camera videos, motion segmentation is commonly performed using the image plane motion of pixels, or optical flow. However, objects that are at different depths from the camera can exhibit different optical flows even if they share the same real-world motion. This can cause a depth-dependent segmentation of the scene. Our goal is to develop a segmentation algorithm that clusters pixels that have similar real-world motion irrespective of their depth in the scene. Our solution uses optical flow orientations instead of the complete vectors and exploits the well-known property that under camera translation, optical flow orientations are independent of object depth. We introduce a probabilistic model that automatically estimates the number of observed independent motions and results in a labeling that is consistent with real-world motion in the scene. The result of our system is that static objects are correctly identified as one segment, even if they are at different depths. Color features and information from previous frames in the video sequence are used to correct occasional errors due to the orientation-based segmentation. We present results on more than thirty videos from different benchmarks. The system is particularly robust on complex background scenes containing objects at significantly different depths
This paper considers the classification of linear subspaces with mismatched classifiers. In particular, we assume a model where one observes signals in the presence of isotropic Gaussian noise and the distribution of the signals conditioned on a given class is Gaussian with a zero mean and a low-rank covariance matrix. We also assume that the classifier knows only a mismatched version of the parameters of input distribution in lieu of the true parameters. By constructing an asymptotic low-noise expansion of an upper bound to the error probability of such a mismatched classifier, we provide sufficient conditions for reliable classification in the low-noise regime that are able to sharply predict the absence of a classification error floor. Such conditions are a function of the geometry of the true signal distribution, the geometry of the mismatched signal distributions as well as the interplay between such geometries, namely, the principal angles and the overlap between the true and the mismatched signal subspaces. Numerical results demonstrate that our conditions for reliable classification can sharply predict the behavior of a mismatched classifier both with synthetic data and in a motion segmentation and a hand-written digit classification applications.
Feature tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications in many computer vision tasks, such as visual SLAM and action recognition. This paper introduces a novel multi-body feature tracker that exploits a multi-body rigidity assumption to improve tracking robustness under a general perspective camera model. A conventional approach to addressing this problem would consist of alternating between solving two subtasks: motion segmentation and feature tracking under rigidity constraints for each segment. This approach, however, requires knowing the number of motions, as well as assigning points to motion groups, which is typically sensitive to the motion estimates. By contrast, here, we introduce a segmentation-free solution to multi-body feature tracking that bypasses the motion assignment step and reduces to solving a series of subproblems with closed-form solutions. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of our approach in terms of tracking accuracy and robustness to noise.
We formulate a general energy and method for segmentation that is designed to have preference for segmenting the coarse structure over the fine structure of the data, without smoothing across boundaries of regions. The energy is formulated by considering data terms at a continuum of scales from the scale space computed from the Heat Equation within regions, and integrating these terms over all time. We show that the energy may be approximately optimized without solving for the entire scale space, but rather solving time-independent linear equations at the native scale of the image, making the method computationally feasible. We provide a multi-region scheme, and apply our method to motion segmentation. Experiments on a benchmark dataset shows that our method is less sensitive to clutter or other undesirable fine-scale structure, and leads to better performance in motion segmentation.
The human ability to detect and segment moving objects works in the presence of multiple objects, complex background geometry, motion of the observer, and even camouflage. In addition to all of this, the ability to detect motion is nearly instantaneous. While there has been much recent progress in motion segmentation, it still appears we are far from human capabilities. In this work, we derive from first principles a new likelihood function for assessing the probability of an optical flow vector given the 3D motion direction of an object. This likelihood uses a novel combination of the angle and magnitude of the optical flow to maximize the information about the true motions of objects. Using this new likelihood and several innovations in initialization, we develop a motion segmentation algorithm that beats current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We compare to five state-of-the-art methods on two established benchmarks, and a third new data set of camouflaged animals, which we introduce to push motion segmentation to the next level.
Motion blur can adversely affect a number of vision tasks, hence it is generally considered a nuisance. We instead treat motion blur as a useful signal that allows to compute the motion of objects from a single image. Drawing on the success of joint segmentation and parametric motion models in the context of optical flow estimation, we propose a parametric object motion model combined with a segmentation mask to exploit localized, non-uniform motion blur. Our parametric image formation model is differentiable w.r.t. the motion parameters, which enables us to generalize marginal-likelihood techniques from uniform blind deblurring to localized, non-uniform blur. A two-stage pipeline, first in derivative space and then in image space, allows to estimate both parametric object motion as well as a motion segmentation from a single image alone. Our experiments demonstrate its ability to cope with very challenging cases of object motion blur.
We present a general framework and method for simultaneous detection and segmentation of an object in a video that moves (or comes into view of the camera) at some unknown time in the video. The method is an online approach based on motion segmentation, and it operates under dynamic backgrounds caused by a moving camera or moving nuisances. The goal of the method is to detect and segment the object as soon as it moves. Due to stochastic variability in the video and unreliability of the motion signal, several frames are needed to reliably detect the object. The method is designed to detect and segment with minimum delay subject to a constraint on the false alarm rate. The method is derived as a problem of Quickest Change Detection. Experiments on a dataset show the effectiveness of our method in minimizing detection delay subject to false alarm constraints.