In this paper we propose an energy-efficient camera-based gesture recognition system powered by light energy for "always on" applications. Low energy consumption is achieved by directly extracting gesture features from the compressed measurements, which are the block averages and the linear combinations of the image sensor's pixel values. The gestures are recognized using a nearest-neighbour (NN) classifier followed by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). The system has been implemented on an Analog Devices Black Fin ULP vision processor and powered by PV cells whose output is regulated by TI's DC-DC buck converter with Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT). Measured data reveals that with only 400 compressed measurements (768x compression ratio) per frame, the system is able to recognize key wake-up gestures with greater than 80% accuracy and only 95mJ of energy per frame. Owing to its fully self-powered operation, the proposed system can find wide applications in "always-on" vision systems such as in surveillance, robotics and consumer electronics with touch-less operation.
Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) have demonstrated excellent performance for visual object tracking. The key to their success is the ability to efficiently exploit available negative data by including all shifted versions of a training sample. However, the underlying DCF formulation is restricted to single-resolution feature maps, significantly limiting its potential. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional DCF framework and introduce a novel formulation for training continuous convolution filters. We employ an implicit interpolation model to pose the learning problem in the continuous spatial domain. Our proposed formulation enables efficient integration of multi-resolution deep feature maps, leading to superior results on three object tracking benchmarks: OTB-2015 (+5.1% in mean OP), Temple-Color (+4.6% in mean OP), and VOT2015 (20% relative reduction in failure rate). Additionally, our approach is capable of sub-pixel localization, crucial for the task of accurate feature point tracking. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our learning formulation in extensive feature point tracking experiments. Code and supplementary material are available at http://www.cvl.isy.liu.se/research/objrec/visualtracking/conttrack/index.html.
Traditional point tracking algorithms such as the KLT use local 2D information aggregation for feature detection and tracking, due to which their performance degrades at the object boundaries that separate multiple objects. Recently, CoMaL Features have been proposed that handle such a case. However, they proposed a simple tracking framework where the points are re-detected in each frame and matched. This is inefficient and may also lose many points that are not re-detected in the next frame. We propose a novel tracking algorithm to accurately and efficiently track CoMaL points. For this, the level line segment associated with the CoMaL points is matched to MSER segments in the next frame using shape-based matching and the matches are further filtered using texture-based matching. Experiments show improvements over a simple re-detect-and-match framework as well as KLT in terms of speed/accuracy on different real-world applications, especially at the object boundaries.
We present a point tracking system powered by two deep convolutional neural networks. The first network, MagicPoint, operates on single images and extracts salient 2D points. The extracted points are "SLAM-ready" because they are by design isolated and well-distributed throughout the image. We compare this network against classical point detectors and discover a significant performance gap in the presence of image noise. As transformation estimation is more simple when the detected points are geometrically stable, we designed a second network, MagicWarp, which operates on pairs of point images (outputs of MagicPoint), and estimates the homography that relates the inputs. This transformation engine differs from traditional approaches because it does not use local point descriptors, only point locations. Both networks are trained with simple synthetic data, alleviating the requirement of expensive external camera ground truthing and advanced graphics rendering pipelines. The system is fast and lean, easily running 30+ FPS on a single CPU.