Semantic Analysis Of Image Sequences Using Computer Vision Methods

Observing, learning, and imitating human skills are intriguing topics in cognitive robotics. The main problem in the imitation learning paradigm is the policy development. Policy can be defined as a mapping from an agent's current world state to actions. Thus, understanding and performing an observed human skill for a cognitive agent depends heavily upon the learned policy. So far, naive policies that use object and hand models with trajectory information have commonly been developed to encode and imitate various types of human manipulations. These approaches, on the one hand, can not be ge...

Semantic Analysis and Understanding of Human Behaviour in Video Streaming investigates the semantic analysis of the human behaviour captured by video streaming, and introduces both theoretical and technological points of view. Video analysis based on the semantic content is in fact still an open issue for the computer vision research community, especially when real-time analysis of complex scenes is concerned. This book explores an innovative, original approach to human behaviour analysis and understanding by using the syntactical symbolic analysis of images and video streaming described by means of strings of symbols. A symbol is associated to each area of the analyzed scene. When a moving object enters an area, the corresponding symbol is appended to the string describing the motion. This approach allows for characterizing the motion of a moving object with a word composed by symbols. By studying and classifying these words we can categorize and understand the various behaviours. The main advantage of this approach lies in the simplicity of the scene and motion descriptions so that the behaviour analysis will have limited computational complexity due to the intrinsic nature both of the representations and the related operations used to manipulate them. Besides, the structure of the representations is well suited for possible parallel processing, thus allowing for speeding up the analysis when appropriate hardware architectures are used. A new methodology for design systems for hierarchical high semantic level analysis of video streaming in narrow domains is also proposed. Guidelines to design your own system are provided in this book. Designed for practitioners, computer scientists and engineers working within the fields of human computer interaction, surveillance, image processing and computer vision, this book can also be used as secondary text book for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering.

Figure 1.1. An outdoor scene "A bus is passing three cars which are parking between trees at the side of the road. Houses having two storeys are lined up at the street. 3 4 Introduction Figure 1.2. An assembly scene There seems to be a small open place between the group of houses in the foreground and the store in the background". In such or a similar way the content of the natural scene shown above can be described. It is quite easy to give such a short description. The problem is somewhat more complex for the second image. First of all, it can be stated that the image does not show an everyday scene. It appears as a kind of man made surrounding. But everyone can accept the following statements about this image: 1. The image shows a snapshot of an assembly line. 2. The robot in front is screwing. 3. There is no person in the working area of the robots. 4. All objects on the conveyor belt are worked on by robots. There are no free objects on the belt.

This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image. The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.

This text introduces the basic concepts and techniques in VIR. In doing so, it develops a foundation for further research and study. Divided into two parts, the first part describes the fundamental principles. A chapter is devoted to each of the main features of VIR, such as colour, texture and shape-based search. There is coverage of search techniques for time-based image sequences or videos, and an overview of how to combine all the basic features described and integrate them into the search process. The second part looks at advanced topics such as multimedia query. This book is essential reading for researchers in VIR, and final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses such as Multimedia Information Retrieval, Multimedia Databases, and others.

Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision represent an exciting part of modern cognitive and computer science. Following an explosion of inter est during the Seventies, the Eighties were characterized by the maturing of the field and the significant growth of active applications; Remote Sensing, Technical Diagnostics, Autonomous Vehicle Guidance and Medical Imaging are the most rapidly developing areas. This progress can be seen in an in creasing number of software and hardware products on the market as well as in a number of digital image processing and machine vision courses offered at universities world-wide. There are many texts available in the areas we cover - most (indeed, all of which we know) are referenced somewhere in this book. The subject suffers, however, from a shortage of texts at the 'elementary' level - that appropriate for undergraduates beginning or completing their studies of the topic, or for Master's students - and the very rapid developments that have taken and are still taking place, which quickly age some of the very good text books produced over the last decade or so. This book reflects the authors' experience in teaching one and two semester undergraduate and graduate courses in Digital Image Processing, Digital Image Analysis, Machine Vision, Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Robotics at their respective institutions.

This book presents a comprehensive treatment of visual analysis of behaviour from computational-modelling and algorithm-design perspectives. Topics: covers learning-group activity models, unsupervised behaviour profiling, hierarchical behaviour discovery, learning behavioural context, modelling rare behaviours, and “man-in-the-loop” active learning; examines multi-camera behaviour correlation, person re-identification, and “connecting-the-dots” for abnormal behaviour detection; discusses Bayesian information criterion, Bayesian networks, “bag-of-words” representation, canonical correlation analysis, dynamic Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixtures, and Gibbs sampling; investigates hidden conditional random fields, hidden Markov models, human silhouette shapes, latent Dirichlet allocation, local binary patterns, locality preserving projection, and Markov processes; explores probabilistic graphical models, probabilistic topic models, space-time interest points, spectral clustering, and support vector machines.

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyz ing image sequences, or video understanding. Video understanding deals with understanding of video sequences, e. g. , recognition of gestures, activities, fa cial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvious overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to gener ate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Researchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to gen erate the synthetic imagery. A good example of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is de rived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analysis followed by synthesis.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Computer Vision, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in March 2000. The 20 revised full papers presented have been through two rounds of reviewing, selection, and revision and give a representative assessment of the foundational issues in multiple-image processing. The papers are organized in topical sections on 3D data acquisition and sensor design, multi-image analysis, data fusion in 3D scene description, and applied 3D vision and virtual reality.

The six volume set of LNCS 12622-12627 constitutes the proceedings of the 15th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2020, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November/ December 2020.* The total of 254 contributions was carefully reviewed and selected from 768 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers focus on the following topics: Part I: 3D computer vision; segmentation and grouping Part II: low-level vision, image processing; motion and tracking Part III: recognition and detection; optimization, statistical methods, and learning; robot vision Part IV: deep learning for computer vision, generative models for computer vision Part V: face, pose, action, and gesture; video analysis and event recognition; biomedical image analysis Part VI: applications of computer vision; vision for X; datasets and performance analysis *The conference was held virtually.