Publications | Perceiving Systems - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

91 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2015

Exploiting Object Similarity in 3D Reconstruction

Zhou, C., Güney, F., Wang, Y., Geiger, A.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Despite recent progress, reconstructing outdoor scenes in 3D from movable platforms remains a highly difficult endeavor. Challenges include low frame rates, occlusions, large distortions and difficult lighting conditions. In this paper, we leverage the fact that the larger the reconstructed area, the more likely objects of similar type and shape will occur in the scene. This is particularly true for outdoor scenes where buildings and vehicles often suffer from missing texture or reflections, but share similarity in 3D shape. We take advantage of this shape similarity by locating objects using detectors and jointly reconstructing them while learning a volumetric model of their shape. This allows us to reduce noise while completing missing surfaces as objects of similar shape benefit from all observations for the respective category. We evaluate our approach with respect to LIDAR ground truth on a novel challenging suburban dataset and show its advantages over the state-of-the-art.

pdf suppmat [BibTex]

2015

Zhou, C., Güney, F., Wang, Y., Geiger, A. Exploiting Object Similarity in 3D Reconstruction In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat [BibTex]

FollowMe: Efficient Online Min-Cost Flow Tracking with Bounded Memory and Computation

Lenz, P., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

One of the most popular approaches to multi-target tracking is tracking-by-detection. Current min-cost flow algorithms which solve the data association problem optimally have three main drawbacks: they are computationally expensive, they assume that the whole video is given as a batch, and they scale badly in memory and computation with the length of the video sequence. In this paper, we address each of these issues, resulting in a computationally and memory-bounded solution. First, we introduce a dynamic version of the successive shortest-path algorithm which solves the data association problem optimally while reusing computation, resulting in faster inference than standard solvers. Second, we address the optimal solution to the data association problem when dealing with an incoming stream of data (i.e., online setting). Finally, we present our main contribution which is an approximate online solution with bounded memory and computation which is capable of handling videos of arbitrary length while performing tracking in real time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on the KITTI and PETS2009 benchmarks and show state-of-the-art performance, while being significantly faster than existing solvers.

pdf suppmat video project [BibTex]

Lenz, P., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R. FollowMe: Efficient Online Min-Cost Flow Tracking with Bounded Memory and Computation In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat video project [BibTex]

Intrinsic Depth: Improving Depth Transfer with Intrinsic Images

Kong, N., Black, M. J.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3514-3522, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We formulate the estimation of dense depth maps from video sequences as a problem of intrinsic image estimation. Our approach synergistically integrates the estimation of multiple intrinsic images including depth, albedo, shading, optical flow, and surface contours. We build upon an example-based framework for depth estimation that uses label transfer from a database of RGB and depth pairs. We combine this with a method that extracts consistent albedo and shading from video. In contrast to raw RGB values, albedo and shading provide a richer, more physical, foundation for depth transfer. Additionally we train a new contour detector to predict surface boundaries from albedo, shading, and pixel values and use this to improve the estimation of depth boundaries. We also integrate sparse structure from motion with our method to improve the metric accuracy of the estimated depth maps. We evaluate our Intrinsic Depth method quantitatively by estimating depth from videos in the NYU RGB-D and SUN3D datasets. We find that combining the estimation of multiple intrinsic images improves depth estimation relative to the baseline method.

pdf suppmat YouTube official video poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Kong, N., Black, M. J. Intrinsic Depth: Improving Depth Transfer with Intrinsic Images In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3514-3522, December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat YouTube official video poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Detailed Full-Body Reconstructions of Moving People from Monocular RGB-D Sequences

Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Loper, M., Romero, J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 2300-2308, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We accurately estimate the 3D geometry and appearance of the human body from a monocular RGB-D sequence of a user moving freely in front of the sensor. Range data in each frame is first brought into alignment with a multi-resolution 3D body model in a coarse-to-fine process. The method then uses geometry and image texture over time to obtain accurate shape, pose, and appearance information despite unconstrained motion, partial views, varying resolution, occlusion, and soft tissue deformation. Our novel body model has variable shape detail, allowing it to capture faces with a high-resolution deformable head model and body shape with lower-resolution. Finally we combine range data from an entire sequence to estimate a high-resolution displacement map that captures fine shape details. We compare our recovered models with high-resolution scans from a professional system and with avatars created by a commercial product. We extract accurate 3D avatars from challenging motion sequences and even capture soft tissue dynamics.

Video pdf Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Loper, M., Romero, J. Detailed Full-Body Reconstructions of Moving People from Monocular RGB-D Sequences In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 2300-2308, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Video pdf Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions

Tzionas, D., Gall, J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 729-737, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Recent advances have enabled 3d object reconstruction approaches using a single off-the-shelf RGB-D camera. Although these approaches are successful for a wide range of object classes, they rely on stable and distinctive geometric or texture features. Many objects like mechanical parts, toys, household or decorative articles, however, are textureless and characterized by minimalistic shapes that are simple and symmetric. Existing in-hand scanning systems and 3d reconstruction techniques fail for such symmetric objects in the absence of highly distinctive features. In this work, we show that extracting 3d hand motion for in-hand scanning effectively facilitates the reconstruction of even featureless and highly symmetric objects and we present an approach that fuses the rich additional information of hands into a 3d reconstruction pipeline, significantly contributing to the state-of-the-art of in-hand scanning.

pdf Project's Website Video Spotlight Extended Abstract YouTube DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tzionas, D., Gall, J. 3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 729-737, December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf Project's Website Video Spotlight Extended Abstract YouTube DOI Project Page [BibTex]

The fertilized forests Decision Forest Library

Lassner, C., Lienhart, R.

In ACM Transactions on Multimedia (ACMMM) Open-source Software Competition, October 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Since the introduction of Random Forests in the 80's they have been a frequently used statistical tool for a variety of machine learning tasks. Many different training algorithms and model adaptions demonstrate the versatility of the forests. This variety resulted in a fragmentation of research and code, since each adaption requires its own algorithms and representations. In 2011, Criminisi and Shotton developed a unifying Decision Forest model for many tasks. By identifying the reusable parts and specifying clear interfaces, we extend this approach to an object oriented representation and implementation. This has the great advantage that research on specific parts of the Decision Forest model can be done `locally' by reusing well-tested and high-performance components. Our fertilized forests library is open source and easy to extend. It provides components allowing for parallelization up to node optimization level to exploit modern many core architectures. Additionally, the library provides consistent and easy-to-maintain interfaces to C++, Python and Matlab and offers cross-platform and cross-interface persistence.

website and code pdf [BibTex]

Lassner, C., Lienhart, R. The fertilized forests Decision Forest Library In ACM Transactions on Multimedia (ACMMM) Open-source Software Competition, October 2015 (inproceedings)

website and code pdf [BibTex]

Towards Probabilistic Volumetric Reconstruction using Ray Potentials

(Best Paper Award)

Ulusoy, A. O., Geiger, A., Black, M. J.

In 3D Vision (3DV), 2015 3rd International Conference on, pages: 10-18, Lyon, October 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper presents a novel probabilistic foundation for volumetric 3-d reconstruction. We formulate the problem as inference in a Markov random field, which accurately captures the dependencies between the occupancy and appearance of each voxel, given all input images. Our main contribution is an approximate highly parallelized discrete-continuous inference algorithm to compute the marginal distributions of each voxel's occupancy and appearance. In contrast to the MAP solution, marginals encode the underlying uncertainty and ambiguity in the reconstruction. Moreover, the proposed algorithm allows for a Bayes optimal prediction with respect to a natural reconstruction loss. We compare our method to two state-of-the-art volumetric reconstruction algorithms on three challenging aerial datasets with LIDAR ground truth. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm compares favorably in terms of reconstruction accuracy and the ability to expose reconstruction uncertainty.

code YouTube pdf suppmat DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Ulusoy, A. O., Geiger, A., Black, M. J. Towards Probabilistic Volumetric Reconstruction using Ray Potentials In 3D Vision (3DV), 2015 3rd International Conference on, pages: 10-18, Lyon, October 2015 (inproceedings)

code YouTube pdf suppmat DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Moving-horizon Nonlinear Least Squares-based Multirobot Cooperative Perception

Ahmad, A., Bülthoff, H.

7th European Conference on Mobile Robots, pages: 1-8, September 2015 (conference)

Abstract

In this article we present an online estimator for multirobot cooperative localization and target tracking based on nonlinear least squares minimization. Our method not only makes the rigorous optimization-based approach applicable online but also allows the estimator to be stable and convergent. We do so by employing a moving horizon technique to nonlinear least squares minimization and a novel design of the arrival cost function that ensures stability and convergence of the estimator. Through an extensive set of real robot experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of our method as well as the optimality of the arrival cost function. The experiments include comparisons of our method with i) an extended Kalman filter-based online-estimator and ii) an offline-estimator based on full-trajectory nonlinear least squares.

DOI [BibTex]

Ahmad, A., Bülthoff, H. Moving-horizon Nonlinear Least Squares-based Multirobot Cooperative Perception 7th European Conference on Mobile Robots, pages: 1-8, September 2015 (conference)

DOI [BibTex]

Perception of Strength and Power of Realistic Male Characters

Wellerdiek, A. C., Breidt, M., Geuss, M. N., Streuber, S., Kloos, U., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J.

In Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception, SAP’15, pages: 7-14, ACM, New York, NY, September 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We investigated the influence of body shape and pose on the perception of physical strength and social power for male virtual characters. In the first experiment, participants judged the physical strength of varying body shapes, derived from a statistical 3D body model. Based on these ratings, we determined three body shapes (weak, average, and strong) and animated them with a set of power poses for the second experiment. Participants rated how strong or powerful they perceived virtual characters of varying body shapes that were displayed in different poses. Our results show that perception of physical strength was mainly driven by the shape of the body. However, the social attribute of power was influenced by an interaction between pose and shape. Specifically, the effect of pose on power ratings was greater for weak body shapes. These results demonstrate that a character with a weak shape can be perceived as more powerful when in a high-power pose.

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Wellerdiek, A. C., Breidt, M., Geuss, M. N., Streuber, S., Kloos, U., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J. Perception of Strength and Power of Realistic Male Characters In Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception, SAP’15, pages: 7-14, ACM, New York, NY, September 2015 (inproceedings)

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Human Pose as Context for Object Detection

Srikantha, A., Gall, J.

British Machine Vision Conference, September 2015 (conference)

Abstract

Detecting small objects in images is a challenging problem particularly when they are often occluded by hands or other body parts. Recently, joint modelling of human pose and objects has been proposed to improve both pose estimation as well as object detection. These approaches, however, focus on explicit interaction with an object and lack the flexibility to combine both modalities when interaction is not obvious. We therefore propose to use human pose as an additional context information for object detection. To this end, we represent an object category by a tree model and train regression forests that localize parts of an object for each modality separately. Predictions of the two modalities are then combined to detect the bounding box of the object. We evaluate our approach on three challenging datasets which vary in the amount of object interactions and the quality of automatically extracted human poses.

pdf abstract Project Page [BibTex]

Srikantha, A., Gall, J. Human Pose as Context for Object Detection British Machine Vision Conference, September 2015 (conference)

pdf abstract Project Page [BibTex]

Active Learning for Efficient Sampling of Control Models of Collectives

Schiendorfer, A., Lassner, C., Anders, G., Reif, W., Lienhart, R.

In International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-organizing Systems (SASO), September 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Many large-scale systems benefit from an organizational structure to provide for problem decomposition. A pivotal problem solving setting is given by hierarchical control systems familiar from hierarchical task networks. If these structures can be modified autonomously by, e.g., coalition formation and reconfiguration, adequate decisions on higher levels require a faithful abstracted model of a collective of agents. An illustrative example is found in calculating schedules for a set of power plants organized in a hierarchy of Autonomous Virtual Power Plants. Functional dependencies over the combinatorial domain, such as the joint costs or rates of change of power production, are approximated by repeatedly sampling input-output pairs and substituting the actual functions by piecewise linear functions. However, if the sampled data points are weakly informative, the resulting abstracted high-level optimization introduces severe errors. Furthermore, obtaining additional point labels amounts to solving computationally hard optimization problems. Building on prior work, we propose to apply techniques from active learning to maximize the information gained by each additional point. Our results show that significantly better allocations in terms of cost-efficiency (up to 33.7 % reduction in costs in our case study) can be found with fewer but carefully selected sampling points using Decision Forests.

code (hosted on github) [BibTex]

Schiendorfer, A., Lassner, C., Anders, G., Reif, W., Lienhart, R. Active Learning for Efficient Sampling of Control Models of Collectives In International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-organizing Systems (SASO), September 2015 (inproceedings)

code (hosted on github) [BibTex]

The Informed Sampler: A Discriminative Approach to Bayesian Inference in Generative Computer Vision Models

Jampani, V., Nowozin, S., Loper, M., Gehler, P. V.

In Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Special Issue on Generative Models in Computer Vision and Medical Imaging, 136, pages: 32-44, Elsevier, July 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape, and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion. Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately modelling the image formation process as a function of latent variables with prior beliefs. Bayesian posterior inference could then, in principle, explain the observation. While intuitively appealing, generative models for computer vision have largely failed to deliver on that promise due to the difficulty of posterior inference. As a result the community has favored efficient discriminative approaches. We still believe in the usefulness of generative models in computer vision, but argue that we need to leverage existing discriminative or even heuristic computer vision methods. We implement this idea in a principled way in our informed sampler and in careful experiments demonstrate it on challenging models which contain renderer programs as their components. The informed sampler, using simple discriminative proposals based on existing computer vision technology achieves dramatic improvements in inference. Our approach enables a new richness in generative models that was out of reach with existing inference technology.

arXiv-preprint pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Nowozin, S., Loper, M., Gehler, P. V. The Informed Sampler: A Discriminative Approach to Bayesian Inference in Generative Computer Vision Models In Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Special Issue on Generative Models in Computer Vision and Medical Imaging, 136, pages: 32-44, Elsevier, July 2015 (inproceedings)

arXiv-preprint pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Subgraph decomposition for multi-target tracking

Tang, S., Andres, B., Andriluka, M., Schiele, B.

In 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 5033-5041, IEEE, June 2015 (inproceedings)

PDF Proof-of-Lemma-1 DOI [BibTex]

Tang, S., Andres, B., Andriluka, M., Schiele, B. Subgraph decomposition for multi-target tracking In 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 5033-5041, IEEE, June 2015 (inproceedings)

PDF Proof-of-Lemma-1 DOI [BibTex]

The Stitched Puppet: A Graphical Model of 3D Human Shape and Pose

Zuffi, S., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 3537-3546, June 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose a new 3D model of the human body that is both realistic and part-based. The body is represented by a graphical model in which nodes of the graph correspond to body parts that can independently translate and rotate in 3D as well as deform to capture pose-dependent shape variations. Pairwise potentials define a “stitching cost” for pulling the limbs apart, giving rise to the stitched puppet model (SPM). Unlike existing realistic 3D body models, the distributed representation facilitates inference by allowing the model to more effectively explore the space of poses, much like existing 2D pictorial structures models. We infer pose and body shape using a form of particle-based max-product belief propagation. This gives the SPM the realism of recent 3D body models with the computational advantages of part-based models. We apply the SPM to two challenging problems involving estimating human shape and pose from 3D data. The first is the FAUST mesh alignment challenge (http://faust.is.tue.mpg.de/), where ours is the first method to successfully align all 3D meshes. The second involves estimating pose and shape from crude visual hull representations of complex body movements.

pdf Extended Abstract poster code/project video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Zuffi, S., Black, M. J. The Stitched Puppet: A Graphical Model of 3D Human Shape and Pose In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 3537-3546, June 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf Extended Abstract poster code/project video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Displets: Resolving Stereo Ambiguities using Object Knowledge

Güney, F., Geiger, A.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2015, pages: 4165-4175, June 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Stereo techniques have witnessed tremendous progress over the last decades, yet some aspects of the problem still remain challenging today. Striking examples are reflecting and textureless surfaces which cannot easily be recovered using traditional local regularizers. In this paper, we therefore propose to regularize over larger distances using object-category specific disparity proposals (displets) which we sample using inverse graphics techniques based on a sparse disparity estimate and a semantic segmentation of the image. The proposed displets encode the fact that objects of certain categories are not arbitrarily shaped but typically exhibit regular structures. We integrate them as non-local regularizer for the challenging object class 'car' into a superpixel based CRF framework and demonstrate its benefits on the KITTI stereo evaluation.

pdf abstract suppmat [BibTex]

Güney, F., Geiger, A. Displets: Resolving Stereo Ambiguities using Object Knowledge In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2015, pages: 4165-4175, June 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract suppmat [BibTex]

Object Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles

Menze, M., Geiger, A.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2015, pages: 3061-3070, IEEE, June 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel model and dataset for 3D scene flow estimation with an application to autonomous driving. Taking advantage of the fact that outdoor scenes often decompose into a small number of independently moving objects, we represent each element in the scene by its rigid motion parameters and each superpixel by a 3D plane as well as an index to the corresponding object. This minimal representation increases robustness and leads to a discrete-continuous CRF where the data term decomposes into pairwise potentials between superpixels and objects. Moreover, our model intrinsically segments the scene into its constituting dynamic components. We demonstrate the performance of our model on existing benchmarks as well as a novel realistic dataset with scene flow ground truth. We obtain this dataset by annotating 400 dynamic scenes from the KITTI raw data collection using detailed 3D CAD models for all vehicles in motion. Our experiments also reveal novel challenges which can't be handled by existing methods.

pdf abstract suppmat DOI [BibTex]

Menze, M., Geiger, A. Object Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2015, pages: 3061-3070, IEEE, June 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract suppmat DOI [BibTex]

Pose-Conditioned Joint Angle Limits for 3D Human Pose Reconstruction

Akhter, I., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 1446-1455, June 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The estimation of 3D human pose from 2D joint locations is central to many vision problems involving the analysis of people in images and video. To address the fact that the problem is inherently ill posed, many methods impose a prior over human poses. Unfortunately these priors admit invalid poses because they do not model how joint-limits vary with pose. Here we make two key contributions. First, we collected a motion capture dataset that explores a wide range of human poses. From this we learn a pose-dependent model of joint limits that forms our prior. The dataset and the prior will be made publicly available. Second, we define a general parameterization of body pose and a new, multistage, method to estimate 3D pose from 2D joint locations that uses an over-complete dictionary of human poses. Our method shows good generalization while avoiding impossible poses. We quantitatively compare our method with recent work and show state-of-the-art results on 2D to 3D pose estimation using the CMU mocap dataset. We also show superior results on manual annotations on real images and automatic part-based detections on the Leeds sports pose dataset.

pdf Extended Abstract video project/data/code poster DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Akhter, I., Black, M. J. Pose-Conditioned Joint Angle Limits for 3D Human Pose Reconstruction In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 1446-1455, June 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf Extended Abstract video project/data/code poster DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Efficient Sparse-to-Dense Optical Flow Estimation using a Learned Basis and Layers

Wulff, J., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 120-130, June 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We address the elusive goal of estimating optical flow both accurately and efficiently by adopting a sparse-to-dense approach. Given a set of sparse matches, we regress to dense optical flow using a learned set of full-frame basis flow fields. We learn the principal components of natural flow fields using flow computed from four Hollywood movies. Optical flow fields are then compactly approximated as a weighted sum of the basis flow fields. Our new PCA-Flow algorithm robustly estimates these weights from sparse feature matches. The method runs in under 300ms/frame on the MPI-Sintel dataset using a single CPU and is more accurate and significantly faster than popular methods such as LDOF and Classic+NL. The results, however, are too smooth for some applications. Consequently, we develop a novel sparse layered flow method in which each layer is represented by PCA-flow. Unlike existing layered methods, estimation is fast because it uses only sparse matches. We combine information from different layers into a dense flow field using an image-aware MRF. The resulting PCA-Layers method runs in 3.6s/frame, is significantly more accurate than PCA-flow and achieves state-of-the-art performance in occluded regions on MPI-Sintel.

pdf Extended Abstract Supplemental Material Poster Code Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Wulff, J., Black, M. J. Efficient Sparse-to-Dense Optical Flow Estimation using a Learned Basis and Layers In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pages: 120-130, June 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf Extended Abstract Supplemental Material Poster Code Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Permutohedral Lattice CNNs

Kiefel, M., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V.

In ICLR Workshop Track, May 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper presents a convolutional layer that is able to process sparse input features. As an example, for image recognition problems this allows an efficient filtering of signals that do not lie on a dense grid (like pixel position), but of more general features (such as color values). The presented algorithm makes use of the permutohedral lattice data structure. The permutohedral lattice was introduced to efficiently implement a bilateral filter, a commonly used image processing operation. Its use allows for a generalization of the convolution type found in current (spatial) convolutional network architectures.

pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Kiefel, M., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V. Permutohedral Lattice CNNs In ICLR Workshop Track, May 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Consensus Message Passing for Layered Graphical Models

Jampani, V., Eslami, S. M. A., Tarlow, D., Kohli, P., Winn, J.

In Eighteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 38, pages: 425-433, JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, May 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Generative models provide a powerful framework for probabilistic reasoning. However, in many domains their use has been hampered by the practical difficulties of inference. This is particularly the case in computer vision, where models of the imaging process tend to be large, loopy and layered. For this reason bottom-up conditional models have traditionally dominated in such domains. We find that widely-used, general-purpose message passing inference algorithms such as Expectation Propagation (EP) and Variational Message Passing (VMP) fail on the simplest of vision models. With these models in mind, we introduce a modification to message passing that learns to exploit their layered structure by passing 'consensus' messages that guide inference towards good solutions. Experiments on a variety of problems show that the proposed technique leads to significantly more accurate inference results, not only when compared to standard EP and VMP, but also when compared to competitive bottom-up conditional models.

online pdf supplementary link (url) [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Eslami, S. M. A., Tarlow, D., Kohli, P., Winn, J. Consensus Message Passing for Layered Graphical Models In Eighteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 38, pages: 425-433, JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, May 2015 (inproceedings)

online pdf supplementary link (url) [BibTex]

Active Learning for Abstract Models of Collectives

Schiendorfer, A., Lassner, C., Anders, G., Reif, W., Lienhart, R.

In 3rd Workshop on Self-optimisation in Organic and Autonomic Computing Systems (SAOS), March 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Organizational structures such as hierarchies provide an effective means to deal with the increasing complexity found in large-scale energy systems. In hierarchical systems, the concrete functions describing the subsystems can be replaced by abstract piecewise linear functions to speed up the optimization process. However, if the data points are weakly informative the resulting abstracted optimization problem introduces severe errors and exhibits bad runtime performance. Furthermore, obtaining additional point labels amounts to solving computationally hard optimization problems. Therefore, we propose to apply methods from active learning to search for informative inputs. We present first results experimenting with Decision Forests and Gaussian Processes that motivate further research. Using points selected by Decision Forests, we could reduce the average mean-squared error of the abstract piecewise linear function by one third.

code (hosted on github) pdf [BibTex]

Schiendorfer, A., Lassner, C., Anders, G., Reif, W., Lienhart, R. Active Learning for Abstract Models of Collectives In 3rd Workshop on Self-optimisation in Organic and Autonomic Computing Systems (SAOS), March 2015 (inproceedings)

code (hosted on github) pdf [BibTex]

Efficient Facade Segmentation using Auto-Context

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V.

In Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2015 IEEE Winter Conference on, pages: 1038-1045, IEEE, January 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper we propose a system for the problem of facade segmentation. Building facades are highly structured images and consequently most methods that have been proposed for this problem, aim to make use of this strong prior information. We are describing a system that is almost domain independent and consists of standard segmentation methods. A sequence of boosted decision trees is stacked using auto-context features and learned using the stacked generalization technique. We find that this, albeit standard, technique performs better, or equals, all previous published empirical results on all available facade benchmark datasets. The proposed method is simple to implement, easy to extend, and very efficient at test time inference.

website pdf supplementary IEEE page link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V. Efficient Facade Segmentation using Auto-Context In Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2015 IEEE Winter Conference on, pages: 1038-1045, IEEE, January 2015 (inproceedings)

website pdf supplementary IEEE page link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Norm-induced entropies for decision forests

Lassner, C., Lienhart, R.

IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), January 2015 (conference)

Abstract

The entropy measurement function is a central element of decision forest induction. The Shannon entropy and other generalized entropies such as the Renyi and Tsallis entropy are designed to fulfill the Khinchin-Shannon axioms. Whereas these axioms are appropriate for physical systems, they do not necessarily model well the artificial system of decision forest induction. In this paper, we show that when omitting two of the four axioms, every norm induces an entropy function. The remaining two axioms are sufficient to describe the requirements for an entropy function in the decision forest context. Furthermore, we introduce and analyze the p-norm-induced entropy, show relations to existing entropies and the relation to various heuristics that are commonly used for decision forest training. In experiments with classification, regression and the recently introduced Hough forests, we show how the discrete and differential form of the new entropy can be used for forest induction and how the functions can simply be fine-tuned. The experiments indicate that the impact of the entropy function is limited, however can be a simple and useful post-processing step for optimizing decision forests for high performance applications.

pdf code [BibTex]

Lassner, C., Lienhart, R. Norm-induced entropies for decision forests IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), January 2015 (conference)

pdf code [BibTex]

Dataset Suite for Benchmarking Perception in Robotics

Ahmad, A., Lima, P.

In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2015, 2015 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

Ahmad, A., Lima, P. Dataset Suite for Benchmarking Perception in Robotics In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2015, 2015 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

FlowCap: 2D Human Pose from Optical Flow

Romero, J., Loper, M., Black, M. J.

In Pattern Recognition, Proc. 37th German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), LNCS 9358, pages: 412-423, Springer, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We estimate 2D human pose from video using only optical flow. The key insight is that dense optical flow can provide information about 2D body pose. Like range data, flow is largely invariant to appearance but unlike depth it can be directly computed from monocular video. We demonstrate that body parts can be detected from dense flow using the same random forest approach used by the Microsoft Kinect. Unlike range data, however, when people stop moving, there is no optical flow and they effectively disappear. To address this, our FlowCap method uses a Kalman filter to propagate body part positions and ve- locities over time and a regression method to predict 2D body pose from part centers. No range sensor is required and FlowCap estimates 2D human pose from monocular video sources containing human motion. Such sources include hand-held phone cameras and archival television video. We demonstrate 2D body pose estimation in a range of scenarios and show that the method works with real-time optical flow. The results suggest that optical flow shares invariances with range data that, when complemented with tracking, make it valuable for pose estimation.

video pdf preprint Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Romero, J., Loper, M., Black, M. J. FlowCap: 2D Human Pose from Optical Flow In Pattern Recognition, Proc. 37th German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), LNCS 9358, pages: 412-423, Springer, 2015 (inproceedings)

video pdf preprint Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Towards Optimal Robot Navigation in Urban Homes

Ventura, R., Ahmad, A.

In RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages: 318-331, Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 8992, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The work presented in this paper is motivated by the goal of dependable autonomous navigation of mobile robots. This goal is a fundamental requirement for having autonomous robots in spaces such as domestic spaces and public establishments, left unattended by technical staff. In this paper we tackle this problem by taking an optimization approach: on one hand, we use a Fast Marching Approach for path planning, resulting in optimal paths in the absence of unmapped obstacles, and on the other hand we use a Dynamic Window Approach for guidance. To the best of our knowledge, the combination of these two methods is novel. We evaluate the approach on a real mobile robot, capable of moving at high speed. The evaluation makes use of an external ground truth system. We report controlled experiments that we performed, including the presence of people moving randomly nearby the robot. In our long term experiments we report a total distance of 18 km traveled during 11 hours of movement time.

DOI [BibTex]

Ventura, R., Ahmad, A. Towards Optimal Robot Navigation in Urban Homes In RoboCup 2014: Robot World Cup XVIII, pages: 318-331, Lecture Notes in Computer Science ; 8992, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2015 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Joint 3D Object and Layout Inference from a single RGB-D Image

(Best Paper Award)

Geiger, A., Wang, C.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 9358, pages: 183-195, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Inferring 3D objects and the layout of indoor scenes from a single RGB-D image captured with a Kinect camera is a challenging task. Towards this goal, we propose a high-order graphical model and jointly reason about the layout, objects and superpixels in the image. In contrast to existing holistic approaches, our model leverages detailed 3D geometry using inverse graphics and explicitly enforces occlusion and visibility constraints for respecting scene properties and projective geometry. We cast the task as MAP inference in a factor graph and solve it efficiently using message passing. We evaluate our method with respect to several baselines on the challenging NYUv2 indoor dataset using 21 object categories. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to infer scenes with a large degree of clutter and occlusions.

pdf suppmat video project DOI [BibTex]

Geiger, A., Wang, C. Joint 3D Object and Layout Inference from a single RGB-D Image In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 9358, pages: 183-195, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing, 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat video project DOI [BibTex]

3D Object Class Detection in the Wild

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Ritschel, T., Schiele, B.

In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), IEEE, 2015 (inproceedings)

Project Page [BibTex]

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Ritschel, T., Schiele, B. 3D Object Class Detection in the Wild In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), IEEE, 2015 (inproceedings)

Project Page [BibTex]

Discrete Optimization for Optical Flow

Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 9358, pages: 16-28, Springer International Publishing, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose to look at large-displacement optical flow from a discrete point of view. Motivated by the observation that sub-pixel accuracy is easily obtained given pixel-accurate optical flow, we conjecture that computing the integral part is the hardest piece of the problem. Consequently, we formulate optical flow estimation as a discrete inference problem in a conditional random field, followed by sub-pixel refinement. Naive discretization of the 2D flow space, however, is intractable due to the resulting size of the label set. In this paper, we therefore investigate three different strategies, each able to reduce computation and memory demands by several orders of magnitude. Their combination allows us to estimate large-displacement optical flow both accurately and efficiently and demonstrates the potential of discrete optimization for optical flow. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on MPI Sintel and KITTI.

pdf suppmat project DOI [BibTex]

Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A. Discrete Optimization for Optical Flow In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 9358, pages: 16-28, Springer International Publishing, 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat project DOI [BibTex]

Joint 3D Estimation of Vehicles and Scene Flow

Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A.

In Proc. of the ISPRS Workshop on Image Sequence Analysis (ISA), 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Three-dimensional reconstruction of dynamic scenes is an important prerequisite for applications like mobile robotics or autonomous driving. While much progress has been made in recent years, imaging conditions in natural outdoor environments are still very challenging for current reconstruction and recognition methods. In this paper, we propose a novel unified approach which reasons jointly about 3D scene flow as well as the pose, shape and motion of vehicles in the scene. Towards this goal, we incorporate a deformable CAD model into a slanted-plane conditional random field for scene flow estimation and enforce shape consistency between the rendered 3D models and the parameters of all superpixels in the image. The association of superpixels to objects is established by an index variable which implicitly enables model selection. We evaluate our approach on the challenging KITTI scene flow dataset in terms of object and scene flow estimation. Our results provide a prove of concept and demonstrate the usefulness of our method.

PDF [BibTex]

Menze, M., Heipke, C., Geiger, A. Joint 3D Estimation of Vehicles and Scene Flow In Proc. of the ISPRS Workshop on Image Sequence Analysis (ISA), 2015 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

A Setup for multi-UAV hardware-in-the-loop simulations

Odelga, M., Stegagno, P., Bülthoff, H., Ahmad, A.

In pages: 204-210, IEEE, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a hardware in the loop simulation setup for multi-UAV systems. With our setup, we are able to command the robots simulated in Gazebo, a popular open source ROS-enabled physical simulator, using the computational units that are embedded on our quadrotor UAVs. Hence, we can test in simulation not only the correct execution of algorithms, but also the computational feasibility directly on the robot hardware. In addition, since our setup is inherently multi-robot, we can also test the communication flow among the robots. We provide two use cases to show the characteristics of our setup.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Odelga, M., Stegagno, P., Bülthoff, H., Ahmad, A. A Setup for multi-UAV hardware-in-the-loop simulations In pages: 204-210, IEEE, 2015 (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Smooth Loops from Unconstrained Video

Sevilla-Lara, L., Wulff, J., Sunkavalli, K., Shechtman, E.

In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR), 34(4):99-107, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Converting unconstrained video sequences into videos that loop seamlessly is an extremely challenging problem. In this work, we take the first steps towards automating this process by focusing on an important subclass of videos containing a single dominant foreground object. Our technique makes two novel contributions over previous work: first, we propose a correspondence-based similarity metric to automatically identify a good transition point in the video where the appearance and dynamics of the foreground are most consistent. Second, we develop a technique that aligns both the foreground and background about this transition point using a combination of global camera path planning and patch-based video morphing. We demonstrate that this allows us to create natural, compelling, loopy videos from a wide range of videos collected from the internet.

pdf link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Sevilla-Lara, L., Wulff, J., Sunkavalli, K., Shechtman, E. Smooth Loops from Unconstrained Video In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR), 34(4):99-107, 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Onboard robust person detection and tracking for domestic service robots

Sanz, D., Ahmad, A., Lima, P.

In Robot 2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference, pages: 547-559, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ; 418, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Domestic assistance for the elderly and impaired people is one of the biggest upcoming challenges of our society. Consequently, in-home care through domestic service robots is identified as one of the most important application area of robotics research. Assistive tasks may range from visitor reception at the door to catering for owner's small daily necessities within a house. Since most of these tasks require the robot to interact directly with humans, a predominant robot functionality is to detect and track humans in real time: either the owner of the robot or visitors at home or both. In this article we present a robust method for such a functionality that combines depth-based segmentation and visual detection. The robustness of our method lies in its capability to not only identify partially occluded humans (e.g., with only torso visible) but also to do so in varying lighting conditions. We thoroughly validate our method through extensive experiments on real robot datasets and comparisons with the ground truth. The datasets were collected on a home-like environment set up within the context of RoboCup@Home and RoCKIn@Home competitions.

DOI [BibTex]

Sanz, D., Ahmad, A., Lima, P. Onboard robust person detection and tracking for domestic service robots In Robot 2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference, pages: 547-559, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ; 418, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2015 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

2011

Outdoor Human Motion Capture using Inverse Kinematics and von Mises-Fisher Sampling

Pons-Moll, G., Baak, A., Gall, J., Leal-Taixe, L., Mueller, M., Seidel, H., Rosenhahn, B.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1243-1250, November 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf supplemental [BibTex]

2011

Pons-Moll, G., Baak, A., Gall, J., Leal-Taixe, L., Mueller, M., Seidel, H., Rosenhahn, B. Outdoor Human Motion Capture using Inverse Kinematics and von Mises-Fisher Sampling In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1243-1250, November 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf supplemental [BibTex]

Home 3D body scans from noisy image and range data

Weiss, A., Hirshberg, D., Black, M.

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1951-1958, IEEE, Barcelona, November 2011 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The 3D shape of the human body is useful for applications in fitness, games and apparel. Accurate body scanners, however, are expensive, limiting the availability of 3D body models. We present a method for human shape reconstruction from noisy monocular image and range data using a single inexpensive commodity sensor. The approach combines low-resolution image silhouettes with coarse range data to estimate a parametric model of the body. Accurate 3D shape estimates are obtained by combining multiple monocular views of a person moving in front of the sensor. To cope with varying body pose, we use a SCAPE body model which factors 3D body shape and pose variations. This enables the estimation of a single consistent shape while allowing pose to vary. Additionally, we describe a novel method to minimize the distance between the projected 3D body contour and the image silhouette that uses analytic derivatives of the objective function. We propose a simple method to estimate standard body measurements from the recovered SCAPE model and show that the accuracy of our method is competitive with commercial body scanning systems costing orders of magnitude more.

pdf YouTube poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Weiss, A., Hirshberg, D., Black, M. Home 3D body scans from noisy image and range data In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1951-1958, IEEE, Barcelona, November 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf YouTube poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Means in spaces of tree-like shapes

Aasa Feragen, Soren Hauberg, Mads Nielsen, Francois Lauze

In Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pages: 736 -746, IEEE, november 2011 (inproceedings)

Publishers site PDF Suppl. material [BibTex]

Aasa Feragen, Soren Hauberg, Mads Nielsen, Francois Lauze Means in spaces of tree-like shapes In Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pages: 736 -746, IEEE, november 2011 (inproceedings)

Publishers site PDF Suppl. material [BibTex]

Everybody needs somebody: modeling social and grouping behavior on a linear programming multiple people tracker

Leal-Taixé, L., Rosenhahn, G. P. A. B.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (IICCVW), November 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf [BibTex]

Leal-Taixé, L., Rosenhahn, G. P. A. B. Everybody needs somebody: modeling social and grouping behavior on a linear programming multiple people tracker In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (IICCVW), November 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf [BibTex]

Evaluating the Automated Alignment of 3D Human Body Scans

Hirshberg, D. A., Loper, M., Rachlin, E., Tsoli, A., Weiss, A., Corner, B., Black, M. J.

In 2nd International Conference on 3D Body Scanning Technologies, pages: 76-86, (Editors: D’Apuzzo, Nicola), Hometrica Consulting, Lugano, Switzerland, October 2011 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The statistical analysis of large corpora of human body scans requires that these scans be in alignment, either for a small set of key landmarks or densely for all the vertices in the scan. Existing techniques tend to rely on hand-placed landmarks or algorithms that extract landmarks from scans. The former is time consuming and subjective while the latter is error prone. Here we show that a model-based approach can align meshes automatically, producing alignment accuracy similar to that of previous methods that rely on many landmarks. Specifically, we align a low-resolution, artist-created template body mesh to many high-resolution laser scans. Our alignment procedure employs a robust iterative closest point method with a regularization that promotes smooth and locally rigid deformation of the template mesh. We evaluate our approach on 50 female body models from the CAESAR dataset that vary significantly in body shape. To make the method fully automatic, we define simple feature detectors for the head and ankles, which provide initial landmark locations. We find that, if body poses are fairly similar, as in CAESAR, the fully automated method provides dense alignments that enable statistical analysis and anthropometric measurement.

pdf slides DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Hirshberg, D. A., Loper, M., Rachlin, E., Tsoli, A., Weiss, A., Corner, B., Black, M. J. Evaluating the Automated Alignment of 3D Human Body Scans In 2nd International Conference on 3D Body Scanning Technologies, pages: 76-86, (Editors: D’Apuzzo, Nicola), Hometrica Consulting, Lugano, Switzerland, October 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf slides DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Branch&Rank: Non-Linear Object Detection

(Best Impact Paper Prize)

Lehmann, A., Gehler, P., VanGool, L.

In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), pages: 8.1-8.11, (Editors: Jesse Hoey and Stephen McKenna and Emanuele Trucco), BMVA Press, September 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.25.8 (inproceedings)

video of talk pdf slides supplementary [BibTex]

Lehmann, A., Gehler, P., VanGool, L. Branch&Rank: Non-Linear Object Detection In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), pages: 8.1-8.11, (Editors: Jesse Hoey and Stephen McKenna and Emanuele Trucco), BMVA Press, September 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.25.8 (inproceedings)

video of talk pdf slides supplementary [BibTex]

Efficient and Robust Shape Matching for Model Based Human Motion Capture

Pons-Moll, G., Leal-Taixé, L., Truong, T., Rosenhahn, B.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), pages: 416-425, September 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf [BibTex]

Pons-Moll, G., Leal-Taixé, L., Truong, T., Rosenhahn, B. Efficient and Robust Shape Matching for Model Based Human Motion Capture In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), pages: 416-425, September 2011 (inproceedings)

project page pdf [BibTex]

BrainGate pilot clinical trials: Progress in translating neural engineering principles to clinical testing

33rd Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Boston, MA, August 2011 (conference)

[BibTex]

Hochberg, L., Simeral, J., Black, M., Bacher, D., Barefoot, L., Berhanu, E., Borton, D., Cash, S., Feldman, J., Gallivan, E., Homer, M., Jarosiewicz, B., King, B., Liu, J., Malik, W., Masse, N., Perge, J., Rosler, D., Schmansky, N., Travers, B., Truccolo, W., Nurmikko, A., Donoghue, J. BrainGate pilot clinical trials: Progress in translating neural engineering principles to clinical testing 33rd Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Boston, MA, August 2011 (conference)

[BibTex]

Learning Output Kernels with Block Coordinate Descent

Dinuzzo, F., Ong, C. S., Gehler, P., Pillonetto, G.

In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), pages: 49-56, ICML ’11, (Editors: Getoor, Lise and Scheffer, Tobias), ACM, New York, NY, USA, June 2011 (inproceedings)

data+code pdf [BibTex]

Dinuzzo, F., Ong, C. S., Gehler, P., Pillonetto, G. Learning Output Kernels with Block Coordinate Descent In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), pages: 49-56, ICML ’11, (Editors: Getoor, Lise and Scheffer, Tobias), ACM, New York, NY, USA, June 2011 (inproceedings)

data+code pdf [BibTex]

Role of expertise and contralateral symmetry in the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis: an experimental study

Jampani, V., Vaidya, V., Sivaswamy, J., Tourani, K. L.

In Proc. SPIE 7966, Medical Imaging: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment, 2011, Florida, March 2011 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Pneumoconiosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of dust, is mainly diagnosed using chest radiographs. The effects of using contralateral symmetric (CS) information present in chest radiographs in the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis are studied using an eye tracking experimental study. The role of expertise and the influence of CS information on the performance of readers with different expertise level are also of interest. Experimental subjects ranging from novices & medical students to staff radiologists were presented with 17 double and 16 single lung images, and were asked to give profusion ratings for each lung zone. Eye movements and the time for their diagnosis were also recorded. Kruskal-Wallis test (χ2(6) = 13.38, p = .038), showed that the observer error (average sum of absolute differences) in double lung images differed significantly across the different expertise categories when considering all the participants. Wilcoxon-signed rank test indicated that the observer error was significantly higher for single-lung images (Z = 3.13, p < .001) than for the double-lung images for all the participants. Mann-Whitney test (U = 28, p = .038) showed that the differential error between single and double lung images is significantly higher in doctors [staff & residents] than in non-doctors [others]. Thus, Expertise & CS information plays a significant role in the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis. CS information helps in diagnosing pneumoconiosis by reducing the general tendency of giving less profusion ratings. Training and experience appear to play important roles in learning to use the CS information present in the chest radiographs.

url link (url) [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Vaidya, V., Sivaswamy, J., Tourani, K. L. Role of expertise and contralateral symmetry in the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis: an experimental study In Proc. SPIE 7966, Medical Imaging: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment, 2011, Florida, March 2011 (inproceedings)

url link (url) [BibTex]

Recovering Intrinsic Images with a Global Sparsity Prior on Reflectance

Gehler, P., Rother, C., Kiefel, M., Zhang, L., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24, pages: 765-773, (Editors: Shawe-Taylor, John and Zemel, Richard S. and Bartlett, Peter L. and Pereira, Fernando C. N. and Weinberger, Kilian Q.), Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, 2011 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We address the challenging task of decoupling material properties from lighting properties given a single image. In the last two decades virtually all works have concentrated on exploiting edge information to address this problem. We take a different route by introducing a new prior on reflectance, that models reflectance values as being drawn from a sparse set of basis colors. This results in a Random Field model with global, latent variables (basis colors) and pixel-accurate output reflectance values. We show that without edge information high-quality results can be achieved, that are on par with methods exploiting this source of information. Finally, we are able to improve on state-of-the-art results by integrating edge information into our model. We believe that our new approach is an excellent starting point for future developments in this field.

website + code pdf poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Gehler, P., Rother, C., Kiefel, M., Zhang, L., Schölkopf, B. Recovering Intrinsic Images with a Global Sparsity Prior on Reflectance In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24, pages: 765-773, (Editors: Shawe-Taylor, John and Zemel, Richard S. and Bartlett, Peter L. and Pereira, Fernando C. N. and Weinberger, Kilian Q.), Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA, 2011 (inproceedings)

website + code pdf poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

OpenBioSafetyLab: A virtual world based biosafety training application for medical students

Nakasone, A., Tang, S., Shigematsu, M., Heinecke, B., Fujimoto, S., Prendinger, H.

In International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), IEEE CPS, 2011 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

Nakasone, A., Tang, S., Shigematsu, M., Heinecke, B., Fujimoto, S., Prendinger, H. OpenBioSafetyLab: A virtual world based biosafety training application for medical students In International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG), IEEE CPS, 2011 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

Combining wireless neural recording and video capture for the analysis of natural gait

Foster, J., Freifeld, O., Nuyujukian, P., Ryu, S., Black, M. J., Shenoy, K.

In Proc. 5th Int. IEEE EMBS Conf. on Neural Engineering, pages: 613-616, IEEE, 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Foster, J., Freifeld, O., Nuyujukian, P., Ryu, S., Black, M. J., Shenoy, K. Combining wireless neural recording and video capture for the analysis of natural gait In Proc. 5th Int. IEEE EMBS Conf. on Neural Engineering, pages: 613-616, IEEE, 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Tagged Cardiac MR Image Segmentation Using Boundary & Regional-Support and Graph-based Deformable Priors

Xiang, B., Wang, C., Deux, J., Rahmouni, A., Paragios, N.

In IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Xiang, B., Wang, C., Deux, J., Rahmouni, A., Paragios, N. Tagged Cardiac MR Image Segmentation Using Boundary & Regional-Support and Graph-based Deformable Priors In IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Multiview Structure from Motion in Trajectory Space

Zaheer, A., Akhter, I., Mohammad, H. B., Marzban, S., Khan, S.

In Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pages: 2447-2453, 2011 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Most nonrigid objects exhibit temporal regularities in their deformations. Recently it was proposed that these regularities can be parameterized by assuming that the non- rigid structure lies in a small dimensional trajectory space. In this paper, we propose a factorization approach for 3D reconstruction from multiple static cameras under the com- pact trajectory subspace representation. Proposed factor- ization is analogous to rank-3 factorization of rigid struc- ture from motion problem, in transformed space. The benefit of our approach is that the 3D trajectory basis can be directly learned from the image observations. This also allows us to impute missing observations and denoise tracking errors without explicit estimation of the 3D structure. In contrast to standard triangulation based methods which require points to be visible in at least two cameras, our ap- proach can reconstruct points, which remain occluded even in all the cameras for quite a long time. This makes our solution especially suitable for occlusion handling in motion capture systems. We demonstrate robustness of our method on challenging real and synthetic scenarios.

pdf project page [BibTex]

Zaheer, A., Akhter, I., Mohammad, H. B., Marzban, S., Khan, S. Multiview Structure from Motion in Trajectory Space In Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pages: 2447-2453, 2011 (inproceedings)

pdf project page [BibTex]

Unscented Kalman Filtering for Articulated Human Tracking

Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Soren Hauberg, Kim S. Pedersen

In Image Analysis, 6688, pages: 228-237, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Heyden, Anders and Kahl, Fredrik), Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011 (inproceedings)

Publishers site PDF [BibTex]

Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Soren Hauberg, Kim S. Pedersen Unscented Kalman Filtering for Articulated Human Tracking In Image Analysis, 6688, pages: 228-237, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Heyden, Anders and Kahl, Fredrik), Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011 (inproceedings)

Publishers site PDF [BibTex]