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Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering
Research Archive 2001: Human-Machine Interfaces
Click on full report to go to detailed report; click on author name to go to home page (or email).
 

Detection of Human Motion in a Cluttered Scene
Yang Song, Xiaolin Feng, Luis Goncalves, Pietro Perona

Detecting humans in images is a useful application of computer vision. Loose and textured clothing, occlusion and scene clutter make it a difficult problem because bottom-up segmentation and grouping do not always work. We address the problem of detecting humans from their motion pattern in monocular image sequences; extraneous motions and occlusion may be present. We assume that we may not rely on segmentation, nor grouping and that the vision front-end is limited to observing the motion of key points and textured patches in between pairs of frames. We do not assume that we are able to track features for more than two frames. Our method is based on learning an approximate probabilistic model of the joint position and velocity of different body features. Detection is performed by hypothesis testing on the maximum a posteriori estimate of the pose and motion of the body. Our experiments on a dozen of walking sequences indicate that our algorithm is accurate and efficient. (full report)


Configurable Architectures and Systems for Real-Time Low-level Vision
Arrigo Benedetti, Pietro Perona

The long-term goal of this project is to build an infrastructure for the design and implementation of real-time computer vision systems. Since vision algorithms are compute-bound we have chosen the technology of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs), that allow to exploit the parallelism inherent to the first stages of low-level vision tasks. The first problem that we have considered is the real-time computation of the optical flow measured from the sequence of images captured by a video camera. We have designed, built and demonstrated a system able to select in real-time 2-D visual features on a commercially available platform. During this process we have learned that the system level architectures of commercially available configurable systems are not optimized for low level vision tasks, therefore, we have designed a novel architecture dedicated to real-time processing of video streams. A system based on this architecture has been built and is currently being tested. More recently, we have studied the problem of bit-width computation for the optimization of the data paths found in digital video signal processors. (full report)


Learning Object Class Models
Markus Weber, Max Welling, Robert Fergus, Pietro Perona

We have developed a method to automatically learn models of visual object classes from sets of unlabeled and unsegmented training images. The method has been demonstrated to work on images of cars and handwritten characters and it is being adapted to human faces. (full report)


Finding Faces in Cluttered Scenes
Markus Weber, Michael Burl, Pietro Perona

We have designed algorithms that learn a probabilistic description of human faces and other object classes. We have implemented a real-time face detection system which runs at 1Hz and demonstrates the ability to handle deformations, occlusions and background clutter. (full report)


3D Vision with Minimal Equipment
Silvio Savarese, Jean-Yves Bouguet, Pietro Perona

The aim of our work is to investigate new approaches for three-dimensional reconstruction of objects. The proposed techniques require minimal and inexpensive equipment. (full report)


Perception and 3D Reconstruction of Specular Surfaces
Silvio Savarese, Pietro Perona

The aim of our work is to investigate how the human visual system perceives specular surfaces and which cues can be used to recover the shape of such class of objects. (full report)


3D Photography on Your Desk
Jean-Yves Bouguet, Pietro Perona

We are developing a simple and inexpensive method for extracting the three-dimensional shape of objects by using weak-structured lighting. Experimental results demonstrate that the error in reconstructing the surface is less than 1%. (full report)


Visual Input for Pen-Based Computers
Mario E. Munich, Pietro Perona

Our work focuses on the development of a visual interface for pen-based computers. We are building a system that visually tracks the trajectory of a pen in real-time and recovers the handwritten strokes with sufficient spatio-temporal resolution and accuracy to enable handwritten character recognition. (full report)


Camera-Based ID Verification by Signature Tracking
Mario E. Munich, Pietro Perona

The goal of this project is to develop a vision-based biometric technique based on visual capturing of signatures and to evaluate the performance of the system. (full report)


Hand Gesture Biometrics
George Panotopoulos, Demetri Psaltis

We introduce a biometric measure based on hand gestures. We use simple filters to extract features from a gesture captured in the form of still frames. We then use PCA to perform classification using these features. For small databases we obtain 100% correct classification. (full report)


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last modified: 2/22/07