1,721,256 research outputs found

    Automatic 3D Reconstruction of Manifold Meshes via Delaunay Triangulation and Mesh Sweeping

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    In this paper we propose a new approach to incrementally initialize a manifold surface for automatic 3D reconstruction from images. More precisely we focus on the automatic initialization of a 3D mesh as close as possible to the final solution; indeed many approaches require a good initial solution for further refinement via multi-view stereo techniques. Our novel algorithm automatically estimates an initial manifold mesh for surface evolving multi-view stereo algorithms, where the manifold property needs to be enforced. It bootstraps from 3D points extracted via Structure from Motion, then iterates between a state-of-the-art manifold reconstruction step and a novel mesh sweeping algorithm that looks for new 3D points in the neighborhood of the reconstructed manifold to be added in the manifold reconstruction. The experimental results show quantitatively that the mesh sweeping improves the resolution and the accuracy of the manifold reconstruction, allowing a better convergence of state-of-the-art surface evolution multi-view stereo algorithms

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Multi-camera simultaneous localization and mapping

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    In this thesis, we study two aspects of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for multi-camera systems: minimal solution methods for the scaled motion of non-overlapping and partially overlapping two camera systems and enabling online, real-time mapping of large areas using the parallelism inherent in the visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) problem. We present the only existing minimal solution method for six degree of freedom structure and motion estimation using a non-overlapping, rigid two camera system with known intrinsic and extrinsic calibration. One example application of our method is the three-dimensional reconstruction of urban scenes from video. Because our method does not require the cameras' fields-of-view to overlap, we are able to maximize coverage of the scene and avoid processing redundant, overlapping imagery. Additionally, we developed a minimal solution method for partially overlapping stereo camera systems to overcome degeneracies inherent to non-overlapping two-camera systems but still have a wide total field of view. The method takes two stereo images as its input. It uses one feature visible in all four views and three features visible across two temporal view pairs to constrain the system camera's motion. We show in synthetic experiments that our method creates rotation and translation estimates that are more accurate than the perspective three-point method as the overlap in the stereo camera's fields-of-view is reduced. A final part of this thesis is the development of an online, real-time visual SLAM system that achieves real-time speed by exploiting the parallelism inherent in the VSLAM problem. We show that feature tracking, relative pose estimation, and global mapping operations such as loop detection and loop correction can be effectively parallelized. Additionally, we demonstrate that a combination of short baseline, differentially tracked corner features, which can be tracked at high frame rates and wide baseline matchable but slower to compute features such as the scale-invariant feature transform can facilitate high speed visual odometry and at the same time support location recognition for loop detection and global geometric error correction

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Semantic Soft Segmentation

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    Accurate representation of soft transitions between image regions is essential for high-quality image editing and compositing. Current techniques for generating such representations depend heavily on interaction by a skilled visual artist, as creating such accurate object selections is a tedious task. In this work, we introduce semantic soft segments, a set of layers that correspond to semantically meaningful regions in an image with accurate soft transitions between different objects. We approach this problem from a spectral segmentation angle and propose a graph structure that embeds texture and color features from the image as well as higher-level semantic information generated by a neural network. The soft segments are generated via eigendecomposition of the carefully constructed Laplacian matrix fully automatically. We demonstrate that otherwise complex image editing tasks can be done with little effort using semantic soft segments.11Nsciescopu

    Multi-view dynamic scene modeling

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    Modeling dynamic scenes/events from multiple fixed-location vision sensors, such as video camcorders, infrared cameras, Time-of-Flight sensors etc, is of broad interest in computer vision society, with many applications including 3D TV, virtual reality, medical surgery, markerless motion capture, video games, and security surveillance. However, most of the existing multi-view systems are set up in a strictly controlled indoor environment, with fixed lighting conditions and simple background views. Many challenges are preventing the technology to an outdoor natural environment. These include varying sunlight, shadows, reflections, background motion and visual occlusion. In this thesis, I address different aspects to overcome all of the aforementioned difficulties, so as to reduce human preparation and manipulation, and to make a robust outdoor system as automatic as possible. In particular, the main novel technical contributions of this thesis are as follows: a generic heterogeneous sensor fusion framework for robust 3D shape estimation together; a way to automatically recover 3D shapes of static occluder from dynamic object silhouette cues, which explicitly models the static visual occluding event along the viewing rays; a system to model multiple dynamic objects shapes and track their identities simultaneously, which explicitly models the inter-occluding event between dynamic objects; a scheme to recover an object's dense 3D motion flow over time, without assuming any prior knowledge of the underlying structure of the dynamic object being modeled, which helps to enforce temporal consistency of natural motions and initializes more advanced shape learning and motion analysis. A unified automatic calibration algorithm for the heterogeneous network of conventional cameras/camcorders and new Time-of-Flight sensors is also proposed

    Silhouettes for calibration and reconstruction from multiple views

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    In this thesis, we study how silhouettes extracted from images and video can help with two fundamental problems of 3D computer vision - namely multi-view camera calibration and 3D surface reconstruction from multiple images. First, we present an automatic method for calibrating a network of cameras that works by analyzing only the motion of silhouettes in the multiple video streams. This is particularly useful for automatic reconstruction of a dynamic event using a camera network in a situation where pre-calibration of the cameras is impractical or even impossible. Our key contribution is a novel RANSAC-based algorithm that simultaneously computes the epipolar geometry and synchronization of a pair of cameras, only from the motion of silhouettes in video. The approach proceeds by first independently computing the epipolar geometry and synchronization for pairs of cameras in the network. In the next stage, the calibration and synchronization for the complete network is recovered. The fundamental matrices from the first stage are used to determine a projective reconstruction, which is then upgraded to a metric reconstruction using self-calibration. Finally, a visual-hull algorithm is used to reconstruct the shape of the dynamic object from its silhouettes in video. For unsynchronized video streams with sub-frame temporal offsets, we interpolate silhouettes between successive frames to get more accurate visual hulls. In the second part of the thesis, we address some short-comings of existing volumetric multi-view stereo approaches. First we propose a novel formulation for multi-view stereo that allows for robust and accurate fusion of the silhouette and stereo cues. We show that it is possible to enforce exact silhouette constraints within the graph-cut optimization step in the volumetric multi-view stereo algorithm. This guarantees that the reconstructed surface will be exactly consistent with the original silhouettes. Contrary to previous work on silhouette and stereo fusion, the silhouette consistency is guaranteed by construction through hard constraints in the graph-cut problem -- the silhouette consistency terms are not part of the energy minimization problem which aims to find a surface with maximal photo-consistency. Finally, we have also developed an adaptive graph construction approach for graph-cut based multi-view stereo to address the inherent high memory and computational overhead of the basic algorithm. The approach does not need any initialization and is not restricted to a specific surface topology which is a limitation with existing methods that use a base surface for initialization. Using this method, we have been able to efficiently reconstruct accurate and detailed 3D models of objects from high-resolution images for a number of different datasets
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