Publications | Perceiving Systems - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

13 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

1999

Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics

In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Edges are viewed as statistical outliers with respect to local image gradient magnitudes. Within local image regions we compute a robust statistical measure of the gradient variation and use this in an anisotropic diffusion framework to determine a spatially varying "edge-stopping" parameter σ. We show how to determine this parameter for two edge-stopping functions described in the literature (Perona-Malik and the Tukey biweight). Smoothing of the image is related the local texture and in regions of low texture, small gradient values may be treated as edges whereas in regions of high texture, large gradient magnitudes are necessary before an edge is preserved. Intuitively these results have similarities with human perceptual phenomena such as masking and "popout". Results are shown on a variety of standard images.

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1999

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G. Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

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Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities

(Marr Prize, Honorable Mention)

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J.

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J. Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Artscience Sciencart

Black, M. J., Levy, D., PamelaZ,

In Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, pages: 244-300, (Editors: Harris, C.), MIT-Press, 1999 (incollection)

Abstract

One of the effects of the PARC Artist In Residence (PAIR) program has been to expose the strong connections between scientists and artists. Both do what they do because they need to do it. They are often called upon to justify their work in order to be allowed to continue to do it. They need to justify it to funders, to sponsoring institutions, corporations, the government, the public. They publish papers, teach workshops, and write grants touting the educational or health benefits of what they do. All of these things are to some extent valid, but the fact of the matter is: artists and scientists do their work because they are driven to do it. They need to explore and create.

This chapter attempts to give a flavor of one multi-way "PAIRing" between performance artist PamelaZ and two PARC researchers, Michael Black and David Levy. The three of us paired up because we found each other interesting. We chose each other. While most artists in the program are paired with a single researcher Pamela jokingly calls herself a bigamist for choosing two PAIR "husbands" with different backgrounds and interests.

There are no "rules" to the PAIR program; no one told us what to do with our time. Despite this we all had a sense that we needed to produce something tangible during Pamela's year-long residency. In fact, Pamela kept extending her residency because she did not feel as though we had actually made anything concrete. The interesting thing was that all along we were having great conversations, some of which Pamela recorded. What we did not see at the time was that it was these conversations between artists and scientists that are at the heart of the PAIR program and that these conversations were changing the way we thought about our own work and the relationships between science and art.

To give these conversations their due, and to allow the reader into our PAIR interactions, we include two of our many conversations in this chapter.

[BibTex]

Black, M. J., Levy, D., PamelaZ, Artscience Sciencart In Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, pages: 244-300, (Editors: Harris, C.), MIT-Press, 1999 (incollection)

[BibTex]

Parameterized modeling and recognition of activities

Yacoob, Y., Black, M. J.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 73(2):232-247, 1999 (article)

Abstract

In this paper we consider a class of human activities—atomic activities—which can be represented as a set of measurements over a finite temporal window (e.g., the motion of human body parts during a walking cycle) and which has a relatively small space of variations in performance. A new approach for modeling and recognition of atomic activities that employs principal component analysis and analytical global transformations is proposed. The modeling of sets of exemplar instances of activities that are similar in duration and involve similar body part motions is achieved by parameterizing their representation using principal component analysis. The recognition of variants of modeled activities is achieved by searching the space of admissible parameterized transformations that these activities can undergo. This formulation iteratively refines the recognition of the class to which the observed activity belongs and the transformation parameters that relate it to the model in its class. We provide several experiments on recognition of articulated and deformable human motions from image motion parameters.

pdf pdf from publisher DOI [BibTex]

Yacoob, Y., Black, M. J. Parameterized modeling and recognition of activities Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 73(2):232-247, 1999 (article)

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Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models

Black, M. J.

In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

Black, M. J. Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

1996

Cardboard people: A parameterized model of articulated motion

Ju, S. X., Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y.

In 2nd Int. Conf. on Automatic Face- and Gesture-Recognition, pages: 38-44, Killington, Vermont, October 1996 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We extend the work of Black and Yacoob on the tracking and recognition of human facial expressions using parameterized models of optical flow to deal with the articulated motion of human limbs. We define a "cardboard person model" in which a person's limbs are represented by a set of connected planar patches. The parameterized image motion of these patches is constrained to enforce articulated motion and is solved for directly using a robust estimation technique. The recovered motion parameters provide a rich and concise description of the activity that can be used for recognition. We propose a method for performing view-based recognition of human activities from the optical flow parameters that extends previous methods to cope with the cyclical nature of human motion. We illustrate the method with examples of tracking human legs over long image sequences.

pdf [BibTex]

1996

Ju, S. X., Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y. Cardboard people: A parameterized model of articulated motion In 2nd Int. Conf. on Automatic Face- and Gesture-Recognition, pages: 38-44, Killington, Vermont, October 1996 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Estimating optical flow in segmented images using variable-order parametric models with local deformations

Black, M. J., Jepson, A.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 18(10):972-986, October 1996 (article)

Abstract

This paper presents a new model for estimating optical flow based on the motion of planar regions plus local deformations. The approach exploits brightness information to organize and constrain the interpretation of the motion by using segmented regions of piecewise smooth brightness to hypothesize planar regions in the scene. Parametric flow models are estimated in these regions in a two step process which first computes a coarse fit and estimates the appropriate parameterization of the motion of the region (two, six, or eight parameters). The initial fit is refined using a generalization of the standard area-based regression approaches. Since the assumption of planarity is likely to be violated, we allow local deformations from the planar assumption in the same spirit as physically-based approaches which model shape using coarse parametric models plus local deformations. This parametric+deformation model exploits the strong constraints of parametric approaches while retaining the adaptive nature of regularization approaches. Experimental results on a variety of images indicate that the parametric+deformation model produces accurate flow estimates while the incorporation of brightness segmentation provides precise localization of motion boundaries.

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Black, M. J., Jepson, A. Estimating optical flow in segmented images using variable-order parametric models with local deformations IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 18(10):972-986, October 1996 (article)

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On the unification of line processes, outlier rejection, and robust statistics with applications in early vision

Black, M., Rangarajan, A.

International Journal of Computer Vision , 19(1):57-92, July 1996 (article)

Abstract

The modeling of spatial discontinuities for problems such as surface recovery, segmentation, image reconstruction, and optical flow has been intensely studied in computer vision. While “line-process” models of discontinuities have received a great deal of attention, there has been recent interest in the use of robust statistical techniques to account for discontinuities. This paper unifies the two approaches. To achieve this we generalize the notion of a “line process” to that of an analog “outlier process” and show how a problem formulated in terms of outlier processes can be viewed in terms of robust statistics. We also characterize a class of robust statistical problems for which an equivalent outlier-process formulation exists and give a straightforward method for converting a robust estimation problem into an outlier-process formulation. We show how prior assumptions about the spatial structure of outliers can be expressed as constraints on the recovered analog outlier processes and how traditional continuation methods can be extended to the explicit outlier-process formulation. These results indicate that the outlier-process approach provides a general framework which subsumes the traditional line-process approaches as well as a wide class of robust estimation problems. Examples in surface reconstruction, image segmentation, and optical flow are presented to illustrate the use of outlier processes and to show how the relationship between outlier processes and robust statistics can be exploited. An appendix provides a catalog of common robust error norms and their equivalent outlier-process formulations.

pdf pdf from publisher DOI [BibTex]

Black, M., Rangarajan, A. On the unification of line processes, outlier rejection, and robust statistics with applications in early vision International Journal of Computer Vision , 19(1):57-92, July 1996 (article)

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Skin and Bones: Multi-layer, locally affine, optical flow and regularization with transparency

(Nominated: Best paper)

Ju, S., Black, M. J., Jepson, A. D.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’96, pages: 307-314, San Francisco, CA, June 1996 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Ju, S., Black, M. J., Jepson, A. D. Skin and Bones: Multi-layer, locally affine, optical flow and regularization with transparency In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’96, pages: 307-314, San Francisco, CA, June 1996 (inproceedings)

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EigenTracking: Robust matching and tracking of articulated objects using a view-based representation

Black, M. J., Jepson, A.

In Proc. Fourth European Conf. on Computer Vision, ECCV’96, pages: 329-342, LNCS 1064, Springer Verlag, Cambridge, England, April 1996 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Jepson, A. EigenTracking: Robust matching and tracking of articulated objects using a view-based representation In Proc. Fourth European Conf. on Computer Vision, ECCV’96, pages: 329-342, LNCS 1064, Springer Verlag, Cambridge, England, April 1996 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

Mixture Models for Image Representation

Jepson, A., Black, M.

PRECARN ARK Project Technical Report ARK96-PUB-54, March 1996 (techreport)

Abstract

We consider the estimation of local greylevel image structure in terms of a layered representation. This type of representation has recently been successfully used to segment various objects from clutter using either optical ow or stereo disparity information. We argue that the same type of representation is useful for greylevel data in that it allows for the estimation of properties for each of several different components without prior segmentation. Our emphasis in this paper is on the process used to extract such a layered representation from a given image In particular we consider a variant of the EM algorithm for the estimation of the layered model and consider a novel technique for choosing the number of layers to use. We briefly consider the use of a simple version of this approach for image segmentation and suggest two potential applications to the ARK project

pdf [BibTex]

Jepson, A., Black, M. Mixture Models for Image Representation PRECARN ARK Project Technical Report ARK96-PUB-54, March 1996 (techreport)

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The robust estimation of multiple motions: Parametric and piecewise-smooth flow fields

Black, M. J., Anandan, P.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 63(1):75-104, January 1996 (article)

Abstract

Most approaches for estimating optical flow assume that, within a finite image region, only a single motion is present. This single motion assumption is violated in common situations involving transparency, depth discontinuities, independently moving objects, shadows, and specular reflections. To robustly estimate optical flow, the single motion assumption must be relaxed. This paper presents a framework based on robust estimation that addresses violations of the brightness constancy and spatial smoothness assumptions caused by multiple motions. We show how the robust estimation framework can be applied to standard formulations of the optical flow problem thus reducing their sensitivity to violations of their underlying assumptions. The approach has been applied to three standard techniques for recovering optical flow: area-based regression, correlation, and regularization with motion discontinuities. This paper focuses on the recovery of multiple parametric motion models within a region, as well as the recovery of piecewise-smooth flow fields, and provides examples with natural and synthetic image sequences.

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