Laura Leal-Taixé

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

Multiple people tracking consists in detecting the subjects at each frame and matching these detections to obtain full trajectories. In semi-crowded environments, pedestrians often occlude each other, making tracking a challenging task. Most tracking methods make the assumption that each pedestrians motion is independent, thereby ignoring the complex and important interaction between subjects. In this paper, we present an approach which includes the interaction between pedestrians in two ways: first, considering social and grouping behavior, and second, using a global optimization scheme to solve the data association problem. Results on three challenging publicly available datasets show our method outperforms state-of-the-art tracking systems.

Learning an Image-Based Motion Context for Multiple People Tracking

We present a novel method for multiple people tracking that leverages a generalized model for capturing interactions among individuals. At the core of our model lies a learned dictionary of interaction feature strings which capture relationships between the motions of targets. These feature strings, created from low-level image features, lead to a much richer representation of the physical interactions between targets compared to hand-specified social force models that previous works have introduced for tracking. One disadvantage of using social forces is that all pedestrians must be detected in order for the forces to be applied, while our method is able to encode the effect of undetected targets, making the tracker more robust to partial occlusions. The interaction feature strings are used in a Random Forest framework to track targets according to the features surrounding them. Results on six publicly available sequences show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in multiple people tracking.

Joint tracking and segmentation of multiple targets

Tracking-by-detection has proven to be the most successful strategy to address the task of tracking multiple targets in unconstrained scenarios [e.g. 40, 53, 55]. Traditionally, a set of sparse detections, generated in a preprocessing step, serves as input to a high-level tracker whose goal is to correctly associate these “dots” over time. An obvious short-coming of this approach is that most information available in image sequences is simply ignored by thresholding weak detection responses and applying non-maximum suppression. We propose a multi-target tracker that exploits low level image information and associates every (super)-pixel to a specific target or classifies it as background. As a result, we obtain a video segmentation in addition to the classical bounding-box representation in unconstrained, real-world videos. Our method shows encouraging results on many standard benchmark sequences and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection approaches in crowded scenes with long-term partial occlusions.

Outdoor human motion capture using inverse kinematics and von mises-fisher sampling

Human motion capturing (HMC) from multiview image sequences is an extremely difficult problem due to depth and orientation ambiguities and the high dimensionality of the state space. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid HMC system that combines video input with sparse inertial sensor input. Employing an annealing particle-based optimization scheme, our idea is to use orientation cues derived from the inertial input to sample particles from the manifold of valid poses. Then, visual cues derived from the video input are used to weight these particles and to iteratively derive the final pose. As our main contribution, we propose an efficient sampling procedure where the particles are derived analytically using inverse kinematics on the orientation cues. Additionally, we introduce a novel sensor noise model to account for uncertainties based on the von Mises-Fisher distribution. Doing so, orientation constraints are naturally fulfilled and the number of needed particles can be kept very small. More generally, our method can be used to sample poses that fulfill arbitrary orientation or positional kinematic constraints. In the experiments, we show that our system can track even highly dynamic motions in an outdoor environment with changing illumination, background clutter, and shadows.

One-Shot Video Object Segmentation

This paper tackles the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation, i.e., the separation of an object from the background in a video, given the mask of the first frame. We present One-Shot Video Object Segmentation (OSVOS), based on a fully-convolutional neural network architecture that is able to successively transfer generic semantic information, learned on ImageNet, to the task of foreground segmentation, and finally to learning the appearance of a single annotated object of the test sequence (hence one-shot). Although all frames are processed independently, the results are temporally coherent and stable. We perform experiments on two annotated video segmentation databases, which show that OSVOS is fast and improves the state of the art by a significant margin (79.8% vs 68.0%).

Real-Time Sign Language Recognition Using a Consumer Depth Camera

Gesture recognition remains a very challenging task in the field of computer vision and human computer interaction (HCI). A decade ago the task seemed to be almost unsolvable with the data provided by a single RGB camera. Due to recent advances in sensing technologies, such as time-of-flight and structured light cameras, there are new data sources available, which make hand gesture recognition more feasible. In this work, we propose a highly precise method to recognize static gestures from a depth data, provided from one of the above mentioned devices. The depth images are used to derive rotation-, translation- and scale-invariant features. A multi-layered random forest (MLRF) is then trained to classify the feature vectors, which yields to the recognition of the hand signs. The training time and memory required by MLRF are much smaller, compared to a simple random forest with equivalent precision. This allows to repeat the training procedure of MLRF without significant effort. To show the advantages of our technique, we evaluate our algorithm on synthetic data, on publicly available dataset, containing 24 signs from American Sign Language(ASL) and on a new dataset, collected using recently appeared Intel Creative Gesture Camera.

Branch-and-price global optimization for multi-view multi-target tracking

We present a new algorithm to jointly track multiple objects in multi-view images. While this has been typically addressed separately in the past, we tackle the problem as a single global optimization. We formulate this assignment problem as a min-cost problem by defining a graph structure that captures both temporal correlations between objects as well as spatial correlations enforced by the configuration of the cameras. This leads to a complex combinatorial optimization problem that we solve using Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and branching. Our formulation allows us to solve the problem of reconstruction and tracking in a single step by taking all available evidence into account. In several experiments on multiple people tracking and 3D human pose tracking, we show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Learning by Tracking: Siamese CNN for Robust Target Association

This paper introduces a novel approach to the task of data association within the context of pedestrian tracking, by introducing a two-stage learning scheme to match pairs of detections. First, a Siamese convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to learn descriptors encoding local spatio-temporal structures between the two input image patches, aggregating pixel values and optical flow information. Second, a set of contextual features derived from the position and size of the compared input patches are combined with the CNN output by means of a gradient boosting classifier to generate the final matching probability. This learning approach is validated by using a linear programming based multi-person tracker showing that even a simple and efficient tracker may outperform much more complex models when fed with our learned matching probabilities. Results on publicly available sequences show that our method meets state-of-the-art standards in multiple people tracking.

Image-Based Localization Using LSTMs for Structured Feature Correlation

In this work we propose a new CNN+LSTM architecture for camera pose regression for indoor and outdoor scenes. CNNs allow us to learn suitable feature representations for localization that are robust against motion blur and illumination changes. We make use of LSTM units on the CNN output, which play the role of a structured dimensionality reduction on the feature vector, leading to drastic improvements in localization performance. We provide extensive quantitative comparison of CNN-based and SIFT-based localization methods, showing the weaknesses and strengths of each. Furthermore, we present a new large-scale indoor dataset with accurate ground truth from a laser scanner. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor public datasets show our method outperforms existing deep architectures, and can localize images in hard conditions, e.g., in the presence of mostly textureless surfaces, where classic SIFT-based methods fail.

Efficient and robust shape matching for model based human motion capture

In this paper we present a robust and efficient shape matching approach for Marker-less Motion Capture. Extracted features such as contour, gradient orientations and the turning function of the shape are embedded in a 1-D string. We formulate shape matching as a Linear Assignment Problem and propose to use Dynamic Time Warping on the string representation of shapes to discard unlikely correspondences and thereby to reduce ambiguities and spurious local minima. Furthermore, the proposed cost matrix pruning results in robustness to scaling, rotation and topological changes and allows to greatly reduce the computational cost. We show that our approach can track fast human motions where standard articulated Iterative Closest Point algorithms fail.