Vítezslav Beran

Fast and accurate plane segmentation in depth maps for indoor scenes

This paper deals with a scene pre-processing task - depth image segmentation. Efficiency and accuracy of several methods for depth map segmentation are explored. To meet real-time capable constraints, state-of-the-art techniques needed to be modified. Along with these modifications, new segmentation approaches are presented which aim at optimizing performance characteristics. They benefit from an assumption of human-made indoor environments by focusing on detection of planar regions. All methods were evaluated on datasets with manually annotated real environments. A comparison with alternative solutions is also presented.

Video summarization at Brno University of Technology

This paper describes the video summarization system built for the TRECVID 2007 evaluation by the Brno team. Motivations for the system design and its overall structure are described followed by more detailed description of the critical parts of the system, which are feature extraction and clustering of frames (shots, sub-shots) in time domain. Many ideas were not included in the system because of the time constraints. Those considered promising are stated and are briefly described as possible future work. The result of video summarization presented in this paper is promising and will benefit further investigation. This is specifically true as not all the features that can be considered and processing methods were implemented in the evaluated system.

Simplified industrial robot programming: Effects of errors on multimodal interaction in WoZ experiment

This paper presents results of an exploratory study comparing various modalities employed in an industrial-like robot-human shared workplace. Experiments involved 39 participants who used a touch table, a touch display, hand gestures, a 6D pointing device, and a robot arm to show the robot how to assemble a simple product. To rule out a potential dependence of results on the number of misrecognized actions (resulting, e.g., from unreliable gesture recognition), a controlled amount of interaction errors was introduced. A Wizard-of-Oz setting with three user groups differing in the amount of simulated recognition errors helped us to show that hand gestures and 6D pointing are the fastest modalities that are also generally preferred by users for setting parameters of certain robot operations.

Multi-person tracking in meetings: a comparative study

In this paper, we present the findings of the Augmented Multiparty Interaction (AMI) project investigation on the localization and tracking of 2D head positions in meetings. The focus of the study was to test and evaluate various multi-person tracking methods developed in the project using a standardized data set and evaluation methodology.

2D multi-person tracking: a comparative study in AMI meetings

In this paper, we present the findings of the Augmented Multiparty Interaction (AMI) project investigation on the localization and tracking of 2D head positions in meetings. The focus of the study was to test and evaluate various multi-person tracking methods developed in the project using a standardized data set and evaluation methodology.

Depth-Based Filtration for Tracking Boost

This paper presents a novel depth information utilization method for performance boosting of tracking in traditional RGB trackers for arbitrary objects objects not known in advance by object segmentation/separation supported by depth information. The main focus is on real-time applications, such as robotics or surveillance, where exploitation of depth sensors, that are nowadays affordable, is not only possible but also feasible. The aim is to show that the depth information used for target segmentation significantly helps reducing incorrect model updates caused by occlusion or drifts and improves success rate and precision of traditional RGB tracker while keeping comparably efficient and thus possibly real-time. The paper also presents and discusses the achieved performance results.

Comparison of different powered-wheelchair control modes for individuals with severe motor impairments

This paper presents the preliminary evaluation of different powered-wheelchair control modes for individuals with severe motor impediments. To this end, a C400 Permobil wheelchair has been updated with a control command communication interface and equipped with a scanning laser sensor to carry out the automation algorithms that are part of the robot operating system framework. A pilot test was performed with three different modalities; hand-joystick mode, tongue-joystick mode and autonomous mode. The results of the tests have proven the feasibility of using a power wheelchair either autonomously or controlled by users interchangeably in order to continue the development towards a better user/wheelchair shared-control paradigm.

Quality assurance in large collections of video sequences

In the modern digital cinema production, extremely large volumes (in order of 10s of TB) of footage data are captured every day. The process of cataloging and reviewing such footage is nowadays largely manual and time consuming process. In our work, we aim at technical quality aspects, such as correct exposure, color compatibility of adjacent shots, and focusing. The main goal is to assist the reviewing process by providing shot quality meta-data and possibly ordering or even culling significant portion of the data from the review, as better quality shot of the same scene exists. However, in order to meaningfully compare technical quality, temporal shot synchronization needs to be performed first. We propose a fast and robust method for time synchronization of video sequences, capturing similar scenes, which arise naturally in digital cinema production. The method is tested on an extensive library of sequences and its performance is evaluated. We further present a preview of application of the proposed method to detecting focusing errors.