Yaowei Wang

Unsupervised Cross-Dataset Transfer Learning for Person Re-identification

Most existing person re-identification (Re-ID) approaches follow a supervised learning framework, in which a large number of labelled matching pairs are required for training. This severely limits their scalability in realworld applications. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel cross-dataset transfer learning approach to learn a discriminative representation. It is unsupervised in the sense that the target dataset is completely unlabelled. Specifically, we present an multi-task dictionary learning method which is able to learn a dataset-shared but target-data-biased representation. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Sequential Deep Trajectory Descriptor for Action Recognition With Three-Stream CNN

Learning the spatial-temporal representation of motion information is crucial to human action recognition. Nevertheless, most of the existing features or descriptors cannot capture motion information effectively, especially for long-term motion. To address this problem, this paper proposes a long-term motion descriptor called sequential deep trajectory descriptor (sDTD). Specifically, we project dense trajectories into two-dimensional planes, and subsequently a CNN-RNN network is employed to learn an effective representation for long-term motion. Unlike the popular two-stream ConvNets, the sDTD stream is introduced into a three-stream framework so as to identify actions from a video sequence. Consequently, this three-stream framework can simultaneously capture static spatial features, short-term motion, and long-term motion in the video. Extensive experiments were conducted on three challenging datasets: KTH, HMDB51, and UCF101. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KTH and UCF101 datasets, and is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods on the HMDB51 dataset.

Selective Eigenbackground for Background Modeling and Subtraction in Crowded Scenes

Background subtraction is a fundamental preprocessing step in many surveillance video analysis tasks. In spite of significant efforts, however, background subtraction in crowded scenes remains challenging, especially, when a large number of foreground objects move slowly or just keep still. To address the problem, this paper proposes a selective eigenbackground method for background modeling and subtraction in crowded scenes. The contributions of our method are three-fold: First, instead of training eigenbackgrounds using the original video frames that may contain more or less foregrounds, a virtual frame construction algorithm is utilized to assemble clean background pixels from different original frames so as to construct some virtual frames as the training and update samples. This can significantly improve the purity of the trained eigenbackgrounds. Second, for a crowded scene with diversified environmental conditions (e.g., illuminations), it is difficult to use only one eigenbackground model to deal with all these variations, even using some online update strategies. Thus given several models trained offline, we utilize peak signal-to-noise ratio to adaptively choose the optimal one to initialize the online eigenbackground model. Third, to tackle the problem that not all pixels can obtain the optimal results when the reconstruction is performed at once for the whole frame, our method selects the best eigenbackground for each pixel to obtain an improved quality of the reconstructed background image. Extensive experiments on the TRECVID-SED dataset and the Road video dataset show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods remarkably.

Automatic webcam-based human heart rate measurements using laplacian eigenmap

Non-contact, long-term monitoring human heart rate is of great importance to home health care. Recent studies show that Photoplethysmography (PPG) can provide a means of heart rate measurement by detecting blood volume pulse (BVP) in human face. However, most of existing methods use linear analysis method to uncover the underlying BVP, which may be not quite adequate for physiological signals. They also lack rigorous mathematical and physiological models for the subsequent heart rate calculation. In this paper, we present a novel webcam-based heart rate measurement method using Laplacian Eigenmap (LE). Usually, the webcam captures the PPG signal mixed with other sources of fluctuations in light. Thus exactly separating the PPG signal from the collected data is crucial for heart rate measurement. In our method, more accurate BVP can be extracted by applying LE to efficiently discover the embedding ties of PPG with the nonlinear mixed data. We also operate effective data filtering on BVP and get heart rate based on the calculation of interbeat intervals (IBIs). Experimental results show that LE obtains higher degrees of agreement with measurements using finger blood oximetry than Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and other five alternative methods. Moreover, filtering and processing on IBIs are proved to increase the measuring accuracy in experiments.

Segmented lanthanum cerium oxide thermal barrier coatings by atmospheric plasma spray

Abstract Recently, efforts have been focussed on seeking for new candidates as ceramic topcoat in thermal barrier coating (TBC) system, instead of yttria stabilised zirconia (YSZ) currently used for TBC topcoat. Among the candidates, lanthanum cerium oxide (La2Ce2O7, LCO) is a promising TBC topcoat material, because of its higher temperature stability and better thermal insulation performance relative to yttria stabilised zirconia. In this work, the LCO TBC with high segmentation crack density was prepared by atmospheric plasma spraying, while keeping the stoichiometric composition of the coating. High plasma power and high substrate temperature Ts contribute to the formation of the segmentation structure. The segmented LCO TBC had a lifetime of >730 cycles, exhibiting a significant improvement in thermal shock resistance as compared to the nonsegmented coating. Spallation failure of the segmented TBC was caused by both chipping and delamination cracking.

CNN vs. SIFT for Image Retrieval: Alternative or Complementary?

In the past decade, SIFT is widely used in most vision tasks such as image retrieval. While in recent several years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) features achieve the state-of-the-art performance in several tasks such as image classification and object detection. Thus a natural question arises: for the image retrieval task, can CNN features substitute for SIFT? In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that the two kinds of features are highly complementary. Following this fact, we propose an image representation model, complementary CNN and SIFT (CCS), to fuse CNN and SIFT in a multi-level and complementary way. In particular, it can be used to simultaneously describe scene-level, object-level and point-level contents in images. Extensive experiments are conducted on four image retrieval benchmarks, and the experimental results show that our CCS achieves state-of-the-art retrieval results.

A coding unit classification based AVC-to-HEVC transcoding with background modeling for surveillance videos

To save the storage and transmission cost, it is applicable now to develop fast and efficient methods to transcode the perennial surveillance videos to HEVC ones, since HEVC has doubled the compression ratio. Considering the long-time static background characteristic of surveillance videos, this paper presents a coding unit (CU) classification based AVC-to-HEVC transcoding method with background modeling. In our method, the background frame modeled from originally decoded frames is firstly transcoded into HEVC stream as long-term reference to enhance the prediction efficiency. Afterwards, a CU classification algorithm which employs decoded motion vectors and the modeled background frame as input is proposed to divide the decoded data into background, foreground and hybrid CUs. Following this, different transcoding strategies of CU partition termination, prediction unit candidate selection and motion estimation simplification are adopted for different CU categories to reduce the complexity. Experimental results show our method can achieve 45% bit saving and 50% complexity reduction against traditional AVC-to-HEVC transcoding.

Wavelet based smoke detection method with RGB Contrast-image and shape constrain

Smoke detection in video surveillance is very important for early fire detection. A general viewpoint assumes that smoke is a low frequency signal which may smoothen the background. However, some pure-color objects also have this characteristic, and smoke also produces high frequency signal because the rich edge information of its contour. In order to solve these problems, an improved smoke detection method with RGB Contrast-image and shape constrain is proposed. In this method, wavelet transformation is implemented based on the RGB Contrast-image to distinguish smoke from other low frequency signals, and the existence of smoke is determined by analyzing the combination of the shape and the energy change of the region. Experimental results show our method outperforms the conventional methods remarkably.

Learning Deep Trajectory Descriptor for action recognition in videos using deep neural networks

Human action recognition is widely recognized as a challenging task due to the difficulty of effectively characterizing human action in a complex scene. Recent studies have shown that the dense-trajectory-based methods can achieve state-of-the-art recognition results on some challenging datasets. However, in these methods, each dense trajectory is often represented as a vector of coordinates, consequently losing the structural relationship between different trajectories. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel Deep Trajectory Descriptor (DTD) for action recognition. First, we extract dense trajectories from multiple consecutive frames and then project them onto a canvas. This will result in a “trajectory texture” image which can effectively characterize the relative motion in these frames. Based on these trajectory texture images, a deep neural network (DNN) is utilized to learn a more compact and powerful representation of dense trajectories. In the action recognition system, the DTD descriptor, together with other non-trajectory features such as HOG, HOF and MBH, can provide an effective way to characterize human action from various aspects. Experimental results show that our system can statistically outperform several state-of-the-art approaches, with an average accuracy of 95:6% on KTH and an accuracy of 92.14% on UCF50.

Joint Learning of Semantic and Latent Attributes

As mid-level semantic properties shared across object categories, attributes have been studied extensively. Recent approaches have attempted joint modelling of multiple attributes together with class labels so as to exploit their correlations for better attribute prediction and object recognition. However, they often ignore the fact that there exist some shared properties other than nameable/semantic attributes, which we call latent attributes. Basically, they can be further divided into discriminative and non-discriminative parts depending on whether they can contribute to an object recognition task. We argue that learning the latent attributes jointly with user-defined semantic attributes not only leads to better representation for object recognition but also helps with semantic attribute prediction. A novel dictionary learning model is proposed which decomposes the dictionary space into three parts corresponding to semantic, latent discriminative and latent background attributes respectively. An efficient algorithm is then formulated to solve the resultant optimization problem. Extensive experiments show that the proposed attribute learning method produces state-of-the-art results on both attribute prediction and attribute-based person re-identification.