Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

University of Florida Research Foundation Inc

Jeffrey Ho

Ming-Hsuan Yang

Jongwoo Lim

Kuang-Chih Lee

A visual tracker tracks an object in a sequence of input images. A tracking module detects a location of the object based on a set of weighted blocks representing the object's shape. The tracking module then refines a segmentation of the object from the background image at the detected location. Based on the refined segmentation, the set of weighted blocks are updated. By adaptively encoding appearance and shape into the block configuration, the present invention is able to efficiently and accurately track an object even in the presence of rapid motion that causes large variations in appearance and shape of the object.

Online articulate object tracking with appearance and shape

The present invention meets these needs by providing temporal coherency to recognition systems. One embodiment of the present invention comprises a manifold recognition module to use a sequence of images for recognition. A manifold training module receives a plurality of training image sequences (e.g. from a video camera), each training image sequence including an individual in a plurality of poses, and establishes relationships between the images of a training image sequence. A probabilistic identity module receives a sequence of recognition images including a target individual for recognition, and identifies the target individual based on the relationship of training images corresponding to the recognition images. An occlusion module masks occluded portions of an individual's face to prevent distorted identifications.

Video-based face recognition using probabilistic appearance manifolds

A system and a method are disclosed for clustering images of objects seen from different viewpoints. That is, given an unlabelled set of images of n objects, an unsupervised algorithm groups the images into N disjoint subsets such that each subset only contains images of a single object. The clustering method makes use of a broad geometric framework that exploits the interplay between the geometry of appearance manifolds and the symmetry of the 2D affine group.

Image clustering with metric, local linear structure, and affine symmetry

Taking a set of unlabeled images of a collection of objects acquired under different imaging conditions, and decomposing the set into disjoint subsets corresponding to individual objects requires clustering. Appearance-based methods for clustering a set of images of 3-D objects acquired under varying illumination conditions can be based on the concept of illumination cones. A clustering problem is equivalent to finding convex polyhedral cones in the high-dimensional image space. To efficiently determine the conic structures hidden in the image data, the concept of conic affinity can be used which measures the likelihood of a pair of images belonging to the same underlying polyhedral cone. Other algorithms can be based on affinity measure based on image gradient comparisons operating directly on the image gradients by comparing the magnitudes and orientations of the image gradient.

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Gainesville, FL, United States of America

Jeffrey Ho