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- All Subjects: Computer vision
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Chakrabarti, Chaitali
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Object tracking is an important topic in multimedia, particularly in applications such as teleconferencing, surveillance and human-computer interface. Its goal is to determine the position of objects in images continuously and reliably. The key steps involved in object tracking are foreground detection to detect moving objects, clustering to enable representation of an object by its centroid, and tracking the centroids to determine the motion parameters.
In this thesis, a low cost object tracking system is implemented on a hardware accelerator that is a warp based processor for SIMD/Vector style computations. First, the different foreground detection techniques are explored to figure out the best technique that involves the least number of computations without compromising on the performance. It is found that the Gaussian Mixture Model proposed by Zivkovic gives the best performance with respect to both accuracy and number of computations. Pixel level parallelization is applied to this algorithm and it is mapped onto the hardware accelerator.
Next, the different clustering algorithms are studied and it is found that while DBSCAN is highly accurate and robust to outliers, it is very computationally intensive. In contrast, K-means is computationally simple, but it requires that the number of means to be specified beforehand. So, a new clustering algorithm is proposed that uses a combination of both DBSCAN and K-means algorithm along with a diagnostic algorithm on K-means to estimate the right number of centroids. The proposed hybrid algorithm is shown to be faster than the DBSCAN algorithm by ~2.5x with minimal loss in accuracy. Also, the 1D Kalman filter is implemented assuming constant acceleration model. Since the computations involved in Kalman filter is just a set of recursive equations, the sequential model in itself exhibits good performance, thereby alleviating the need for parallelization. The tracking performance of the low cost implementation is evaluated against the sequential version. It is found that the proposed hybrid algorithm performs very close to the reference algorithm based on the DBSCAN algorithm.
In this thesis, a low cost object tracking system is implemented on a hardware accelerator that is a warp based processor for SIMD/Vector style computations. First, the different foreground detection techniques are explored to figure out the best technique that involves the least number of computations without compromising on the performance. It is found that the Gaussian Mixture Model proposed by Zivkovic gives the best performance with respect to both accuracy and number of computations. Pixel level parallelization is applied to this algorithm and it is mapped onto the hardware accelerator.
Next, the different clustering algorithms are studied and it is found that while DBSCAN is highly accurate and robust to outliers, it is very computationally intensive. In contrast, K-means is computationally simple, but it requires that the number of means to be specified beforehand. So, a new clustering algorithm is proposed that uses a combination of both DBSCAN and K-means algorithm along with a diagnostic algorithm on K-means to estimate the right number of centroids. The proposed hybrid algorithm is shown to be faster than the DBSCAN algorithm by ~2.5x with minimal loss in accuracy. Also, the 1D Kalman filter is implemented assuming constant acceleration model. Since the computations involved in Kalman filter is just a set of recursive equations, the sequential model in itself exhibits good performance, thereby alleviating the need for parallelization. The tracking performance of the low cost implementation is evaluated against the sequential version. It is found that the proposed hybrid algorithm performs very close to the reference algorithm based on the DBSCAN algorithm.
ContributorsSasikumar, Asha (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Committee member) / Suppapola, Antonia Pappandreau (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Many real-time vision applications require accurate estimation of optical flow. This problem is quite challenging due to extremely high computation and memory requirements. This thesis focuses on designing low complexity dense optical flow algorithms.
First, a new method for optical flow that is based on Semi-Global Matching (SGM), a popular dynamic programming algorithm for stereo vision, is presented. In SGM, the disparity of each pixel is calculated by aggregating local matching costs over the entire image to resolve local ambiguity in texture-less and occluded regions. The proposed method, Neighbor-Guided Semi-Global Matching (NG-fSGM) achieves significantly less complexity compared to SGM, by 1) operating on a subset of the search space that has been aggressively pruned based on neighboring pixels’ information, 2) using a simple cost aggregation function, 3) approximating aggregated cost array and embedding pixel-wise matching cost computation and flow computation in aggregation. Evaluation on the Middlebury benchmark suite showed that, compared to a prior SGM extension for optical flow, the proposed basic NG-fSGM provides robust optical flow with 0.53% accuracy improvement, 40x reduction in number of operations and 6x reduction in memory size. To further reduce the complexity, sparse-to-dense flow estimation method is proposed. The number of operations and memory size are reduced by 68% and 47%, respectively, with only 0.42% accuracy degradation, compared to the basic NG-fSGM.
A parallel block-based version of NG-fSGM is also proposed. The image is divided into overlapping blocks and the blocks are processed in parallel to improve throughput, latency and power efficiency. To minimize the amount of overlap among blocks with minimal effect on the accuracy, temporal information is used to estimate a flow map that guides flow vector selections for pixels along block boundaries. The proposed block-based NG-fSGM achieves significant reduction in complexity with only 0.51% accuracy degradation compared to the basic NG-fSGM.
First, a new method for optical flow that is based on Semi-Global Matching (SGM), a popular dynamic programming algorithm for stereo vision, is presented. In SGM, the disparity of each pixel is calculated by aggregating local matching costs over the entire image to resolve local ambiguity in texture-less and occluded regions. The proposed method, Neighbor-Guided Semi-Global Matching (NG-fSGM) achieves significantly less complexity compared to SGM, by 1) operating on a subset of the search space that has been aggressively pruned based on neighboring pixels’ information, 2) using a simple cost aggregation function, 3) approximating aggregated cost array and embedding pixel-wise matching cost computation and flow computation in aggregation. Evaluation on the Middlebury benchmark suite showed that, compared to a prior SGM extension for optical flow, the proposed basic NG-fSGM provides robust optical flow with 0.53% accuracy improvement, 40x reduction in number of operations and 6x reduction in memory size. To further reduce the complexity, sparse-to-dense flow estimation method is proposed. The number of operations and memory size are reduced by 68% and 47%, respectively, with only 0.42% accuracy degradation, compared to the basic NG-fSGM.
A parallel block-based version of NG-fSGM is also proposed. The image is divided into overlapping blocks and the blocks are processed in parallel to improve throughput, latency and power efficiency. To minimize the amount of overlap among blocks with minimal effect on the accuracy, temporal information is used to estimate a flow map that guides flow vector selections for pixels along block boundaries. The proposed block-based NG-fSGM achieves significant reduction in complexity with only 0.51% accuracy degradation compared to the basic NG-fSGM.
ContributorsXiang, Jiang (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Karam, Lina (Committee member) / Kim, Hun Seok (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Visual navigation is a useful and important task for a variety of applications. As the prevalence of robots increase, there is an increasing need for energy-efficient navigation methods as well. Many aspects of efficient visual navigation algorithms have been implemented in the literature, but there is a lack of work on evaluation of the efficiency of the image sensors. In this thesis, two methods are evaluated: adaptive image sensor quantization for traditional camera pipelines as well as new event-based sensors for low-power computer vision.The first contribution in this thesis is an evaluation of performing varying levels of sensor linear and logarithmic quantization with the task of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This unconventional method can provide efficiency benefits with a trade off between accuracy of the task and energy-efficiency. A new sensor quantization method, gradient-based quantization, is introduced to improve the accuracy of the task. This method only lowers the bit level of parts of the image that are less likely to be important in the SLAM algorithm since lower bit levels signify better energy-efficiency, but worse task accuracy. The third contribution is an evaluation of the efficiency and accuracy of event-based camera intensity representations for the task of optical flow. The results of performing a learning based optical flow are provided for each of five different reconstruction methods along with ablation studies. Lastly, the challenges of an event feature-based SLAM system are presented with results demonstrating the necessity for high quality and high resolution event data. The work in this thesis provides studies useful for examining tradeoffs for an efficient visual navigation system with traditional and event vision sensors. The results of this thesis also provide multiple directions for future work.
ContributorsChristie, Olivia Catherine (Author) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022