G53VIS – Computer Vision

Tony Pridmore
Room C57
tpp@cs.nott.ac.uk
 Computer Vision
 An image is a function of
- the reflectance and shape of the viewed object
- illumination conditions
- viewing geometry
 Biological vision inverts that function
 The goal of computer vision is to
- understand how
- build systems that do something similar and useful
 Computer Vision
 Vision is underdetermined
- one pixel value is not enough to allow us to solve for
everything we need
 Vision is overdetermined
- multiple cues are available; shading, texture, stereo,
motion, boundary shape,…..
 Vision is impossible without assumptions/prior knowledge
 G52IVG and G53VIS
 Companion to G52IVG, which introduced some general
problems and techniques in computer vision and graphics….
- Image Acquisition and Representation
- Image Filtering
- Edge Detection & Hough Transforms
- Colour & Segmentation
- Motion & Tracking
- Projective Geometry
 G52IVG and G53VIS
….. and gave some practical experience of implementing
image processing and vision techniques in JAVA

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~bai/IVG/practicals.html
 If you haven’t done the IVG practicals, now would be a
good time
 G52IVG and G53VIS
 G53VIS will revisit and build upon some of the topics
covered in G52IVG
- more advanced/powerful/useful techniques
- some new problems/methods
- some real vision/image analysis applications
 Two lectures/week: Monday 4-5, A26, Business School
South , Tuesday1-2 in B18, Amenities Building
 One tutorial/week: Friday 12-1, A24, Business School South
www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~tpp/G53VIS/G53VIS.html
 Segmentation
 Graph-based methods: Normalised Cuts
Segmentation

 Edge-based methods:
Watershed Algorithms
 Pixel Clustering Methods:
- K Means
- Expectation Maximisation
 Evaluating Segmentation
Algorithms
Binocular Stereo
 Motion & Tracking
 Optic Flow
 Motion & Tracking
 Tracking: Kalman Filters
 Motion & Tracking
 Tracking: Particle filters and Snakes
Multi-target Tracking

• Large search spaces – need

to monitor the position, etc of
all targets at once

• Coalescence – trackers tend

to migrate onto one target
 Higher-Level Vision
 Learning about and recognising events and behaviours
 Some Good Books
 Introductory Techniques for 3D
Computer Vision, Emanuele Trucco
& Alessandro Verri, Prentice Hall,
1998.
- closest to a VIS module text
- good on features, stereo and
motion
 Some Good Books
 Computer Vision: A Modern
Approach, David Forsyth & Jean
Ponce, Prentice-Hall, 2003
- more comprehensive
- more expensive
- good on pretty much everything
Sample chapters, etc. are available at
http://luthuli.cs.uiuc.edu/~daf/book/book.html
 Assessment
 75% examination, 25% coursework
 The assignment will be a practical project, you will
- implement a correlation-based stereo correspondence
algorithm that applies a similarity measure to matching image
regions;
-implement two similarity measures within this
framework;
- use your system to apply each of the similarity measures
to each of three stereo image pairs;
- use the results obtained to both assess the strengths and
weaknesses of individual similarity measures and compare their
performance.
 Assessment
 The examination will be a standard “Answer 3 questions from
5”, with questions in the same style as previous years.
 The exam will focus on assessing your knowledge of vision
techniques, how they work and how they can be expected to
perform in different situations.

The technical material begins in the next lecture:

Segmentation as Clustering