Camera calibration and radial distortion correction are the crucial prerequisites for many applications in image big data and computer vision. Many existing works rely on the Manhattan world assumption to estimate the camera parameters automatically; however, they may perform poorly when there was lack of man-made structure in the scene. As walking humans are the common objects in video surveillance, they have also been used for camera self-calibration, but the main challenges include the noise reduction for the estimation of vanishing points, the relaxation of assumptions on unknown camera parameters, and the radial distortion correction. In this paper, we present a novel framework for camera self-calibration and automatic radial distortion correction. Our approach starts with the reliable human body segmentation that is facilitated by robust object tracking. Mean shift clustering and Laplace linear regression are, respectively, introduced in the estimation of the vertical vanishing point and the horizon line. The estimation of distribution algorithm, an evolutionary optimization scheme, is then utilized to optimize the camera parameters and the distortion coefficients, in which all the unknowns in camera projection can be fine-tuned simultaneously. Experiments on the three public benchmarks and our own captured dataset demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method. The superiority of this algorithm is also verified by the capability of reliably converting 2D object tracking into 3D space.
The widespread use of vision-based surveillance systems has inspired many research efforts on people localization. In this paper, a series of novel image transforms based on the vanishing point of vertical lines is proposed for enhancement of the probabilistic occupancy map (POM)-based people localization scheme. Utilizing the characteristic that the extensions of vertical lines intersect at a vanishing point, the proposed transforms, based on image or ground plane coordinate system, aims at producing transformed images wherein each standing/walking person will have an upright appearance. Thus, the degradation in localization accuracy due to the deviation of camera configuration constraint specified can be alleviated, while the computation efficiency resulted from the applicability of integral image can be retained. Experimental results show that significant improvement in POM-based people localization for more general camera configurations can indeed be achieved with the proposed image transforms.
We developed an automatic debris flow warning system in this study. The system uses a fixed video camera mounted over mountainous streams with a high risk for debris flows. The focus of this study is to develop an automatic algorithm for detecting debris flows with a low computational effort which can facilitate real-time implementation. The algorithm is based on a moving object detection technique to detect debris flow by comparing among video frames. Background subtraction is the kernel of the algorithm to reduce the computational effort, but non-rigid properties and color similarity of the object and the background color introduces some difficulties. Therefore, we used several spatial filtering approaches to increase the performance of the background subtraction. To increase the accuracy entropy is used with histogram analysis to identify whether a debris flow occurred. The modified background subtraction approach using spatial filtering and entropy determination is adopted to overcome the error in moving detection caused by non-rigid and similarities in color properties. The results of this study show that the approach described here can improve performance and also reduce the computational effort.
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