Shape knowledge for segmentation and tracking

The aim of this thesis is to provide methods for 2D segmentation and 2D/3D tracking, that are both fast and robust to imperfect image information, as caused for example by occlusions, motion blur and cluttered background. We do this by combining high level shape information with simultaneous segmentation and tracking. We base our work on the assumption that the space of possible 2D object shapes can be either generated by projecting down known rigid 3D shapes or learned from 2D shape examples. We minimise the discrimination between statistical foreground and background appearance models with respect to the parameters governing the shape generative process (the 6 degree-of-freedom 3D pose of the 3D shape or the parameters of the learned space). The foreground region is delineated by the zero level set of a signed distance function, and we define an energy over this region and its immediate background surroundings based on pixel-wise posterior membership probabilities. We obtain the differentials of this energy with respect to the parameters governing shape and conduct searches for the correct shape using standard non-linear minimisation techniques. This methodology first leads to a novel rigid 3D object tracker. For a known 3D shape, our optimisation here aims to find the 3D pose that leads to the 2D projection that best segments a given image. We extend our approach to track multiple objects from multiple views and propose novel enhancements at the pixel level based on temporal consistency. Finally, owing to the per pixel nature of much of the algorithm, we support our theoretical approach with a real-time GPU based implementation. We next use our rigid 3D tracker in two applications: (i) a driver assistance system, where the tracker is augmented with 2D traffic sign detections, which, unlike previous work, allows for the relevance of the traffic signs to the driver to be gauged and (ii) a robust, real time 3D hand tracker that uses data from an off-the-shelf accelerometer and articulated pose classification results from a multiclass SVM classifier. Finally, we explore deformable 2D/3D object tracking. Unlike previous works, we use a non-linear and probabilistic dimensionality reduction, called Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models, to learn spaces of shape. Segmentation becomes a minimisation of an image-driven energy function in the learned space. We can represent both 2D and 3D shapes which we compress with Fourier-based transforms, to keep inference tractable. We extend this method by learning joint shape-parameter spaces, which, novel to the literature, enable simultaneous segmentation and generic parameter recovery. These can describe anything from 3D articulated pose to eye gaze. We also propose two novel extensions to standard GP-LVM: a method to explore the multimodality in the joint space efficiently, by learning a mapping from the latent space to a space that encodes the similarity between shapes and a method for obtaining faster convergence and greater accuracy by use of a hierarchy of latent embeddings.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo