Abstract

Super-resolution reconstruction algorithms assume the availability of exact registration and blur parameters. Inaccurate estimation of these parameters adversely affects the quality of the reconstructed image. However, traditional approaches for image registration are either sensitive to image degradations such as variations in blur, illumination and noise, or are limited in the class of image transformations that can be estimated. We propose an accurate registration algorithm that uses the local phase information, which is robust to the above degradations. We derive the theoretical error rate of the estimates in presence of non-ideal band-pass behavior of the filter and show that the error converges to zero over iterations. We also show the invariance of local phase to a class of blur kernels. Experimental results on images taken under varying conditions clearly demonstrates the robustness of our approach.

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to 3D hand geometry based person authentication using projected light patterns. Instead of explicitly computing a depth map of the palm for recognition, we capture the depth information in the deformations of a projected texture pattern, and use it directly for recognition. The deformed pattern is characterized using local texture measures, which can encode the certain depth characteristics of the palm. An authentication system built using the proposed technique achieves an equal error rate of 0.84% on a dataset of 1341 samples collected from 149 users, as opposed to 4.03% using traditional 2D features on an identical dataset. The approach is robust as well as computationally efficient and could be applied to other 3D object recognition problems as well.

Abstract

Text-dependent writer verification systems are preferred over text-independent systems due to the accuracy they achieve with small amount of data. However, text-dependent systems are prone to forgery. This paper proposes a novel boosting based framework for writerspecific text generation to increase the accuracy and a method of text variation to make the system robust to forgery. The approach is able to achieve error rates of 5% with just 6 words as compared to random(11%) or most discriminative(22%) primitive selection methods on a dataset containing 20 writers. Boosting based text selection also provides the flexibility to incorporate text variation across multiple authentications, which in turn makes the system robust to forgery

Abstract

Algorithms for classification of 3D objects either recover the depth information lost during imaging using multiple images, structured lighting, image cues, etc. or work directly the images for classification. While the latter class of algorithms are more efficient and robust in comparison, they are less accurate due to the lack of depth information. We propose the use of structured lighting patterns projected on the object, which gets deformed according to the shape of the object. Since our goal is object classification and not shape recovery, we characterize the deformations using simple texture measures, thus avoiding the error prone and computationally expensive step of depth recovery. Moreover, since the deformations encode depth variations of the object, the 3D shape information is implicitly used for classification. We show that the information thus derived can significantly improve the accuracy of object classification algorithms, and derive the theoretical limits on height variations that can be captured by a particular projector-camera setup. A 3D texture classification algorithm derived from the proposed approach achieves a ten-fold reduction in error rate on a dataset of 30 classes, when compared to state-of-the-art image based approaches. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for a hand geometry based authentication system, which achieves a four-fold reduction in the equal error rate on a dataset containing 149 users.

Abstract

Projector-Camera systems are extensively used for various applications in computer vision, immersive environments, visual servoing, etc. Due to gaps between neighboring pixels on the projector’s image plane and variations in scene depth, the mage projected onto a scene shows pixelation and blurring artifacts. In certain vision and graphics applications, it is desirable that a high quality composition of the scene and the projected image, excluding the artifacts, is captured, while retaining the scene characteristics. Localization of projected pixels can also help in dense estimation of scene shape. In this paper, we address the problem of localizing each of the projected pixels from a captured scene and restoring the captured image so that the pixelation and blurring artifacts of the projector are removed. We improve the quality of the captured image further by virtualizing a high resolution projector. i.e., we modify the captured image as if the scene were illuminated with a high-resolution projector. We propose robust solutions to these problems and demonstrate their effectiveness on scenes of different complexities.

Abstract

Constructing a high-resolution (HR) image from low resolution (LR) image(s) has been a very active research topic recently with focus shifting from multi-frames to learning based single-frame super-resolution (SR). Multi-frame R algorithms attempt the exact reconstruction of reality, but are limited to small magnification factors. Learning based SR algorithms learn the correspondences between LR and HR patches. Accurate replacements or revealing the exact underlying information is not guaranteed in many scenarios. In this paper we propose an alternate solution. We propose to capture images at right zoom such that it has just sufficient amount of information so that further resolution enhancements can be easily achieved using any off the shelf single-frame SR algorithm. This is true under the assumption that such a zoom factor is not very high, which is true for most man-made structures. The low-resolution image is divided into small patches and ideal resolution is predicted for every patch. The contextual information is incorporated using a Markov Random Field based prior. Training data is generated from high-quality images and can use any singleframe SR algorithm. Several constraints are proposed to minimize the extent of zoom-in. We validate the proposed approach on synthetic data and real world images to show the robustness

Abstract

Recognition of object categories from their images is extremely challenging due to the large intra-class variations, and variations in pose, illumination and scale, in addition to lack of depth information of the object. Recovering the depth information from multiple images or from image cues such as variations in illumination or focus, is both computationally intensive and error prone. In contrast, the appearance based approaches are more robust and computationally efficient. However, they lack the potential accuracy of 3D feature based approaches due to the lack of shape information. We propose the use of structured lighting patterns projected on the object, which gets deformed according to the shape of the object for recognition. Since our goal is object classification and not shape recovery, we characterize the deformations using simple texture measures, thus avoiding depth recovery step. Moreover, the shape information present in the deformations is implicitly used for classification. We show that the information thus derived can significantly improve the accuracy of object category recognition from arbitrary-pose images.

Abstract

A document image is composed of a variety of physical entities or regions such as text blocks, lines, words, figures, tables, and background. We could also assign functional or logical labels such as sentences, titles, captions, author names, and addresses to some of these regions. The process of document structure and layout analysis tries to decompose a given document image into its component regions and understand their functional roles and relationships. The processing is carried out in multiple steps, such as preprocessing, page decomposition, structure understanding, etc. We will look into each of these steps in detail in the following sections. Document images are often generated from ph

Abstract

One of the prime challenges in designing a classifier for large-class problems such as Indian language OCRs is the presence of a large similar looking character set. The nature of the character set introduces problems with accuracy and efficiency of the classifier. Hierarchical classifiers such as Binary Hierarchical Decision Trees (BHDTs) using SVMs as component classifiers have been effectively used to tackle such large-class classification problems. The accuracy and efficiency of a BHDT classifier will depend on: i) the accuracy of the component classifiers, ii) the separability of the clusters at each node in a hierarchical classifier, and iii) the balance of the BHDT. We propose methods to tackle each of the above problems in the case of binary character images. We present a new distance measure, which is intuitively suitable when Support Vector Machines are used as component classifiers. We also propose a novel method for balancing the BHDT to improve its efficiency, while maintaining the accuracy. Finally we propose a method to generate overlapping partitions to improve the accuracy of BHDTs. Comparison of the method with other forms of classifier combination techniques such as 1vs1, 1vsRest and Decision Directed Acyclic Graphs shows that the proposed approach is highly efficient, while being comparable with the more expensive techniques in terms of accuracy. The experiments are focused on the problem of Indian language OCR, while the framework is usable for other problems as well

Abstract

Accurate registration of images is essential for many computer vision algorithms for medical image analysis, super-resolution, and image mosaicing. Performance of traditional correspondence-based approaches is restricted by the reliability of the feature detector. Popular frequency domain approaches use the magnitude of global frequencies for registration, and are limited in the class of transformations that can be estimated. We propose the use of local phase information for accurate image registration as it is robust to noise and illumination conditions and the estimates are obtained at sub-pixel accuracy without any correspondence computation. We form an overdetermined system of equations from the phase differences to estimate the parameters of image registration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for affine transformation under Gaussian white noise and varying illumination conditions.