One of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence is to enable computers to interpret 3D scenes and objects from imagery. This book organizes and introduces major concepts in 3D scene and object representation and inference from still images, with a focus on recent efforts to fuse models of geometry and perspective with statistical machine learning. The book is organized into three sections: (1) Interpretation of Physical Space; (2) Recognition of 3D Objects; and (3) Integrated 3D Scene Interpretation. The first discusses representations of spatial layout and techniques to interpret physical scenes from images. The second section introduces representations for 3D object categories that account for the intrinsically 3D nature of objects and provide robustness to change in viewpoints. The third section discusses strategies to unite inference of scene geometry and object pose and identity into a coherent scene interpretation. Each section broadly surveys important ideas from cognitive science and artificial intelligence research, organizes and discusses key concepts and techniques from recent work in computer vision, and describes a few sample approaches in detail. Newcomers to computer vision will benefit from introductions to basic concepts, such as single-view geometry and image classification, while experts and novices alike may find inspiration from the book's organization and discussion of the most recent ideas in 3D scene understanding and 3D object recognition. Specific topics include: mathematics of perspective geometry; visual elements of the physical scene, structural 3D scene representations; techniques and features for image and region categorization; historical perspective, computational models, and datasets and machine learning techniques for 3D object recognition; inferences of geometrical attributes of objects, such as size and pose; and probabilistic and feature-passing approaches for contextual reasoning about 3D objects and scenes. Table of Contents: Background on 3D Scene Models / Single-view Geometry / Modeling the Physical Scene / Categorizing Images and Regions / Examples of 3D Scene Interpretation / Background on 3D Recognition / Modeling 3D Objects / Recognizing and Understanding 3D Objects / Examples of 2D 1/2 Layout Models / Reasoning about Objects and Scenes / Cascades of Classifiers / Conclusion and Future Directions

Monocular Model-Based 3D Tracking of Rigid Objects reviews the different techniques and approaches that have been developed by industry and research.

- The first book, by the leading experts, on this rapidly developing field with applications to security, smart homes, multimedia, and environmental monitoring - Comprehensive coverage of fundamentals, algorithms, design methodologies, system implementation issues, architectures, and applications - Presents in detail the latest developments in multi-camera calibration, active and heterogeneous camera networks, multi-camera object and event detection, tracking, coding, smart camera architecture and middleware This book is the definitive reference in multi-camera networks. It gives clear guidance on the conceptual and implementation issues involved in the design and operation of multi-camera networks, as well as presenting the state-of-the-art in hardware, algorithms and system development. The book is broad in scope, covering smart camera architectures, embedded processing, sensor fusion and middleware, calibration and topology, network-based detection and tracking, and applications in distributed and collaborative methods in camera networks. This book will be an ideal reference for university researchers, R&D engineers, computer engineers, and graduate students working in signal and video processing, computer vision, and sensor networks. Hamid Aghajan is a Professor of Electrical Engineering (consulting) at Stanford University. His research is on multi-camera networks for smart environments with application to smart homes, assisted living and well being, meeting rooms, and avatar-based communication and social interactions. He is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, and was general chair of ACM/IEEE ICDSC 2008. Andrea Cavallaro is Reader (Associate Professor) at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). His research is on target tracking and audiovisual content analysis for advanced surveillance and multi-sensor systems. He serves as Associate Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and the IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, and has been general chair of IEEE AVSS 2007, ACM/IEEE ICDSC 2009 and BMVC 2009. - The first book, by the leading experts, on this rapidly developing field with applications to security, smart homes, multimedia, and environmental monitoring - Comprehensive coverage of fundamentals, algorithms, design methodologies, system implementation issues, architectures, and applications - Presents in detail the latest developments in multi-camera calibration, active and heterogeneous camera networks, multi-camera object and event detection, tracking, coding, smart camera architecture and middleware

This timely and authoritative volume explores the bidirectional relationship between images and locations. The text presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art in large-scale visual geo-localization, and discusses the emerging trends in this area. Valuable insights are supplied by a pre-eminent selection of experts in the field, into a varied range of real-world applications of geo-localization. Topics and features: discusses the latest methods to exploit internet-scale image databases for devising geographically rich features and geo-localizing query images at different scales; investigates geo-localization techniques that are built upon high-level and semantic cues; describes methods that perform precise localization by geometrically aligning the query image against a 3D model; reviews techniques that accomplish image understanding assisted by the geo-location, as well as several approaches for geo-localization under practical, real-world settings.

Oriented Projective Geometry: A Framework for Geometric Computations proposes that oriented projective geometry is a better framework for geometric computations than classical projective geometry. The aim of the book is to stress the value of oriented projective geometry for practical computing and develop it as a rich, consistent, and effective tool for computer programmers. The monograph is comprised of 20 chapters. Chapter 1 gives a quick overview of classical and oriented projective geometry on the plane, and discusses their advantages and disadvantages as computational models. Chapters 2 through 7 define the canonical oriented projective spaces of arbitrary dimension, the operations of join and meet, and the concept of relative orientation. Chapter 8 defines projective maps, the space transformations that preserve incidence and orientation; these maps are used in chapter 9 to define abstract oriented projective spaces. Chapter 10 introduces the notion of projective duality. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 deal with projective functions, projective frames, relative coordinates, and cross-ratio. Chapter 14 tells about convexity in oriented projective spaces. Chapters 15, 16, and 17 show how the affine, Euclidean, and linear vector spaces can be emulated with the oriented projective space. Finally, chapters 18 through 20 discuss the computer representation and manipulation of lines, planes, and other subspaces. Computer scientists and programmers will find this text invaluable.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Vision Algorithms held in Corfu, Greece in September 1999 in conjunction with ICCV'99. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions; each paper is complemented by a brief transcription of the discussion that followed its presentation. Also included are two invited contributions and two expert reviews as well as a panel discussion. The volume spans the whole range of algorithms for geometric vision. The authors and volume editors succeeded in providing added value beyond a mere collection of papers and made the volume a state-of-the-art survey of their field.

Being able to recover the shape of 3D deformable surfaces from a single video stream would make it possible to field reconstruction systems that run on widely available hardware without requiring specialized devices. However, because many different 3D shapes can have virtually the same projection, such monocular shape recovery is inherently ambiguous. In this survey, we will review the two main classes of techniques that have proved most effective so far: The template-based methods that rely on establishing correspondences with a reference image in which the shape is already known, and non-rigid structure-from-motion techniques that exploit points tracked across the sequences to reconstruct a completely unknown shape. In both cases, we will formalize the approach, discuss its inherent ambiguities, and present the practical solutions that have been proposed to resolve them. To conclude, we will suggest directions for future research. Table of Contents: Introduction / Early Approaches to Non-Rigid Reconstruction / Formalizing Template-Based Reconstruction / Performing Template-Based Reconstruction / Formalizing Non-Rigid Structure from Motion / Performing Non-Rigid Structure from Motion / Future Directions