Computer Vision Metrics provides an extensive survey and analysis of over 100 current and historical feature description and machine vision methods, with a detailed taxonomy for local, regional and global features. This book provides necessary background to develop intuition about why interest point detectors and feature descriptors actually work, how they are designed, with observations about tuning the methods for achieving robustness and invariance targets for specific applications. The survey is broader than it is deep, with over 540 references provided to dig deeper. The taxonomy includes search methods, spectra components, descriptor representation, shape, distance functions, accuracy, efficiency, robustness and invariance attributes, and more. Rather than providing ‘how-to’ source code examples and shortcuts, this book provides a counterpoint discussion to the many fine opencv community source code resources available for hands-on practitioners.

Based on the successful 2014 book published by Apress, this textbook edition is expanded to provide a comprehensive history and state-of-the-art survey for fundamental computer vision methods and deep learning. With over 800 essential references, as well as chapter-by-chapter learning assignments, both students and researchers can dig deeper into core computer vision topics and deep learning architectures. The survey covers everything from feature descriptors, regional and global feature metrics, feature learning architectures, deep learning, neuroscience of vision, neural networks, and detailed example architectures to illustrate computer vision hardware and software optimization methods. To complement the survey, the textbook includes useful analyses which provide insight into the goals of various methods, why they work, and how they may be optimized. The text delivers an essential survey and a valuable taxonomy, thus providing a key learning tool for students, researchers and engineers, to supplement the many effective hands-on resources and open source projects, such as OpenCV and other imaging and deep learning tools.

Similarity between objects plays an important role in both human cognitive processes and artificial systems for recognition and categorization. How to appropriately measure such similarities for a given task is crucial to the performance of many machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining methods. This book is devoted to metric learning, a set of techniques to automatically learn similarity and distance functions from data that has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields in the past ten years. In this book, we provide a thorough review of the metric learning literature that covers algorithms, theory and applications for both numerical and structured data. We first introduce relevant definitions and classic metric functions, as well as examples of their use in machine learning and data mining. We then review a wide range of metric learning algorithms, starting with the simple setting of linear distance and similarity learning. We show how one may scale-up these methods to very large amounts of training data. To go beyond the linear case, we discuss methods that learn nonlinear metrics or multiple linear metrics throughout the feature space, and review methods for more complex settings such as multi-task and semi-supervised learning. Although most of the existing work has focused on numerical data, we cover the literature on metric learning for structured data like strings, trees, graphs and time series. In the more technical part of the book, we present some recent statistical frameworks for analyzing the generalization performance in metric learning and derive results for some of the algorithms presented earlier. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of metric learning in real-world problems through a series of successful applications to computer vision, bioinformatics and information retrieval. Table of Contents: Introduction / Metrics / Properties of Metric Learning Algorithms / Linear Metric Learning / Nonlinear and Local Metric Learning / Metric Learning for Special Settings / Metric Learning for Structured Data / Generalization Guarantees for Metric Learning / Applications / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

This book presents a comprehensive treatise on Riemannian geometric computations and related statistical inferences in several computer vision problems. This edited volume includes chapter contributions from leading figures in the field of computer vision who are applying Riemannian geometric approaches in problems such as face recognition, activity recognition, object detection, biomedical image analysis, and structure-from-motion. Some of the mathematical entities that necessitate a geometric analysis include rotation matrices (e.g. in modeling camera motion), stick figures (e.g. for activity recognition), subspace comparisons (e.g. in face recognition), symmetric positive-definite matrices (e.g. in diffusion tensor imaging), and function-spaces (e.g. in studying shapes of closed contours).

Group and Crowd Behavior for Computer Vision provides a multidisciplinary perspective on how to solve the problem of group and crowd analysis and modeling, combining insights from the social sciences with technological ideas in computer vision and pattern recognition. The book answers many unresolved issues in group and crowd behavior, with Part One providing an introduction to the problems of analyzing groups and crowds that stresses that they should not be considered as completely diverse entities, but as an aggregation of people. Part Two focuses on features and representations with the aim of recognizing the presence of groups and crowds in image and video data. It discusses low level processing methods to individuate when and where a group or crowd is placed in the scene, spanning from the use of people detectors toward more ad-hoc strategies to individuate group and crowd formations. Part Three discusses methods for analyzing the behavior of groups and the crowd once they have been detected, showing how to extract semantic information, predicting/tracking the movement of a group, the formation or disaggregation of a group/crowd and the identification of different kinds of groups/crowds depending on their behavior. The final section focuses on identifying and promoting datasets for group/crowd analysis and modeling, presenting and discussing metrics for evaluating the pros and cons of the various models and methods. This book gives computer vision researcher techniques for segmentation and grouping, tracking and reasoning for solving group and crowd modeling and analysis, as well as more general problems in computer vision and machine learning. - Presents the first book to cover the topic of modeling and analysis of groups in computer vision - Discusses the topics of group and crowd modeling from a cross-disciplinary perspective, using social science anthropological theories translated into computer vision algorithms - Focuses on group and crowd analysis metrics - Discusses real industrial systems dealing with the problem of analyzing groups and crowds

The seven-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 7572-7578 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2012, held in Florence, Italy, in October 2012. The 408 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1437 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on geometry, 2D and 3D shapes, 3D reconstruction, visual recognition and classification, visual features and image matching, visual monitoring: action and activities, models, optimisation, learning, visual tracking and image registration, photometry: lighting and colour, and image segmentation.

The goal of this book is to address the use of several important machine learning techniques into computer vision applications. An innovative combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques has the promise of advancing the field of computer vision, which contributes to better understanding of complex real-world applications. The effective usage of machine learning technology in real-world computer vision problems requires understanding the domain of application, abstraction of a learning problem from a given computer vision task, and the selection of appropriate representations for the learnable (input) and learned (internal) entities of the system. In this book, we address all these important aspects from a new perspective: that the key element in the current computer revolution is the use of machine learning to capture the variations in visual appearance, rather than having the designer of the model accomplish this. As a bonus, models learned from large datasets are likely to be more robust and more realistic than the brittle all-design models.