I serve as VP of R&D at United Imaging Intelligence (UII America) in Boston, MA, where I lead the creation of computer vision, machine learning, and intelligent robotic systems for medical environments.
Previously, I worked as a Senior Key Expert Scientist at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ and as a System Engineer at Honeywell Technology Solutions Labs in Shanghai, China, respectively.
I received my PhD in Computer and Systems Engineering from the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in May 2014 under the guidance of Prof. Richard J. Radke.
[Internship] We are looking for multiple research interns with computer vision and robotics background to join our Boston team for Spring and Summer 2026. Please email ziyan.wu AT uii-ai DOT com if you are interested.
We introduce MedVidBench, a large-scale benchmark of 531,850 video-instruction pairs across 8 medical sources spanning video, segment, and frame-level tasks. While supervised fine-tuning on MedVidBench yields noticeable gains, standard Reinforcement Learning fails due to imbalanced reward scales across datasets. To overcome this, we introduce MedGRPO, a novel RL framework for balanced multi-dataset training with cross-dataset reward normalization and a medical LLM judge that evaluates caption quality on five clinical dimensions. Supervised fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on MedVidBench substantially outperforms GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-Flash across all tasks, while our MedGRPO framework further improves upon the SFT baseline across grounding and captioning tasks.
We introduce Consistent Instance Field, a continuous and probabilistic spatio-temporal representation for dynamic scene understanding. Unlike prior methods that rely on discrete tracking or view-dependent features, our approach disentangles visibility from persistent object identity by modeling each space-time point with an occupancy probability and a conditional instance distribution. We introduce a novel instance-embedded representation based on deformable 3D Gaussians, which jointly encode radiance and semantic information and are learned directly from input RGB images and instance masks through differentiable rasterization. Experiments on HyperNeRF and Neu3D datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on novel-view panoptic segmentation and open-vocabulary 4D querying tasks.
We introduce Universal Beta Splatting (UBS), a unified framework that generalizes 3D Gaussian Splatting to N-dimensional anisotropic Beta kernels for explicit radiance field rendering. Unlike fixed Gaussian primitives, Beta kernels enable controllable dependency modeling across spatial, angular, and temporal dimensions within a single representation. Our unified approach captures complex light transport effects, handles anisotropic view-dependent appearance, and models scene dynamics without requiring auxiliary networks or specific color encodings. UBS maintains backward compatibility by approximating to Gaussian Splatting as a special case, guaranteeing plug-in usability and lower performance bounds. The learned Beta parameters naturally decompose scene properties into interpretable components without explicit supervision: spatial (surface vs. texture), angular (diffuse vs. specular), and temporal (static vs. dynamic).
We propose a novel pipeline designed to reconstruct occlusion-resilient 3D humans with multiview consistency from a single occluded image, without requiring either ground-truth geometric prior annotations or 3D supervision. Specifically, CHROME leverages a multiview diffusion model to first synthesize occlusion-free human images from the occluded input, compatible with off-the-shelf pose control to explicitly enforce cross-view consistency during synthesis. A 3D reconstruction model is then trained to predict a set of 3D Gaussians conditioned on both the occluded input and synthesized views, aligning cross-view details to produce a cohesive and accurate 3D representation.
We present 7D Gaussian Splatting (7DGS), a unified framework representing scene elements as seven-dimensional Gaussians spanning position (3D), time (1D), and viewing direction (3D). Our key contribution is an efficient conditional slicing mechanism that transforms 7D Gaussians into view- and time-conditioned 3D Gaussians, maintaining compatibility with existing 3D Gaussian Splatting pipelines while enabling joint optimization. Experiments demonstrate that 7DGS outperforms prior methods by up to 7.36 dB in PSNR while achieving real-time rendering (401 FPS) on challenging dynamic scenes with complex view-dependent effects.
We introduce PolypSegTrack, a novel foundation model that jointly addresses polyp detection, segmentation, classification and unsupervised tracking in colonoscopic videos. Our approach leverages a novel conditional mask loss, enabling flexible training across datasets with either pixel-level segmentation masks or bounding box annotations, allowing us to bypass task-specific fine-tuning. Our unsupervised tracking module reliably associates polyp instances across frames using object queries, without relying on any heuristics. We leverage a robust vision foundation model backbone that is pre-trained unsupervisedly on natural images, thereby removing the need for domain-specific pre-training.
We propose
Seq2Time, a data-oriented training paradigm that leverages sequences of images and short video clips to enhance
temporal awareness in long videos. By converting sequence
positions into temporal annotations, we transform largescale image and clip captioning datasets into sequences
that mimic the temporal structure of long videos, enabling
self-supervised training with abundant time-sensitive data.
To enable sequence-to-time knowledge transfer, we introduce a novel time representation that unifies positional information across image sequences, clip sequences, and long
videos.
Novel view synthesis has advanced significantly with the development of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). However, achieving high quality without compromising real-time rendering remains challenging, particularly for physically-based ray tracing with view-dependent effects.We introduce 6D Gaussian Splatting (6DGS), which enhances color and opacity representations and leverages the additional directional information in the 6D space for optimized Gaussian control. Our approach is fully compatible with the 3DGS framework and significantly improves real-time radiance field rendering by better modeling view-dependent effects and fine details.
We propose a solution that adequately handles the distinct visual and semantic modalities, i.e., a 3D vision-language Gaussian splatting model for scene understanding, to put emphasis on the representation learning of language modality. We propose a novel cross-modal rasterizer, using modality fusion along with a smoothed semantic indicator for enhancing semantic rasterization. We also employ a camera-view blending technique to improve semantic consistency between existing and synthesized views, thereby effectively mitigating over-fitting.
We introduce a novel order-aware attention, where the order maps seamlessly guide the user interactions (in the form of clicks) to attend to the image features. We further present an object-aware attention module to incorporate a strong object-level understanding to better differentiate objects with similar order. Our approach allows both dense and sparse integration of user clicks, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency as compared to prior works.
We propose an automated patient positioning system that utilizes a camera to detect specific hand gestures from technicians, allowing users to indicate the target patient region to the system and initiate automated positioning. Our approach relies on a novel multi-stage pipeline to recognize and interpret the technicians’ gestures, translating them into precise motions of medical devices.
We present a novel approach that marries realistic
physics-inspired X-ray simulation with efficient,
differentiable DRR generation using 3D Gaussian splatting
(3DGS). Our direction-disentangled 3DGS (DDGS) method
separates the radiosity contribution into isotropic and
direction-dependent components, approximating complex
anisotropic interactions without intricate runtime
simulations. Additionally, we adapt the 3DGS initialization
to account for tomography data properties, enhancing
accuracy and efficiency.
We introduce a novel bottom-up approach for human body mesh reconstruction, specifically designed to address the challenges posed by partial visibility and occlusion in input images.
Our method reconstructs human body parts independently before fusing them, thereby ensuring robustness against occlusions. We design
Human Part Parametric Models that independently reconstruct
the mesh from a few shape and global-location parameters,
without inter-part dependency. A specially designed fusion
module then seamlessly integrates the reconstructed parts,
even when only a few are visible.
We present MSFSeg, a novel few-shot 3D segmentation framework with a lightweight multi-surrogate fusion (MSF). MSFSeg is able to automatically segment unseen 3D objects/organs (during training) provided with one or a few annotated 2D slices or 3D sequence segments, via learning dense query-support organ/lesion anatomy correlations across patient populations. Our proposed MSF module mines comprehensive and diversified morphology correlations between unlabeled and the few labeled slices/sequences through multiple designated surrogates, making it able to generate accurate cross-domain 3D segmentation masks given annotated slices or sequences.
This work addresses the issue of cross-class domain adaptation
(CCDA) in semantic segmentation, where the target domain contains
both shared and novel classes that are either unlabeled or
unseen in the source domain. We propose a label alignment
method by leveraging VLMs to relabel pseudo labels for novel
classes. We embed a two-stage method to enable fine-grained
semantic segmentation and design a threshold based on the uncertainty
of pseudo labels to exclude noisy VLM predictions. To
further augment the supervision of novel classes, we devise memory
banks with an adaptive update scheme to effectively manage
accurate VLM predictions, which are then resampled to increase
the sampling probability of novel classes.
We present a novel direction-aware representation (DaRe) approach that captures scene dynamics from six different directions.
This learned representation undergoes an inverse dual-tree complex wavelet transformation (DTCWT) to recover plane-based information.
DaReNeRF computes features for each space-time point by fusing vectors from these recovered planes.
Combining DaReNeRF with a tiny MLP for color regression and leveraging volume rendering in training yield state-of-the-art performance
in novel view synthesis for complex dynamic scenes. Notably, to address redundancy introduced by the six real and six imaginary
direction-aware wavelet coefficients, we introduce a trainable masking approach, mitigating storage issues without significant performance decline.
The official proceedings of the Second Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence with Biased or Scarce Data in
conjunction with AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
2024.
We presents PBADet, a novel one-stage, anchor-free approach for part-body association detection.
Building upon the anchor-free object representation across multi-scale feature maps,
we introduce a singular part-to-body center offset that effectively encapsulates the relationship between parts and their parent bodies.
Our design is inherently versatile and capable of managing multiple parts-to-body associations without compromising on detection accuracy or robustness.
In this work, we propose MODIF, a multi-object deep implicit function that jointly learns the deformation fields and instance-specific latent codes for multiple objects at once. Our emphasis is on non-rigid, non-interpenetrating entities such as organs. To effectively capture the interrelation between these entities and ensure precise, collision-free representations, our approach facilitates signaling between category-specific fields to adequately rectify shapes. We also introduce novel inter-object supervision: an attraction-repulsion loss is formulated to refine contact regions between objects.
In this paper, we introduce Disguise, a novel algorithm that seamlessly de-identifies facial images while ensuring the usability of the modified data. Unlike previous approaches, our solution is firmly grounded in the domains of differential privacy and ensemble-learning research. Our method involves extracting and substituting depicted identities with synthetic ones, generated using variational mechanisms to maximize obfuscation and non-invertibility. Additionally, we leverage supervision from a mixture-of-experts to disentangle and preserve other utility attributes.
We propose a federated learning framework eliminating any requirement of recursive local parameter exchange or auxiliary task-relevant data to transfer knowledge, thereby giving direct privacy control to local users. In particular, to cope with the inherent data heterogeneity across locals, our technique learns to distill input on which each local model produces consensual yet unique results to represent each expertise.
Event cameras, as a new form of vision sensors, are complementary to conventional cameras with their high dynamic range. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (CMDA) framework to leverage multi-modality (Images and Events) information for nighttime semantic segmentation, with only labels on daytime images.
We propose a novel simulation-based training pipeline for multi-view human mesh recovery, which (a) relies on intermediate 2D representations which are more robust to synthetic-to-real domain gap; (b) leverages learnable calibration and triangulation to adapt to more diversified camera setups; and (c) progressively aggregates multi-view information in a canonical 3D space to remove ambiguities in 2D representations.
We propose a privacy-preserving FL framework leveraging unlabeled public data for one-way offline knowledge distillation in this work. The central model is learned from local knowledge via ensemble attention distillation. Our technique uses decentralized and heterogeneous local data like existing FL approaches, but more importantly, it significantly reduces the risk of privacy leakage. We demonstrate that our method achieves very competitive performance with more robust privacy preservation based on extensive experiments on image classification, segmentation, and reconstruction tasks.
The moving patterns of human in a constrained scenario
typically conform to a limited number of regularities to a
certain extent, because of the scenario restrictions and
person-person or person-object interactivity. We propose to forecast a person's future
trajectory by learning from the implicit scene regularities.
We call the regularities, inherently derived from the past
dynamics of the people and the environment in the scene,
scene history. We introduce a novel framework
Scene History Excavating Network (SHENet), where the scene
history is leveraged in a simple yet effective approach.
We leverage a neural motion field for estimating the motion of all points in a multiview setting. Modeling the motion from a dynamic scene with multiview data is challenging due to the ambiguities in points of similar color and points with time-varying color. We propose to regularize the estimated motion to be predictable. If the motion from previous frames is known, then the motion in the near future should be predictable. Therefore, we introduce a predictability regularization by first conditioning the estimated motion on latent embeddings, then by adopting a predictor network to enforce predictability on the embeddings.
We propose cross-representation alignment utilizing the complementary information from the robust but sparse representation (2D keypoints). Specifically, the alignment errors between initial mesh estimation and both 2D representations are forwarded into regressor and dynamically corrected in the following mesh regression. This adaptive cross-representation alignment explicitly learns from the deviations and captures complementary information: robustness from sparse representation and richness from dense representation.
We ask the question: can our model directly predict where to click, so as to further reduce the user interaction cost? To this end, we propose PseudoClick, a
generic framework that enables existing segmentation networks to propose candidate next clicks. These automatically generated clicks, termed pseudo clicks in this work,
serve as an imitation of human clicks to refine the
segmentation mask. We build PseudoClick on existing segmentation backbones and show how our click prediction mechanism leads to improved performance.
We propose a generic modularized 3D patient modeling
method consists of (a) a multi-modal keypoint detection
module with attentive fusion for 2D patient joint
localization, to learn complementary cross-modality patient
body information, leading to improved keypoint localization
robustness and generalizability in a wide variety of imaging and clinical scenarios; and (b) a self-supervised 3D mesh regression module which does not require expensive 3D mesh parameter annotations to train, bringing immediate cost benefits for clinical deployment.
We propose the first method to generate generic visual
similarity explanations with gradient-based attention. We
demonstrate that our technique is agnostic to the specific
similarity model type, e.g., we show applicability to
Siamese, triplet, and quadruplet models. Furthermore, we
make our proposed similarity attention a principled part of
the learning process, resulting in a new paradigm for
learning similarity functions. We demonstrate that our
learning mechanism results in more generalizable, as well as
explainable, similarity models.
We present the first learning-based approach to estimate the patient’s internal organ deformation for arbitrary human poses in order to assist with radiotherapy and similar medical protocols. The underlying method first leverages medical scans to learn a patient-specific representation that potentially encodes the organ’s shape and elastic properties. During inference, given the patient’s current body pose information and the organ's representation extracted from previous medical scans, our method can estimate their current organ deformation to offer guidance to clinicians.
The official proceedings of the First Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence with Biased or Scarce Data in
conjunction with AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
2022.
We propose a quantized and noisy ensemble of local predictions from completely trained local models for stronger privacy guarantees without sacrificing accuracy. Based on extensive experiments on classification and segmentation tasks, we show that our method outperforms baseline FL algorithms with superior performance in both accuracy and data privacy preservation.
We propose a Multi-motion and Appearance Self-supervised Network (MASNet) to introduce multi-scale motion information and appearance information of scene for MOD.
Introducing multi-scale motion can aggregate these regions
to form a more complete detection. Appearance information
can serve as another cue for MOD when the motion
independence is not reliable and for removing false
detection in background caused by locally independent
background motion.
We present a generalized human mesh optimization algorithm that substantially improves the performance of existing methods on both obese person images as well as community-standard benchmark datasets.
The proposed method utilizes only 2D annotations without
relying on supervision from expensive-to-create mesh
parameters.
We present a new method for video mesh recovery that divides the human mesh into several local parts following the standard skeletal model. We then model the dynamics of each local part with separate recurrent models, with each model conditioned appropriately based on the known kinematic structure of the human body.
We propose a new distillation-based FL framework that can
preserve privacy by design, while also consuming
substantially less network communication resources when
compared to the current methods. Our framework engages in
inter-node communication using only publicly available and
approved datasets, thereby giving explicit privacy control
to the user. To distill knowledge among the various local
models, our framework involves a novel ensemble distillation
algorithm that uses both final prediction as well as model
attention.
We propose Spatio-Temporal Representation Factorization
(STRF), a flexible new computational unit that can be used
in conjunction with most existing 3D convolutional neural
network architectures for re-ID. The key innovations of STRF
over prior work include explicit pathways for learning
discriminative temporal and spatial features, with each
component further factorized to capture complementary
person-specific appearance and motion information.
Specifically, temporal factorization comprises two branches,
one each for static features (e.g., the color of clothes)
that do not change much over time, and dynamic features
(e.g., walking patterns) that change over time.
We propose a novel framework to interpret neural networks which extracts relevant class-specific visual concepts and organizes them using structural concepts graphs based on pairwise concept relationships. By means of knowledge distillation,
we show VRX can take a step towards mimicking the reasoning process of NNs and provide logical, concept-level explanations for final model decisions. With extensive experiments, we empirically show VRX can meaningfully answer “"why” and “"why not” questions about the prediction,
providing easy-to-understand insights about the reasoning process. We also show that these insights can potentially provide guidance on improving NN’s performance.
We proposed zero-shot deep domain adaptation (ZDDA). ZDDA-C/ML learns to generate common representations for
source and target domains data. Then, either domain
representation is used later to train a system that works on
both domains or having the ability to eliminate the need to
either domain in sensor fusion settings. In this paper, two variants of
ZDDA have been developed for classification and metric learning task respectively.
We propose a new attention-driven weakly supervised algorithm comprising a hierarchical attention mining framework that unifies activation- and gradient-based visual attention in a holistic manner. Our key algorithmic innovations include the design of explicit ordinal attention constraints, enabling principled model training in a weakly-supervised fashion, while also facilitating the generation of visual-attention-driven model explanations by means of localization cues.
This paper considers the problem of 3D patient body
modeling. Such a 3D model provides valuable information for
improving patient care, streamlining clinical workflow,
automated parameter optimization for medical devices etc. We
present a novel robust dynamic fusion technique that
facilitates flexible multi-modal inference, resulting in
accurate 3D body modeling even when the input sensor
modality is only a subset of the training modalities.
In this work, we address this gap by proposing a new
technique for regression of human parametric model that is
explicitly informed by the known hierarchical structure,
including joint interdependencies of the model. This results
in a strong prior-informed design of the regressor
architecture and an associated hierarchical optimization
that is flexible to be used in conjunction with the current
standard frameworks for 3D human mesh recovery.
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the highly contagious
SARS-CoV-2 virus, has overwhelmed healthcare systems
worldwide, putting medical professionals at a high risk of
getting infected themselves due to a global shortage of
personal protective equipment. To help alleviate this
problem, we design and develop a contactless patient
positioning system that can enable scanning patients in a
completely remote and contactless fashion. Our key design
objective is to reduce the physical contact time with a
patient as much as possible, which we achieve with our
contactless workflow.
We cover the entire pipeline of medical imaging and analysis techniques involved with COVID-19, including image acquisition, segmentation, diagnosis, and follow-up. We particularly focus on the integration of AI with X-ray and CT, both of which are widely used in the frontline hospitals, in order to depict the latest progress of medical imaging and radiology fighting against COVID-19.
We propose the first technique to visually explain VAEs by means of gradient-based attention. We present methods to generate visual attention from the learned latent space, and also demonstrate such attention explanations serve more than just explaining VAE predictions. We show how these attention maps can be used to localize anomalies in images,
and how they can be infused into model training, helping
bootstrap the VAE into learning improved latent space
disentanglement.
We present a method to incrementally generate complete 2D or 3D scenes with global consistentcy at each step according to a
learned scene prior. Real observations of a scene can be incorporated while observing global consistency and unobserved regions can be hallucinated locally in
consistence with previous observations, hallucinations as well as global priors. Hallucinations are statistical in nature, i.e., different scenes can be generated from the same observations.
We improve the generalizability of CNNs by means of a new framework that makes class-discriminative attention a principled part of the learning process. We propose new learning objectives for attention separability and cross-layer consistency, which result in improved attention discriminability and reduced visual
confusion.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019
We solve the key problem of existing 3D object pose estimation methods requiring expensive 3D pose annotations by proposing a new method that matches RGB images to CAD models for object pose estimation.
Our method requires neither real-world textures for CAD models nor explicit 3D pose annotations for RGB images.
This is an extension of our
CVPR 18 work with added
support of bounding box labels seamlessly integrated with
image level and pixel level labels for weakly supervised
semantic segmentation.
We introduce a pipeline to map unseen target samples into the
synthetic domain used to train task-specific methods.
Denoising the data and retaining only the features these
recognition algorithms are familiar with.
Knowledge distillation should not only focus on "what",
but also "why". We peoposed an online learning method to
preserve the exisiting knowledge without storing any
data, while making the classifier progressively learn to
encode the new classes.
We proposed the first learning architecture that integrates attention consistency modeling and Siamese representation learning in a joint learning framework, called the Consistent Attentive Siamese Network (CASN), for person re-id.
A technique to produce counterfactual visual explanations. Given a 'query' image I for which a vision system predicts class c, a counterfactual visual explanation identifies how I could change such that the system would output a different specified class c′.
We present an extensive review and
performance evaluation of single and multi-shot re-id algorithms. The experimental protocol incorporates 11 feature extraction
and 22 metric learning and ranking techniques and evaluates
using a new large-scale dataset that closely mimics a real-world problem setting, in addition to 16 other publicly available datasets.
We propose zero-shot deep domain adaptation (ZDDA) for
domain adaptation and sensor fusion. ZDDA learns from the
task-irrelevant dual-domain pairs when the task-relevant
target-domain training data is unavailable.
In one common framework we address three shortcomings of
previous approaches in modeling such attention maps: We (1)
first time make attention maps an explicit and natural
component of the end-to-end training, (2) provide
self-guidance directly on these maps by exploring
supervision form the network itself to improve them, and (3)
seamlessly bridge the gap between using weak and extra
supervision if available.
We proposed ConceptGAN, a novel concept learning
framework where we seek to capture underlying semantic
shifts between data domains instead of mappings restricted
to training distributions. The key idea is that via joint
concept learning, transfer and composition, information over
a joint latent space is recovered given incomplete training
data.
We proposed an end-to-end learning
framework for keypoint detection and its representation (descriptor) for 3D depth maps or 3D scans, where the two can
be jointly optimized towards task-specific objectives without
a need for separate annotations.
We describe the image sequence data using affine hulls,
and we show that directly
computing the distance between the closest points on these affine
hulls as in existing recognition algorithms is not sufficiently
discriminative in the context of person re-identification. To this
end, we incorporate affine hull data modeling into the traditional
distance metric learning framework, learning discriminative
feature representations directly using affine hulls.
We propose a novel approach leveraging only CAD models to bridge the realism gap. Purely
trained on synthetic data, playing against an extensive augmentation pipeline in an unsupervised manner, a generative adversarial network learns to effectively segment depth
images and recover the clean synthetic-looking depth information even from partial occlusions.
We proposed a weakly supervised approach to summarize
videos with only video-level annotation, introducing an
effective method for computing spatio-temporal importance
scores without resorting to additional training steps.
We propose an end-to-end framework which simulates the whole mechanism of 3D sensors (structured light and TOF), generating realistic depth data from 3D models by comprehensively modeling vital factors e.g. sensor noise, material reflectance, surface geometry.
We present a method to track vessels in angiography. Our
method maximizes the appearance similarity while preserving
the vessel structure. The vessel tree
tracking problem turns into finding the most similar tree from the DAG in the next frame, and it is solved
using an efficient dynamic programming algorithm.
We detail the challenges of the real-world airport environment, the computer vision algorithms underlying our human detection and re-identification algorithms,
our robust software architecture, and the ground-truthing system required to provide the training and validation data for the algorithms.
We model the wire-like structure as a sequence of small segments and formulate guidewire tracking as a graph-based optimization problem which aims to find the optimal link set.
To overcome distracters, we extract them from the dominant motion pattern and propose a confidence re-weighting process in the appearance measurement.
This book covers aspects of human re-identification problems related to computer vision and machine learning. Working from a practical perspective, it introduces novel algorithms and designs for human re-identification that bridge the gap between research and reality. The primary focus is on building a robust, reliable, distributed and scalable smart surveillance system that can be deployed in real-world scenarios.
We build a model for human
appearance as a function of pose, using training data gathered from a calibrated camera. We then apply this “pose prior” in
online re-identification to make matching and identification more robust to viewpoint. We further integrate person-specific features
learned over the course of tracking to improve the algorithm’s performance.
We introduce an algorithm to
hierarchically cluster image sequences and use the representative data samples to learn a
feature subspace maximizing the Fisher criterion. The clustering and subspace learning
processes are applied iteratively to obtain diversity-preserving discriminative features.
We perform dimensionality reduction on image feature vectors through random projection for multi-shot Re-ID. A random forests is trained based on pairwise constraints in
the projected subspace. During run-time, we select personalized random forests for each subject using their multi-shot appearances.
We propose a novel “virtual insertion” scheme
for Structure from Motion (SfM), which constructs virtual points and virtual frames to adapt the existence of visual landmark link
outage, namely “visual breaks” due to no common features observed from neighboring
camera views in challenging environments.
Video surveillance is a critical issue for defense and
homeland security applications. There are three key steps of
video surveillance: system calibration, multi-object
tracking, and target behavior analysis. In this thesis we
investigate several important and challenging computer
vision problems and applications related to these three
steps, in order to improve the performance of video
surveillance.
This paper addresses the problem of detecting counterflow motion in
videos of highly dense crowds. We focus on improving the detection performance by identifying scene features — that is, features on motionless
background surfaces. We propose a three-way classifier to differentiate counterflow from normal flow, simultaneously identifying scene features based on
statistics of low-level feature point tracks.
We discuss the high-level system design of the video surveillance application, and the issues we encountered during our development and testing. We also describe the algorithm framework for our human re-identification software, and discuss considerations of speed and matching performance.
We propose a complete model for a pan-tilt-zoom camera
that explicitly reflects how focal length and lens distortion vary as a function of zoom scale. We show how the parameters of this model
can be quickly and accurately estimated using a series of simple initialization steps followed by a nonlinear optimization. We also show how the calibration parameters can be maintained using
a one-shot dynamic correction process; this ensures that the camera returns the same field of view every time the user requests a given
(pan, tilt, zoom), even after hundreds of hours of operation.
We introduce an airport security checkpoint surveillance
system using a camera network. The system tracks the
movement of each passenger and carry-on bag, continuously maintains the association between bags and passengers, and verifies that passengers leave the checkpoint with
the correct bags.
Resources are presented for fostering paper-based election technology. They comprise a diverse collection of real and simulated ballot and survey images, and software tools for ballot synthesis, registration, segmentation, and ground truthing.
Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization.