15030913
Automatic Real-Time Barcode Localization in Complex Scenes
Many applications exist for automatically finding and reading barcodes in complex scenes with a camera. The key problem is to search barcodes in a complex scene and supply them for a reading subsystem. However, illumination, rotation, perspective distortion and multiple barcodes circumstances make barcode localization difficult. By jointly analyzing texture and shape, we propose a realtime barcode localization method that is robust to the above problems. A user only needs to put a barcode in front of a camera at around 15 cm for common Web cameras, and the system then automatically locates and decodes the barcode. This paper only focuses at automatic localization. We will demonstrate the complete system live at the conference.
18016173
Corner guided curve matching and its application to scene reconstruction
Corners and curves are important image features in many vision-based applications. Corners are usually more stable and easier to match than curves, while curves contain richer information of scene structure. In previously work, corners are often used to recover the epipolar geometry between two views, which is then used in curve matching to reduce the search space. However, information of the scene structure contained in this set of matched corners is ignored. In this paper we present a curve matching algorithm that is guided by a set of matched corners. Within a probabilistic framework, the role of the corner guidance is explicitly defined by a set of similarity-invariant unary measurements and by a similarity function. The similarity function provides stronger capability of resolving matching ambiguity than the epipolar constraint, and is integrated into a relaxation scheme to reduce computational complexity and improve accuracy of curve matching. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the benefit of integrating corner matches into the curve matching procedure.
2276524
Automatic Business Card Scanning with a Camera
In this paper, we present a system to automatically extract, rectify and enhance business card images. First the business card image patch is automatically segmented by minimizing a novel local-global variational energy. Second a quadrangle is fitted to the segmented image patch. With the four corner points of the quadrangle, we then estimate the physical aspect ratio of the business card and obtain a homography to rectify the quadrangle back to rectangular shape. We finally enhance the contrast of the rectified business card image using a S-shaped curve. Extensive experiments demonstrated the efficacy and robustness of our system.
28801152
Remote Collaboration on Physical Whiteboards
A whiteboard provides a large shared space for the participants to focus their attention and express their ideas, and is therefore a great collaboration tool for information workers. However, it has several limitations; notably, the contents on the whiteboard are hard to archive or share with people who are not present in the discussions. This paper presents our work in developing tools to facilitate collaboration on physical whiteboards by using a camera and a microphone. In particular, our system allows a user to take notes of a whiteboard meeting when he/she wants or in an automatic way, to transmit the whiteboard content to remote participants in real time and in an efficient way, and to archive the whole whiteboard session for efficient post-viewing. Our system can be retrofit to any existing whiteboard. With the help of a camera and a microphone, we are effectively bridging the physical and digital worlds.
8951856
Model-based head pose tracking with stereovision
We present a robust model-based stereo head tracking algorithm that operates in real time on a commodity PC. The use of an individualized three-dimensional head model, coupled with the epipolar constraint from the stereo image pair greatly improves the robustness of the tracking. Experimental results have shown that our method is able to track all the six degrees of freedom of the rigid part of head motions, over an extended period of time, in the presence of large angular and translational head motions, partial occlusions, and/or dramatic facial expression changes. Applications include human-computer interaction and eye-gaze correction for videoconferencing.
36184486
Image-Based Surface Detail Transfer
We present a novel technique, called Image-Based Surface Detail Transfer, to transfer geometric details from one surface to another with simple 2D image operations. The basic observation is that, without knowing its 3D geometry, geometric details (local deformations) can be extracted from a single image of an object in a way independent of its surface reflectance, and furthermore, these geometric details can be transferred to modify the appearance of other objects directly in images. We show examples including surface detail transfer between real objects, as well as between real and synthesized objects.
26146425
An On-Line Universal Lossy Data Compression Algorithm via Continuous Codebook Refinement - Part III: Redundancy Analysis
For pt.II see ibid., vol.42, p.822-36 (1996). The Gold-washing data compression algorithm is an adaptive vector quantization algorithm with vector dimension n. In this paper, a redundancy problem of the Gold-washing data compression algorithm is considered. It is demonstrated that for any memoryless source with finite alphabet A and generic distribution p and for any R>0, the redundancy of the Gold-washing data compression algorithm with dimension n (defined as the difference between the average performance of the algorithm and the distortion-rate function D(p,R) of p) is upper-bounded by |/sub /spl delta/R///sup /spl delta//D(p,R)|((|A|+2/spl xi/+4 log n)/2n)+/spl sigma/(logn/n) where /sub /spl delta/R///sup /spl delta//D(p,R) is the partial derivative of D(p,R) with respect to R, |A| is the cardinality of A, and /spl xi/>0 is a parameter used to control the threshold in the Gold-washing algorithm. In connection with the results of Zhang, Yang, and Wei (see ibid., vol.43, no.1, p.71-91, 1997) on the redundancy of lossy source coding, this shows that the Gold-washing algorithm has the optimal convergence rate among all adaptive finite-state vector quantizers.
28168487
Channel condition ARQ rate control for real-time wireless video under buffer constraints
Many emerging applications involve real-time packet video transmission over noisy wireless networks. To ensure reliable video transmission, an automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme is used for repairing packet loss over a channel by retransmitting corrupted packets. However, an ARQ resolves the problem of packet loss at the expense of varying an effective channel rate as well as introducing extra latency. These properties increase the difficulty of rate control for real-time wireless video when the buffer overflow and underflow are taken into account. Therefore, we propose a novel ARQ-based rate control scheme, called "channel condition ARQ rate control" by using embedded coding to design an efficient retransmission policy for wireless video. This scheme achieves both maximal channel utilization and smooth video quality perceived at an end-host, which has a low implementation complexity under buffer constraints. We have conducted extensive simulations to verify the efficiency and robustness of the proposed scheme.
1951197
A probabilistic semantic model for image annotation and multi-modal image retrieval
This paper addresses automatic image annotation problem and its application to multi-modal image retrieval. The contribution of our work is three-fold. (1) We propose a probabilistic semantic model in which the visual features and the textual words are connected via a hidden layer which constitutes the semantic concepts to be discovered to explicitly exploit the synergy among the modalities. (2) The association of visual features and textual words is determined in a Bayesian framework such that the confidence of the association can be provided. (3) Extensive evaluation on a large-scale, visually and semantically diverse image collection crawled from Web is reported to evaluate the prototype system based on the model. In the proposed probabilistic model, a hidden concept layer which connects the visual feature and the word layer is discovered by fitting a generative model to the training image and annotation words through an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based iterative learning procedure. The evaluation of the prototype system on 17,000 images and 7736 automatically extracted annotation words from crawled Web pages for multi-modal image retrieval has indicated that the proposed semantic model and the developed Bayesian framework are superior to a state-of-the-art peer system in the literature.
18861911
Service Identification and Packaging in Service Oriented Reengineering
With the adoption to Web service technologies, more and more existing non-service-oriented software systems turn to be legacy systems. They require a service-oriented reengineering process in order to survive in serviceoriented computing environment. In this paper, we present an architecture-based service-oriented approach to support service-oriented reengineering. It integrates and reuses software components as services over Internet by wrapping underlying computing models with XML. Service identification and service packaging processes are described in details, which are the keys to serviceoriented reengineering. Target services are defined according to service identification, which is based on a comparison of analyses in both problem domain and legacy systems. Clustering techniques are applied in service identification process to analyse recovered architectural information and to identify related modules. Service packaging is benefit from architecture-based development and reuse.
8041199
Scheduling in buffered WDM packet switching networks with arbitrary wavelength conversion capability
Optical networking is a promising candidate for high-speed communication networks because of its huge bandwidth. In this paper we study optimal scheduling in buffered WDM packet switching networks with arbitrary wavelength conversion ability. We focus on limited range wavelength conversion while considering full range wavelength conversion as a special case of it. We formalize the problem of maximizing network throughput and minimizing total delay in such a network as finding an optimal matching in a weighted bipartite graph. We then give a simple and fast algorithm called the scan and swap algorithm that solves the problem in O(kB/sup 2/) time, where k is the number of wavelengths per fiber and B is the buffer length, as compared to other existing algorithms that need at least O(k/sup 2/B/sup 2/ + k/sup 2/BN) time where N is the number of input fibers.