Research Projects

The focus of the project is outdoor mobile computer vision with all of its challenges. Mobile systems need to be compact and energy efficient and are frequently changing locations. Therefore they must be autonomous and perform processing locally. A number of challenges arise from these requirements for which the project aims to provide solutions: Being compact, there is not much space for a large number of sensors such as laser scanners, radar antennas and the like. The work in this project will focus on stereo vision but with two different types of cameras. Often a second camera is already available and stereo information increases detection accuracies. Each time the system moves it needs to adapt to the changing situation. This requires adaptive calibration and online learning. Mobile systems often work from batteries. In addition, there is not much space to include intricate cooling systems. Thus, the system must be designed to be very energy efficient. New approaches for dynamic power management will be explored in the project. To put the work into context, several applications from the area of traffic surveillance/toll enforcement will be implemented and tested in an application oriented setting.

Current traffic enforcement solutions are either very large and costly (section control, toll enforcement) or do not offer much in terms of image processing (radar speed control). The technological output of Mobi Trick makes it possible to design mobile solutions for traffic monitoring, vehicle identification and classification, intelligent incident detection and observation of driver behavior. Mobile devices are also more efficient in enforcement. Their transient nature makes them less predictable. Mobile systems can also react more flexibly to changing road situations such as construction sites.

Different authorities like such as the Ministry of the Interior often require to find certain event or behavior patterns in recordings in large video archives. This "forensic" search is computationally extremely expensive and due to restricted storage permissions often even not possible. Thus, security-critical events can often not prevented or being postpursued. To overcome these problems, the aim of the OUTLIER project is the investigation of algorithms, methods, and processes to alleviate the work of security staff in searching and pursuiting of events in video archives. Furthermore these tasks should be performed more efficiently.

Based on the requirements of the Ministry of the Interior as well as the possibilities of an infrastructure operator these issues should be examined and a research prototype should be created. This should occur in cooperation of AIT and ICG (University of Technology Graz) as research partners and ASE as an industrial partner. Essential research subjects are: (i) detection and segmentation of people, (ii) comparisons and finding of events in different video streams, and (iii) analyses and learning of behavior patterns. In addition, a social-scientific acceptance research will be established by the research institute of the Red Cross (FRK). Based on these results recommendations are compiled for the optimization by use and minimization of problem potentials from social-scientific view.

The goal of this project is to develop an interactive visual search method that finds a given pedestrian in a large archive of other camera views efficiently. A user-selected pedestrian image or sequence is used to obtain initial discriminative features and an initial ranked list of hypothetical matches. A discriminative pedestrian recognition model is learned in an on-line manner by user interaction assigning positive and negative labels to the initially retrieved results and on-line boosting for feature selection. This enables that the best discriminative features for the current query are selected.

The trend in video surveillance is an ever increasing number of (digital) cameras for surveying complex scenarios (e.g. crowds). Currently available video surveillance systems cannot cope with this increased complexity, the detection rates are too low and the systems are not reliable enough. This hinders the broad use of automatic surveillance systems. AUTOVISTA proposes to use modern visual computing technologies to advance the state-of-the-art of video surveillance considerably. In order to cope with the increasing number of cameras, AUTOVISTA will (1) use novel on-line learning techniques to increase the detection rate and decrease the false alarm rate, while the camera adapts in an unsupervised manner to the surveyed scene. Besides an increased performance, this has the additional advantage that the installation and maintenance effort will be substantially decreased; (2) exploit novel visualization and interaction techniques to support the human operator. Furthermore two complementary visualization modes are proposed, blending smoothly between these allows the operator to maintain coherence. These techniques will enable a single operator to cope simultaneously with a large amount of cameras. AUTOVISTA will tackle the problem of increased people densities and highly cluttered scenes in a novel manner. Instead of relying on single person detection and tracking (which is not feasible for high people density scenarios), methods will be investigated to handle the crowd as a whole. AUTOVISTA will derive spatio-temporal crowd statistics, describe normal crowd behavior and use this for unusual event detection.