This report presents an efficient method for semi-supervised video object segmentation – the problem of identifying foreground pixels occupied by a target object. The target is specified by the ground-truth mask in the first video frame. While the state of the art achieves a segmentation accuracy greater than 80%, it...
Heatmap regression has became one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. As Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are becoming popular in solving computer vision tasks, extensive research has been done on these architectures. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...
Sports analytics is rapidly evolving today through the use of computer vision systems that automatically extract huge amount of information inherently present in multimedia data without much human assistance. This information can facilitate a better understanding of patterns and strategies in various sports. However, for non-professional teams, due to expense...
Automatic analysis of American football videos can help teams develop strategies and extract patterns with less human effort. In this work, we focus on the problem of automatically determining which team is on offense/defense, which is an important subproblem for higher-level analysis. While seemingly mundane, this problem is quite challenging...
Mechanical vibrations compromise the integrity of key components of thermal power plants. Without careful design, strong resonances during steady state operation can wear these components to the point of failure, leading to an unsafe situation that may force a plant to shut down. The purpose of this research is to...
Gusset plates are an important component of bridges. They are thick sheets of steel that join steel members together using fasteners and also strengthen their joint. Transportation agencies regularly evaluate and rate their inventories of gusset plate connections using visual inspection, which is very costly. To address this issue, we...
This thesis presents an interactive software tool for tracking a moving object in a video. In particular, we focus on the problem of tracking a player in American football videos. Object tracking is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. It is one of the most important components in...
This thesis addresses a basic problem in computer vision, that of semantic labeling of images. Our work is aimed at object detection in biological images for evolutionary biology research. In particular, our goal is to detect nematocysts in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images. This biological domain presents challenges for existing...
This thesis addresses a fundamental computer vision problem, that of action recognition. The goal of action recognition is to recognize a class of human actions in a given video. Action recognition has a wide range of applications, including automated surveillance, sports video analysis, internet-based searches etc. The main challenge is...