MIT talk: Understanding Video: Research and Development in Applied Computer Vision

Speaker: Matthew Antone , BAE Systems Advanced Information Technologies
Date: Wednesday, October 19 2005

The past decade has seen great advances in the theory and practice of computer vision. As algorithm maturity and computational power have grown, so also has the demand for robust application of vision techniques in real-world, deployed systems. In the first part of this talk, I will present high-level overviews of a few video-based projects currently under development in our research group. These include tracking of vehicles and people from stationary and moving cameras, and extraction of salient features for object recognition and classification, with emphasis on the implementation of working prototypes.

Camera calibration is vital to the success of many such applications. For example, rectification of perspective effects normalizes size and velocity measurements, while recovery of pose situates disparate cameras and objects in a consistent coordinate frame. However, physical access to the site or to the sensors may be limited, precluding use of explicit calibration patterns. The second part of the talk will describe efficient techniques for automatic recovery of camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters based upon phenomena observed over time, including object trajectories and cast shadows.