Shape Knowledge in Segmentation and Tracking

In this talk I will detail methods for simultaneous 2D/3D segmentation, tracking and reconstruction which incorporate high level shape information. I base my work on the assumption that the space of possible 2D object shapes can be either generated by projecting down known rigid 3D shapes or learned from 2D shape examples. I minimise the discrimination between statistical foreground and background appearance models with respect to the parameters governing the shape generative process (the 6 degree-of-freedom 3D pose of the 3D shape or the parameters of the learned space). The foreground region is delineated by the zero level set of a signed distance function, and I define an energy over this region and its immediate background surroundings based on pixel-wise posterior membership probabilities. I obtain the differentials of this energy with respect to the parameters governing shape and conduct searches for the correct shape using standard non-linear minimisation techniques. This methodology first leads to a novel rigid 3D object tracker. For a known 3D shape, the optimisation here aims to find the 3D pose that leads to the 2D projection that best segments a given image. I also extend my approach to track multiple objects from multiple views and show how depth (such as may be available from a Kinect sensor) can be integrated in a straighforward manner. Next, I explore deformable 2D/3D object tracking. I use a non-linear and probabilistic dimensionality reduction, called Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models, to learn spaces of shape. Segmentation becomes a minimisation of an image-driven energy function in the learned space. I can represent both 2D and 3D shapes which I compress with Fourier-based transforms, to keep inference tractable. I extend this method by learning joint shape-parameter spaces, which, novel to the literature, enable simultaneous segmentation and generic parameter recovery. These can describe anything from 3D articulated pose to eye gaze. Finally, I will also be discussing various applications of the proposed techniques, ranging from (limited) articulated hand tracking to semantic SLAM.