• Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Mei Han, and Irfan Essa (2010) “Discontinuous Seam-Carving for Video Retargeting” (a GA Tech, Google Collaboration)
• Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Mei Han, and Irfan Essa (2010) “Efficient Hierarchical Graph-Based Video Segmentation” (a GA Tech, Google Collaboration)
• Kihwan Kim, Matthias Grundmann, Ariel Shamir, Iain Matthews, Jessica Hodgins, and Irfan Essa (2010) “Motion Fields to Predict Play Evolution in Dynamic Sport Scenes” (a GA Tech, Disney Collaboration)
• Raffay Hamid, Ramkrishan Kumar, Matthias Grundmann, Kihwan Kim, Irfan Essa, and Jessica Hodgins (2010) “Player Localization Using Multiple Static Cameras for Sports Visualization” (a GA Tech, Disney Collaboration)

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for the automatic segmentation of monocular videos into foreground and background layers. Correct segmentations are produced even in the presence of large background motion with nearly stationary foreground. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a novel motion representation, “motons”, inspired by research in object recognition. Second, we propose learning the segmentation likelihood from the spatial context of motion. The learning is efficiently performed by Random Forests. The third contribution is a general taxonomy of tree-based classifiers, which facilitates theoretical and experimental comparisons of several known classification algorithms, as well as spawning new ones. Diverse visual cues such as motion, motion context, colour, contrast and spatial priors are fused together by means of a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model. Segmentation is then achieved by binary min-cut. Our algorithm requires no initialization. Experiments on many video-chat type sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in a variety of scenes. The segmentation results are comparable to those obtained by stereo systems.

Abstract

Speech reading, also known as lip reading, is aimed at extracting visual cues of lip and facial movements to aid in recognition of speech. The main hurdle for speech reading is that visual measurements of lip and facial motion lack information-rich features like the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), widely used in acoustic speech recognition. These MFCC are used with hidden Markov models (HMM) in most speech recognition systems at present. Speech reading could greatly benefit from automatic selection and formation of informative features from measurements in the visual domain. These new features can then be used with HMM to capture the dynamics of lip movement and eventual recognition of lip shapes. Towards this end, we use AdaBoost methods for automatic visual feature formation. Specifically, we design an asymmetric variant of AdaBoost M2 algorithm to deal with the ill-posed multi-class sample distribution inherent in our problem. Our experiments show that the boosted HMM approach outperforms conventional AdaBoost and HMM classifiers. Our primary contributions are in the design of (a) boosted HMM and (b) asymmetric multi-class boosting.