Introduction - Computer Vision: Models, Learning, and Inference (2012)

Computer Vision: Models, Learning, and Inference (2012)

Chapter 1

Introduction

The goal of computer vision is to extract useful information from images. This has proved a surprisingly challenging task; it has occupied thousands of intelligent and creative minds over the last four decades, and despite this we are still far from being able to build a general-purpose “seeing machine.”

Part of the problem is the complexity of visual data. Consider the image in Figure 1.1. There are hundreds of objects in the scene. Almost none of these are presented in a “typical” pose. Almost all of them are partially occluded. For a computer vision algorithm, it is not even easy to establish where one object ends and another begins. For example, there is almost no change in the image intensity at the boundary between the sky and the white building in the background. However, there is a pronounced change in intensity on the back window of the SUV in the foreground, although there is no object boundary or change in material here.

We might have grown despondent about our chances of developing useful computer vision algorithms if it were not for one thing: we have concrete proof that vision is possible because our own visual systems make light work of complex images such as Figure 1.1. If I ask you to count the trees in this image or to draw a sketch of the street layout, you can do this easily. You might even be able to pinpoint where this photo was taken on a world map by extracting subtle visual clues such as the ethnicity of the people, the types of cars and trees, and the weather.

So, computer vision is not impossible, but it is very challenging; perhaps this was not appreciated at first because what we perceive when we look at a scene is already highly processed. For example, consider observing a lump of coal in bright sunlight and then moving to a dim indoor environment and looking at a piece of white paper. The eye will receive far more photons per unit area from the coal than from the paper, but we nonetheless perceive the coal as black and the paper as white. The visual brain performs many tricks of this kind, and unfortunately when we build vision algorithms, we don’t have the benefit of this preprocessing.

Nonetheless, there has been remarkable recent progress in our understanding of computer vision, and the last decade has seen the first large-scale deployments of consumer computer vision technology. For example, most digital cameras now have embedded algorithms for face detection, and at the time of writing the Microsoft Kinect (a peripheral that allows real-time tracking of the human body) holds the Guinness World Record for being the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever. The principles behind both of these applications and many more are explained in this book.

images

Figure 1.1 A visual scene containing many objects, almost all of which are partially occluded. The red circle indicates a part of the scene where there is almost no brightness change to indicate the boundary between the sky and the building. The green circle indicates a region in which there is a large intensity change but this is due to irrelevant lighting effects; there is no object boundary or change in the object material here.

There are a number of reasons for the rapid recent progress in computer vision. The most obvious is that the processing power, memory, and storage capacity of computers has vastly increased; before we disparage the progress of early computer vision pioneers, we should pause to reflect that they would have needed specialized hardware to hold even a single high-resolution image in memory. Another reason for the recent progress in this area has been the increased use of machine learning. The last 20 years have seen exciting developments in this parallel research field, and these are now deployed widely in vision applications. Not only has machine learning provided many useful tools, it has also helped us understand existing algorithms and their connections in a new light.

The future of computer vision is exciting. Our understanding grows by the day, and it is likely that artificial vision will become increasingly prevalent in the next decade. However, this is still a young discipline. Until recently, it would have been unthinkable to even try to work with complex scenes such as that in Figure 1.1. As Szeliski (2010) puts it, “It may be many years before computers can name and outline all of the objects in a photograph with the same skill as a two year old child.” However, this book provides a snapshot of what we have achieved and the principles behind these achievements.

Organization of the book

The structure of this book is illustrated in Figure 1.2. It is divided into six parts.

The first part of the book contains background information on probability. All the models in this book are expressed in terms of probability, which is a useful language for describing computer vision applications. Readers with a rigorous background in engineering mathematics will know much of this material already but should skim these chapters to ensure they are familiar with the notation. Those readers who do not have this background should read these chapters carefully. The ideas are relatively simple, but they underpin everything else in the rest of the book. It may be frustrating to be forced to read fifty pages of mathematics before the first mention of computer vision, but please trust me when I tell you that this material will provide a solid foundation for everything that follows.

The second part of the book discusses machine learning for machine vision. These chapters teach the reader the core principles that underpin all of our methods to extract useful information from images. We build statistical models that relate the image data to the information that we wish to retrieve. After digesting this material, the reader should understand how to build a model to solve almost any vision problem, although that model may not yet be very practical.

The third part of the book introduces graphical models for computer vision. Graphical models provide a framework for simplifying the models that relate the image data to the properties we wish to estimate. When both of these quantities are high-dimensional, the statistical connections between them become impractically complex; we can still define models that relate them, but we may not have the training data or computational power to make them useful. Graphical models provide a principled way to assert sparseness in the statistical connections between the data and the world properties.

The fourth part of the book discusses image preprocessing. This is not necessary to understand most of the models in the book, but that is not to say that it is unimportant. The choice of preprocessing method is at least as critical as the choice of model in determining the final performance of a computer vision system. Although image processing is not the main topic of this book, this section provides a compact summary of the most important and practical techniques.

The fifth part of the book concerns geometric computer vision; it introduces the projective pinhole camera – a mathematical model that describes where a given point in the 3D world will be imaged in the pixel array of the camera. Associated with this model are a set of techniques for finding the position of the camera relative to a scene and for reconstructing 3D models of objects.

Finally, in the sixth part of the book, we present several families of vision models that build on the principles established earlier in the book. These models address some of the most central problems in computer vision including face recognition, tracking, and object recognition.

The book concludes with several appendices. There is a brief discussion of the notational conventions used in the book, and compact summaries of linear algebra and optimization techniques. Although this material is widely available elsewhere, it makes the book more self-contained and is discussed in the same terminology as it is used in the main text.

At the end of every chapter is a brief notes section. This provides details of the related research literature. It is heavily weighted toward the most useful and recent papers and does not reflect an accurate historical description of each area. There are also a number of exercises for the reader at the end of each chapter. In some cases, important but tedious derivations have been excised from the text and turned into problems to retain the flow of the main argument. Here, the solution will be posted on the main book Web site (http://www.computervisionmodels.com). A series of applications are also presented at the end of each chapter (apart from Chapters 1–5 and Chapter 10, which contain only theoretical material). Collectively, these represent a reasonable cross-section of the important vision papers of the last decade.

images

Figure 1.2 Chapter dependencies. The book is organized into six sections. The first section is a review of probability and is necessary for all subsequent chapters. The second part concerns machine learning and inference. It describes both generative and discriminative models. The third part concerns graphical models: visual representations of the probabilistic dependencies between variables in large models. The fourth part describes preprocessing methods. The fifth part concerns geometry and transformations. Finally, the sixth part presents several other important families of vision models.

Finally, pseudocode for over 70 of the algorithms discussed is available and can be downloaded in a separate document from the associated Web site (http://www.computervisionmodels.com). Throughout the text, the symbol inlinefiguredenotes that there is pseudocode associated with this portion of the text. This pseudocode uses the same notation as the book and will make it easy to implement many of the models. I chose not to include this in the main text because it would have decreased the readability. However, I encourage all readers of this book to implement as many of the models as possible. Computer vision is a practical engineering discipline, and you can learn a lot by experimenting with real code.

Other books

I am aware that most people will not learn computer vision from this book alone, so here is some advice about other books that complement this volume. To learn more about machine learning and graphical models, I recommend ‘Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning’ by Bishop (2006) as a good starting point. There are many books on preprocessing, but my favorite is ‘Feature Extraction and Image Processing’ by Nixon and Aguado (2008). The best source for information about geometrical computer vision is, without a doubt, ‘Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision’ by Hartley and Zisserman (2004). Finally, for a much more comprehensive overview of the state of the art of computer vision and its historical development, consider ‘Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications’ by Szeliski (2010).