Applications of Optical Flow to Surveillance and Enhancement

Lambert Wixson
Sarnoff Corporation
Vision Technologies Laboratory

Place and Time

1305 Newell-Simon Hall
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm

Abstract

This talk will focus on using optical flow to align pixels in multiple frames, and how this can be applied to solve challenging problems in video motion detection and enhancement. In the domain of motion detection, I will describe a new type of measurement, "cumulative flow". This has proven effective in discriminating between uninteresting oscillatory motion (e.g., vegetation in the wind) versus interesting motion (e.g., humans or vehicles). The computation of this measure is a pre-processing step and can completely avoid the problem of first extracting object regions. In the domain of video enhancement, I will show how flow can be used to eliminate distortions and reduce noise in video.

Speaker Biography

Lambert Wixson received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, where his dissertation examined camera placement and aiming for the automatic execution of visual search tasks. Since 1993, he has been a Member of Technical Staff at Sarnoff Corporation, where he has participated in commercial and government video processing projects in the areas of traffic monitoring, stereo, face detection, and active camera control.

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact the host, Alan Lipton (ajl@ri.cmu.edu).