Off-line, reading, dreading the coming spring.


Haven’t got much done lately. Was working on revising an old paper for resubmission, which required rereading all the literature. It is mostly on interactive segmentation, so I got a chance to read some other image segmentation papers that I haven’t read before (e.g., the math behind intelligent scissors or livewire). Some cool methods based on shortest paths, dynamic programming, random walkers, weighted distances, and level sets. And of course the graph-cut techniques. I particularly like the methods that do region clustering on the image data (e.g., Live Surface or Lazy snapping), which then allows for either a faster (possibly hierarchical) segmentation. Such clustering seems to be appearing other areas of vision, such as stereo and flow computations (there is a new cvpr09 paper for flow). I am holding myself back from implementing one of these because I don’t need it for anything.

There are lots of nice details for automatic matting (e.g., Bayesian matting and the extensions in GrabCut). The matting tries to determine the foreground and background colors as well as the compositing factor, typically given a trimap (bg/fg labels and the portion in between where the matting happens). In the past I have just used a trilateral filter (using color, distance, and alpha) to get a better border, but these methods would work far better.

Aside from reading, I have also been trying to clean up my multicapture dc1394 code. It is by no means clean yet, but it is better than it was. More details to come in the project page: http://www.neilbirkbeck.com/?p=1359

The cleaning up involved learning more of the boost library, which I am ashamed that I haven’t exploited earlier.  On the other hand, most of what I was changing was to remove dependencies on Qt for lower parts in the architecture.  I still prefer Qt’s QFile, QFileInfo, QDir to boost::filesystem, but boost::filesystem is pretty handy.  Same goes for boost::format and boost:regex.

  1. No comments yet.
(will not be published)

  1. No trackbacks yet.