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High-level Prior Models for Computer Vision

Descripción del proyecto

Un cambio sísmico en la visión artificial

Durante años, se ha tratado de igualar la visión artificial a las extraordinarias capacidades del sistema visual humano, pero no ha sido posible. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el equipo del proyecto HOMOVIS, financiado con fondos europeos, propondrá una iniciativa visionaria que pretende tender un puente entre la visión artificial y una percepción similar a la humana. En concreto, se aprovecha la potencia de una extraordinaria arquitectura de tres capas que refleja la eficacia del sistema visual humano. Esta arquitectura consta de una capa de nivel inferior, que identifica las características críticas de la imagen, una capa de nivel medio, que permite desocluir y completar los límites, y una capa de nivel alto, responsable del reconocimiento de objetos. Al integrar experiencias previas de nivel alto en modelos variacionales de nivel bajo, el equipo del proyecto HOMOVIS introducirá un marco matemático unificado. Sus avances matemáticos impulsarán el campo más allá de los modelos variacionales convencionales.

Objetivo

Since more than 50 years, computer vision has been a very active research field but it is still far away from the abilities of the human visual system. This stunning performance of the human visual system can be mainly contributed to a highly efficient three-layer architecture: A low-level layer that sparsifies the visual information by detecting important image features such as image gradients, a mid-level layer that implements disocclusion and boundary completion processes and finally a high-level layer that is concerned with the recognition of objects.
Variational methods are certainly one of the most successful methods for low-level vision. However, it is very unlikely that these methods can be further improved without the integration of high-level prior models. Therefore, we propose a unified mathematical framework that allows for a natural integration of high-level priors into low-level variational models. In particular, we propose to represent images in a higher-dimensional space which is inspired by the architecture for the visual cortex. This space performs a decomposition of the image gradients into magnitude and direction and hence performs a lifting of the 2D image to a 3D space. This has several advantages: Firstly, the higher-dimensional embedding allows to implement mid-level tasks such as boundary completion and disocclusion processes in a very natural way. Secondly, the lifted space allows for an explicit access to the orientation and the magnitude of image gradients. In turn, distributions of gradient orientations – known to be highly effective for object detection – can be utilized as high-level priors. This inverts the bottom-up nature of object detectors and hence adds an efficient top-down process to low-level variational models.
The developed mathematical approaches will go significantly beyond traditional variational models for computer vision and hence will define a new state-of-the-art in the field.

Régimen de financiación

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Institución de acogida

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 1 473 525,00
Dirección
RECHBAUERSTRASSE 12
8010 Graz
Austria

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Región
Südösterreich Steiermark Graz
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 1 473 525,00

Beneficiarios (1)