Abstract: TC8.6
This paper proposes a novel method for estimating the geospatial localization of a vehicle. I uses as input a georeferenced video sequence recorded by a forward-facing camera attached to the windscreen. The core of the proposed method is an on-line video synchronization which finds out the corresponding frame in the georeferenced video sequence to the one recorded at each time by the camera on a second drive through the same track. Once found the corresponding frame in the georeferenced video sequence, we transfer its geospatial information of this frame. The key advantages of this method are: 1) the increase of the update rate and the geospatial accuracy with regard to a standard low-cost GPS and 2) the ability to localize a vehicle even when a GPS is not available or is not reliable enough, like in certain urban areas. Experimental results for an urban environments are presented, showing an average of relative accuracy of 1.5 meters.

Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of aligning two video sequences. Such alignment refers to synchronization, i.e., the establishment of temporal correspondence between frames of the first and second video, followed by spatial registration of all the temporally corresponding frames. Video synchronization and alignment have been attempted before, but most often in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, restrictive assumptions have been applied, including linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of any solutions developed. We intend to solve the more general problem of aligning video sequences recorded by independently moving cameras that follow similar trajectories, based only on the fusion of image intensity and GPS information. The novelty of our approach is to pose the synchronization as a MAP inference problem on a Bayesian network including the observations from these two sensor types, which have been proved complementary. Alignment results are presented in the context of videos recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times, for different road types. In addition, we explore two applications of the proposed video alignment method, both based on change detection between aligned videos. One is the detection of vehicles, which could be of use in ADAS. The other is online difference spotting videos of surveillance rounds.

Abstract: Video synchronization and alignment is a rather recent topic in computer vision. It usually deals with the problem of aligning sequences recorded simultaneously by static, jointly- or independently-moving cameras. In this paper, we investigate the more difficult problem of matching videos captured at different times from independently-moving cameras, whose trajectories are approximately coincident or parallel. To this end, we propose a novel method that pixel-wise aligns videos and allows thus to automatically highlight their differences. This primarily aims at visual surveillance but the method can be adopted as is by other related video applications, like object transfer (augmented reality) or high dynamic range video. We build upon a slice matching scheme to first synchronize the sequences, while we develop a spatio-temporal alignment scheme to spatially register corresponding frames and refine the temporal mapping. We investigate the performance of the proposed method on videos recorded from vehicles driven along different types of roads and compare with related previous works.