Abstract: The integration of cognitive capabilities in computer vision systems requires both to enable high semantic expressiveness and to deal with high computational costs as large amounts of data are involved in the analysis. This contribution describes a cognitive vision system conceived to automatically provide high-level interpretations of complex real-time situations in outdoor and indoor scenarios, and to eventually maintain communication with casual end users in multiple languages. The main contributions are: (i) the design of an integrative multilevel architecture for cognitive surveillance purposes; (ii) the proposal of a coherent taxonomy of knowledge to guide the process of interpretation, which leads to the conception of a situation-based ontology; (iii) the use of situational analysis for content detection and a progressive interpretation of semantically rich scenes, by managing incomplete or uncertain knowledge, and (iv) the use of such an ontological background to enable multilingual capabilities and advanced end-user interfaces. Experimental results are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Abstract: In this paper we present a technique to interpret hand line drawings as objects in a three-dimensional space. The object domain considered is based on planar surfaces with straight edges, concretely, on ansextension of Origami world to hidden lines. The line drawing represents the object under orthographic projection and it is sensed using a scanner. Our method is structured in two modules: feature extraction and feature interpretation. In the first one, image processing techniques are applied under certain tolerance margins to detect lines and junctions on the hand line drawing. Feature interpretation module is founded on line labelling techniques using a labelled junction dictionary. A labelling algorithm is here proposed. It uses relaxation techniques to reduce the number of incompatible labels with the junction dictionary so that the convergence of solutions can be accelerated. We formulate some labelling hypotheses tending to eliminate elements in two sets of labelled interpretations. That is, those which are compatible with the dictionary but do not correspond to three-dimensional objects and those which represent objects not very probable to be specified by means of a line drawing. New entities arise on the line drawing as a result of the extension of Origami world. These are defined to enunciate the assumptions of our method as well as to clarify the algorithms proposed. This technique is framed in a project aimed to implement a system to create 3D objects to improve man-machine interaction in CAD systems.

Abstract: This paper presents a computational model to recover the most likely interpretation of the 3D scene structure from a planar image, where some objects may occlude others. The estimated scene interpretation is obtained by integrating some global and local cues and provides both the complete disoccluded objects that form the scene and their ordering according to depth. Our method first computes several distal scenes which are compatible with the proximal planar image. To compute these different hypothesized scenes, we propose a perceptually inspired object disocclusion method, which works by minimizing the Euler's elastica as well as by incorporating the relatability of partially occluded contours and the convexity of the disoccluded objects. Then, to estimate the preferred scene we rely on a Bayesian model and define probabilities taking into account the global complexity of the objects in the hypothesized scenes as well as the effort of bringing these objects in their relative position in the planar image, which is also measured by an Euler's elastica-based quantity. The model is illustrated with numerical experiments on, both, synthetic and real images showing the ability of our model to reconstruct the occluded objects and the preferred perceptual order among them. We also present results on images of the Berkeley dataset with provided figure-ground ground-truth labeling.