I am PhD student in the Perceptual User Interfaces Group since October 2013.
contact
email: xczhang@mpi-inf.mpg.de
office: E1 4, Room 609
education
I revived my Bachelor degree from Honors Program, China Agriculture University, Beijing in 2010, and completed my Master degree in Beihang University, 2013.
research interests
My research interest is Human Computer Interaction based on computer vision.
publications
 | Xucong Zhang; Yusuke Sugano; Mario Fritz; Andreas Bulling It's Written All Over Your Face: Full-Face Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation Technical Report arXiv:1611.08860, 2016. @techreport{zhang16_arxiv, title = {It's Written All Over Your Face: Full-Face Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation}, author = {Xucong Zhang and Yusuke Sugano and Mario Fritz and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.08860 https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/wp-content/blogs.dir/12/files/2016/11/zhang16_arxiv.pdf}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-11-29}, abstract = {While appearance-based gaze estimation methods have traditionally exploited information encoded solely from the eyes, recent results from a multi-region method indicated that using the full face image can benefit performance. Pushing this idea further, we propose an appearance-based method that, in contrast to a long-standing line of work in computer vision, only takes the full face image as input. Our method encodes the face image using a convolutional neural network with spatial weights applied on the feature maps to flexibly suppress or enhance information in different facial regions. Through evaluation on the recent MPIIGaze and EYEDIAP gaze estimation datasets, we show that our full-face method significantly outperforms the state of the art for both 2D and 3D gaze estimation, achieving improvements of up to 14.3% on MPIIGaze and 27.7% on EYEDIAP for person-independent 3D gaze estimation. We further show that this improvement is consistent across different illumination conditions and gaze directions and particularly pronounced for the most challenging extreme head poses. }, type = {arXiv:1611.08860}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {techreport} } While appearance-based gaze estimation methods have traditionally exploited information encoded solely from the eyes, recent results from a multi-region method indicated that using the full face image can benefit performance. Pushing this idea further, we propose an appearance-based method that, in contrast to a long-standing line of work in computer vision, only takes the full face image as input. Our method encodes the face image using a convolutional neural network with spatial weights applied on the feature maps to flexibly suppress or enhance information in different facial regions. Through evaluation on the recent MPIIGaze and EYEDIAP gaze estimation datasets, we show that our full-face method significantly outperforms the state of the art for both 2D and 3D gaze estimation, achieving improvements of up to 14.3% on MPIIGaze and 27.7% on EYEDIAP for person-independent 3D gaze estimation. We further show that this improvement is consistent across different illumination conditions and gaze directions and particularly pronounced for the most challenging extreme head poses. |
 | Yusuke Sugano; Xucong Zhang; Andreas Bulling AggreGaze: Collective Estimation of Audience Attention on Public Displays Inproceedings Proc. of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), pp. 821-831, 2016, (best paper honourable mention award). @inproceedings{sugano16_uist, title = {AggreGaze: Collective Estimation of Audience Attention on Public Displays}, author = {Yusuke Sugano and Xucong Zhang and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2016/09/sugano16_uist.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_gFRuivsFE}, doi = {10.1145/2984511.2984536}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-06-26}, booktitle = {Proc. of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)}, pages = {821-831}, abstract = {Gaze is frequently explored in public display research given its importance for monitoring and analysing audience attention. However, current gaze-enabled public display interfaces require either special-purpose eye tracking equipment or explicit personal calibration for each individual user. We present AggreGaze, a novel method for estimating spatio-temporal audience attention on public displays. Our method requires only a single off-the-shelf camera attached to the display, does not require any personal calibration, and provides visual attention estimates across the full display. We achieve this by 1) compensating for errors of state-of-the-art appearance-based gaze estimation methods through on-site training data collection, and by 2) aggregating uncalibrated and thus inaccurate gaze estimates of multiple users into joint attention estimates. We propose different visual stimuli for this compensation: a standard 9-point calibration, moving targets, text and visual stimuli embedded into the display content, as well as normal video content. Based on a two-week deployment in a public space, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for estimating attention maps that closely resemble ground-truth audience gaze distributions.}, note = {best paper honourable mention award}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } Gaze is frequently explored in public display research given its importance for monitoring and analysing audience attention. However, current gaze-enabled public display interfaces require either special-purpose eye tracking equipment or explicit personal calibration for each individual user. We present AggreGaze, a novel method for estimating spatio-temporal audience attention on public displays. Our method requires only a single off-the-shelf camera attached to the display, does not require any personal calibration, and provides visual attention estimates across the full display. We achieve this by 1) compensating for errors of state-of-the-art appearance-based gaze estimation methods through on-site training data collection, and by 2) aggregating uncalibrated and thus inaccurate gaze estimates of multiple users into joint attention estimates. We propose different visual stimuli for this compensation: a standard 9-point calibration, moving targets, text and visual stimuli embedded into the display content, as well as normal video content. Based on a two-week deployment in a public space, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for estimating attention maps that closely resemble ground-truth audience gaze distributions. |
 | Daniel Pohl; Xucong Zhang; Andreas Bulling Combining Eye Tracking with Optimizations for Lens Astigmatism in Modern Wide-Angle HMDs Inproceedings Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality (VR), 2016. @inproceedings{pohl16_vr, title = {Combining Eye Tracking with Optimizations for Lens Astigmatism in Modern Wide-Angle HMDs}, author = {Daniel Pohl and Xucong Zhang and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2016/01/Pohl16_VR.pdf}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-03-19}, booktitle = {Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality (VR)}, abstract = {Virtual Reality has hit the consumer market with affordable head-mounted displays. When using these, it quickly becomes apparent that the resolution of the built-in display panels still needs to be highly increased. To overcome the resulting higher performance demands, eye tracking can be used for foveated rendering. However, as there are lens distortions in HMDs, there are more possibilities to increase the performance with smarter rendering approaches. We present a new system using optimizations for rendering considering lens astigmatism and combining this with foveated rendering through eye tracking. Depending on the current eye gaze, this delivers a rendering speed-up of up to 20%.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } Virtual Reality has hit the consumer market with affordable head-mounted displays. When using these, it quickly becomes apparent that the resolution of the built-in display panels still needs to be highly increased. To overcome the resulting higher performance demands, eye tracking can be used for foveated rendering. However, as there are lens distortions in HMDs, there are more possibilities to increase the performance with smarter rendering approaches. We present a new system using optimizations for rendering considering lens astigmatism and combining this with foveated rendering through eye tracking. Depending on the current eye gaze, this delivers a rendering speed-up of up to 20%. |
 | Daniel Pohl; Xucong Zhang; Andreas Bulling; Oliver Grau Concept for Using Eye Tracking in a Head-mounted Display to Adapt Rendering to the User's Current Visual Field Inproceedings Proc. of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), pp. 323–324, 2016. @inproceedings{pohl16_vrst, title = {Concept for Using Eye Tracking in a Head-mounted Display to Adapt Rendering to the User's Current Visual Field}, author = { Daniel Pohl and Xucong Zhang and Andreas Bulling and Oliver Grau}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/wp-content/blogs.dir/12/files/2016/11/pohl2016_vrst.pdf}, doi = {10.1145/2993369.2996300}, year = {2016}, date = {2016-01-01}, booktitle = {Proc. of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST)}, pages = {323--324}, abstract = {With increasing spatial and temporal resolution in head-mounted displays (HMDs), using eye trackers to adapt rendering to the user is getting important to handle the rendering workload. Besides using methods like foveated rendering, we propose to use the current visual field for rendering, depending on the eye gaze. We use two effects for performance optimizations. First, we noticed a lens defect in HMDs, where depending on the distance of the eye gaze to the center, certain parts of the screen towards the edges are not visible anymore. Second, if the user looks up, he cannot see the lower parts of the screen anymore. For the invisible areas, we propose to skip rendering and to reuse the pixels colors from the previous frame. We provide a calibration routine to measure these two effects. We apply the current visual field to a renderer and get up to 2x speed-ups.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } With increasing spatial and temporal resolution in head-mounted displays (HMDs), using eye trackers to adapt rendering to the user is getting important to handle the rendering workload. Besides using methods like foveated rendering, we propose to use the current visual field for rendering, depending on the eye gaze. We use two effects for performance optimizations. First, we noticed a lens defect in HMDs, where depending on the distance of the eye gaze to the center, certain parts of the screen towards the edges are not visible anymore. Second, if the user looks up, he cannot see the lower parts of the screen anymore. For the invisible areas, we propose to skip rendering and to reuse the pixels colors from the previous frame. We provide a calibration routine to measure these two effects. We apply the current visual field to a renderer and get up to 2x speed-ups. |
 | Marc Tonsen; Xucong Zhang; Yusuke Sugano; Andreas Bulling Labelled pupils in the wild: A dataset for studying pupil detection in unconstrained environments Technical Report arXiv:1511.05768, 2015. @techreport{Tonsen15_arxiv, title = {Labelled pupils in the wild: A dataset for studying pupil detection in unconstrained environments}, author = {Marc Tonsen and Xucong Zhang and Yusuke Sugano and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/11/Tonsen15_arxive.pdf http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05768 }, year = {2015}, date = {2015-11-18}, abstract = {We present labelled pupils in the wild (LPW), a novel dataset of 66 high-quality, high-speed eye region videos for the development and evaluation of pupil detection algorithms. The videos in our dataset were recorded from 22 participants in everyday locations at about 95 FPS using a state-of-the-art dark-pupil head-mounted eye tracker. They cover people with different ethnicities, a diverse set of everyday indoor and outdoor illumination environments, as well as natural gaze direction distributions. The dataset also includes participants wearing glasses, contact lenses, as well as make-up. We benchmark five state-of-the-art pupil detection algorithms on our dataset with respect to robustness and accuracy. We further study the influence of image resolution, vision aids, as well as recording location (indoor, outdoor) on pupil detection performance. Our evaluations provide valuable insights into the general pupil detection problem and allow us to identify key challenges for robust pupil detection on head-mounted eye trackers. }, type = {arXiv:1511.05768}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {techreport} } We present labelled pupils in the wild (LPW), a novel dataset of 66 high-quality, high-speed eye region videos for the development and evaluation of pupil detection algorithms. The videos in our dataset were recorded from 22 participants in everyday locations at about 95 FPS using a state-of-the-art dark-pupil head-mounted eye tracker. They cover people with different ethnicities, a diverse set of everyday indoor and outdoor illumination environments, as well as natural gaze direction distributions. The dataset also includes participants wearing glasses, contact lenses, as well as make-up. We benchmark five state-of-the-art pupil detection algorithms on our dataset with respect to robustness and accuracy. We further study the influence of image resolution, vision aids, as well as recording location (indoor, outdoor) on pupil detection performance. Our evaluations provide valuable insights into the general pupil detection problem and allow us to identify key challenges for robust pupil detection on head-mounted eye trackers. |
 | Xucong Zhang; Yusuke Sugano; Mario Fritz; Andreas Bulling Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation in the Wild Inproceedings Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015), pp. 4511-4520, 2015. @inproceedings{zhang15_cvpr, title = {Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation in the Wild}, author = {Xucong Zhang and Yusuke Sugano and Mario Fritz and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/04/zhang_CVPR15.pdf}, doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2015.7299081}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-03-02}, booktitle = {Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2015)}, pages = {4511-4520}, abstract = {Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world settings but existing datasets were collected under controlled laboratory conditions and methods were not evaluated across multiple datasets. In this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We present the MPIIGaze dataset that contains 213,659 images we collected from 15 participants during natural everyday laptop use over more than three months. Our dataset is significantly more variable than existing datasets with respect to appearance and illumination. We also present a method for in-the-wild appearance-based gaze estimation using multimodal convolutional neural networks, which significantly outperforms state-of-the art methods in the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation setting. We present an extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art image-based gaze estimation algorithm on three current datasets, including our own. This evaluation provides clear insights and allows us identify key research challenges of gaze estimation in the wild.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world settings but existing datasets were collected under controlled laboratory conditions and methods were not evaluated across multiple datasets. In this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We present the MPIIGaze dataset that contains 213,659 images we collected from 15 participants during natural everyday laptop use over more than three months. Our dataset is significantly more variable than existing datasets with respect to appearance and illumination. We also present a method for in-the-wild appearance-based gaze estimation using multimodal convolutional neural networks, which significantly outperforms state-of-the art methods in the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation setting. We present an extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art image-based gaze estimation algorithm on three current datasets, including our own. This evaluation provides clear insights and allows us identify key research challenges of gaze estimation in the wild. |
 | Erroll Wood; Tadas Baltrusaitis; Xucong Zhang; Yusuke Sugano; Peter Robinson; Andreas Bulling Rendering of Eyes for Eye-Shape Registration and Gaze Estimation Inproceedings Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2015), 2015. @inproceedings{wood2015_iccv, title = {Rendering of Eyes for Eye-Shape Registration and Gaze Estimation}, author = {Erroll Wood and Tadas Baltrusaitis and Xucong Zhang and Yusuke Sugano and Peter Robinson and Andreas Bulling}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/wp-content/blogs.dir/12/files/2016/06/wood2015_iccv.pdf http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537891/virtual-eyes-train-deep-learning-algorithm-to-recognize-gaze-direction/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/projects/syntheseyes/}, year = {2015}, date = {2015-01-01}, booktitle = {Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2015)}, abstract = {Images of the eye are key in several computer vision problems, such as shape registration and gaze estimation. Recent large-scale supervised methods for these problems require time-consuming data collection and manual annotation, which can be unreliable. We propose synthesizing perfectly labelled photo-realistic training data in a fraction of the time. We used computer graphics techniques to build a collection of dynamic eye-region models from head scan geometry. These were randomly posed to synthesize close-up eye images for a wide range of head poses, gaze directions, and illumination conditions. We used our model's controllability to verify the importance of realistic illumination and shape variations in eye-region training data. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our synthesized training data (SynthesEyes) by out-performing state-of-the-art methods for eye-shape registration as well as cross-dataset appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } Images of the eye are key in several computer vision problems, such as shape registration and gaze estimation. Recent large-scale supervised methods for these problems require time-consuming data collection and manual annotation, which can be unreliable. We propose synthesizing perfectly labelled photo-realistic training data in a fraction of the time. We used computer graphics techniques to build a collection of dynamic eye-region models from head scan geometry. These were randomly posed to synthesize close-up eye images for a wide range of head poses, gaze directions, and illumination conditions. We used our model's controllability to verify the importance of realistic illumination and shape variations in eye-region training data. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our synthesized training data (SynthesEyes) by out-performing state-of-the-art methods for eye-shape registration as well as cross-dataset appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. |
 | Junjie Yan; Xucong Zhang; Zhen Lei; Shengcai Liao; Stan Z Li Robust multi-resolution pedestrian detection in traffic scenes Inproceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013, pp. 3033–3040, IEEE 2013. @inproceedings{yan2013robust, title = {Robust multi-resolution pedestrian detection in traffic scenes}, author = {Junjie Yan and Xucong Zhang and Zhen Lei and Shengcai Liao and Stan Z Li}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/03/Yan_CVPR13.pdf}, year = {2013}, date = {2013-01-01}, booktitle = { IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013}, pages = {3033--3040}, organization = {IEEE}, abstract = {The serious performance decline with decreasing resolution is the major bottleneck for current pedestrian detection techniques. In this paper, we take pedestrian detection in different resolutions as different but related problems, and propose a Multi-Task model to jointly consider their commonness and differences. The model contains resolution aware transformations to map pedestrians in different resolutions to a common space, where a shared detector is constructed to distinguish pedestrians from background. For model learning, we present a coordinate descent procedure to learn the resolution aware transformations and deformable part model (DPM) based detector iteratively. In traffic scenes, there are many false positives located around vehicles, therefore, we further build a context model to suppress them according to the pedestrian-vehicle relationship. The context model can be learned automatically even when the vehicle annotations are not available. Our method reduces the mean miss rate to 60% for pedestrians taller than 30 pixels on the Caltech Pedestrian Benchmark, which noticeably outperforms previous state-of-the-art (71%).}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } The serious performance decline with decreasing resolution is the major bottleneck for current pedestrian detection techniques. In this paper, we take pedestrian detection in different resolutions as different but related problems, and propose a Multi-Task model to jointly consider their commonness and differences. The model contains resolution aware transformations to map pedestrians in different resolutions to a common space, where a shared detector is constructed to distinguish pedestrians from background. For model learning, we present a coordinate descent procedure to learn the resolution aware transformations and deformable part model (DPM) based detector iteratively. In traffic scenes, there are many false positives located around vehicles, therefore, we further build a context model to suppress them according to the pedestrian-vehicle relationship. The context model can be learned automatically even when the vehicle annotations are not available. Our method reduces the mean miss rate to 60% for pedestrians taller than 30 pixels on the Caltech Pedestrian Benchmark, which noticeably outperforms previous state-of-the-art (71%). |
 | Junjie Yan; Xucong Zhang; Zhen Lei; Stan Z. Li Structural face detection Inproceedings 10th Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2013. @inproceedings{Yan_FG13, title = {Structural face detection}, author = {Junjie Yan and Xucong Zhang and Zhen Lei and Stan Z. Li}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/03/yan_FG2013.pdf}, year = {2013}, date = {2013-01-01}, booktitle = {10th Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG)}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } |
 | Junjie Yan; Xucong Zhang; Zhen Lei; Stan Z. Li Real-time high performance deformable model for face detection in the wild Inproceedings International Conference on Biometrics (ICB), pp. 1–6, IEEE 2013. @inproceedings{yan2013real, title = {Real-time high performance deformable model for face detection in the wild}, author = { Junjie Yan and Xucong Zhang and Zhen Lei and Stan Z. Li}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/03/Yan_Vis13.pdf}, year = {2013}, date = {2013-01-01}, booktitle = {International Conference on Biometrics (ICB)}, pages = {1--6}, organization = {IEEE}, abstract = {We present an effective deformable part model for face detection in the wild. Compared with previous systems on face detection, there are mainly three contributions. The first is an efficient method for calculating histogram of oriented gradients by pre-calculated lookup tables, which only has read and write memory operations and the feature pyramid can be calculated in real-time. The second is a Sparse Constrained Latent Bilinear Model to simultaneously learn the discriminative deformable part model, and reduce the feature dimension by sparse transformations for efficient inference. The third contribution is a deformable part based cascade, where every stage is a deformable part in the discriminatively learned model. By integrating the three techniques, we demonstrate noticeable improvements over previous state-of-the-art on FDDB with real-time speed, under widely comparisons with both academic and commercial detectors.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } We present an effective deformable part model for face detection in the wild. Compared with previous systems on face detection, there are mainly three contributions. The first is an efficient method for calculating histogram of oriented gradients by pre-calculated lookup tables, which only has read and write memory operations and the feature pyramid can be calculated in real-time. The second is a Sparse Constrained Latent Bilinear Model to simultaneously learn the discriminative deformable part model, and reduce the feature dimension by sparse transformations for efficient inference. The third contribution is a deformable part based cascade, where every stage is a deformable part in the discriminatively learned model. By integrating the three techniques, we demonstrate noticeable improvements over previous state-of-the-art on FDDB with real-time speed, under widely comparisons with both academic and commercial detectors. |
 | Xucong Zhang; Xiaoyun Wang; Yingmin Jia The Visual Internet of Things System Based on Depth Camera Inproceedings Proceedings of the Chinese Intelligent Automation Conference, pp. 447–455, Springer 2013. @inproceedings{zhang2013visual, title = {The Visual Internet of Things System Based on Depth Camera}, author = {Xucong Zhang and Xiaoyun Wang and Yingmin Jia}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/03/Zhang_ICB13.pdf}, year = {2013}, date = {2013-01-01}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Chinese Intelligent Automation Conference}, pages = {447--455}, organization = {Springer}, abstract = {The Visual Internet of Things is an important part of information technology. It is proposed to strength the system with atomic visual label by taking visual camera as the sensor. Unfortunately, the traditional color camera is greatly influenced by the condition of illumination, and suffers from the low detection accuracy. To solve that problem, we build a new Visual Internet of Things with depth camera. The new system takes advantage of the illumination invariant of depth information and rich texture of color information to label the objects in the scene. We use Kinect as the sensor to get the color and depth information of the scene, modify the traditional computer vision technology for the combinatorial information to label target object, and return the result to user interface. We set up the hardware platform and the real application validates the robust and high precision of the system. }, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } The Visual Internet of Things is an important part of information technology. It is proposed to strength the system with atomic visual label by taking visual camera as the sensor. Unfortunately, the traditional color camera is greatly influenced by the condition of illumination, and suffers from the low detection accuracy. To solve that problem, we build a new Visual Internet of Things with depth camera. The new system takes advantage of the illumination invariant of depth information and rich texture of color information to label the objects in the scene. We use Kinect as the sensor to get the color and depth information of the scene, modify the traditional computer vision technology for the combinatorial information to label target object, and return the result to user interface. We set up the hardware platform and the real application validates the robust and high precision of the system. |
 | Zhang, Xucong; Yan, Junjie; Feng, Shikun; Lei, Zhen; Yi, Dong; Li, Stan Z Water filling: Unsupervised people counting via vertical kinect sensor Inproceedings Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS), 2012 IEEE Ninth International Conference on, pp. 215–220, IEEE 2012. @inproceedings{zhang2012water, title = {Water filling: Unsupervised people counting via vertical kinect sensor}, author = {Zhang, Xucong and Yan, Junjie and Feng, Shikun and Lei, Zhen and Yi, Dong and Li, Stan Z}, url = {https://perceptual.mpi-inf.mpg.de/files/2015/03/WaterFilling.pdf}, year = {2012}, date = {2012-01-01}, booktitle = {Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance (AVSS), 2012 IEEE Ninth International Conference on}, pages = {215--220}, organization = {IEEE}, abstract = {People counting is one of the key components in video surveillance applications, however, due to occlusion, illumination, color and texture variation, the problem is far from being solved. Different from traditional visible camera based systems, we construct a novel system that uses vertical Kinect sensor for people counting, where the depth information is used to remove the affect of the appearance variation. Since the head is always closer to the Kinect sensor than other parts of the body, people counting task equals to find the suitable local minimum regions. According to the particularity of the depth map, we propose a novel unsupervised water filling method that can find these regions with the property of robustness, locality and scale-invariance. Experimental comparisons with mean shift and random forest on two databases validate the superiority of our water filling algorithm in people counting.}, keywords = {}, pubstate = {published}, tppubtype = {inproceedings} } People counting is one of the key components in video surveillance applications, however, due to occlusion, illumination, color and texture variation, the problem is far from being solved. Different from traditional visible camera based systems, we construct a novel system that uses vertical Kinect sensor for people counting, where the depth information is used to remove the affect of the appearance variation. Since the head is always closer to the Kinect sensor than other parts of the body, people counting task equals to find the suitable local minimum regions. According to the particularity of the depth map, we propose a novel unsupervised water filling method that can find these regions with the property of robustness, locality and scale-invariance. Experimental comparisons with mean shift and random forest on two databases validate the superiority of our water filling algorithm in people counting. |
