This paper considers the problem of recognizing activities as they occur in surveillance video. Activities are high-level nonatomic semantic concepts which may have complex temporal structure. Activities are not easily identifiable using image features, but rather by the recognition of their composing events. Unfortunately, these composing events may only be observed up to a particular certainty. This paper describes particle filter Petri Net (PFPN), an activity recognition process that combines uncertain event observations to determine the likelihood that a particular activity is taking place in a video sequence. Our paper is based on previous study in which activities are specified as Petri Nets. The stochastic PFPN framework proposed in this paper improves over existing deterministic approaches to activity recognition by enabling the certainty reasoning required for coping with inherent ambiguity in both low-level video processing and activity definition. Furthermore, the PFPN approach reduces the dependence on a duration model and enables the creation of holistic activity models. Often when activity recognition frameworks are proposed they are strongly paired with a particular methodology for low-level video processing and event recognition. Each proposed approach is then applied to a nonstandard dataset. In our experiments, we provide an empirical comparison of our approach with leading activity recognition approaches across several datasets, using a constant event recognition as input. Our results illustrate the tradeoff between deterministic and stochastic activity recognition approaches. Furthermore, our experiments suggest that the holistic PFPN approach is more robust for activity recognition in the surveillance video domain than competing approaches.

In this paper, we propose the surveillance event recognition framework using Petri Nets (SERF-PN) for recognition of event occurrences in video. The Petri Net (PN) formalism allows a robust way to express semantic knowledge about the event domain as well as efficient algorithms for recognizing events as they occur in a particular video sequence. The major novelties of this paper are extensions to both the modeling and the recognition capacities of the Object PN paradigm. The first contribution of this paper is the extension of the PN representational capacities by introducing stochastic timed transitions to allow modeling of events which have some variance in duration. These stochastic timed transitions sample the duration of the condition from a parametrized distribution. The parameters of this distribution can be specified manually or learned from available video data. A second representational novelty is the use of a single PN to represent the entire event domain, as opposed to previous approaches which have utilized several networks, one for each event of interest. A third contribution of this paper is the capacity to probabilistically predict future events by constructing a discrete time Markov chain model of transitions between states. The experiments section of the paper thoroughly evaluates the application of the SERF-PN framework in the event domains of surveillance and traffic monitoring and provides comparison to other approaches using the CAVIAR dataset , a standard dataset for video analysis applications.

This paper presents a framework for hierarchical 3D articulated human body-part tracking and action classification. We introduce a Hierarchical Annealing Particle Filter (H-APF) algorithm, which applies nonlinear dimensionality reduction of the high di-mensional data space to the low dimensional latent spaces combined with the dynamic motion model and the Hierarchical Human Body Model. The improved annealing ap-proach is used for the propagation between different body models and sequential frames. The tracking algorithm generates trajectories in the latent spaces, which provide low di-mensional representations of body poses, observed during the motion. These trajectories are used to classify human motions. The tracking and classification algorithms were checked on HumanEvaI, HumanEvaII, and other datasets, involving more complicated motion types and transitions and proved to be effective and robust. The comparison to other methods and the error calculations are provided. 1

Understanding video events, i.e., the translation of low-level content in video sequences into high-level semantic concepts, is a research topic that has received much interest in recent years. Important applications of this paper include smart surveillance systems, semantic video database indexing, and interactive systems. This technology can be applied to several video domains including airport terminal, parking lot, traffic, subway stations, aerial surveillance, and sign language data. In this paper, we identify the two main components of the event understanding process: abstraction and event modeling. Abstraction is the process of molding the data into informative units to be used as input to the event model. Due to space restrictions, we will limit the discussion on the topic of abstraction. See the study byLaveeetal.(Understanding video events: A survey of methods for automatic interpretation of semantic occurrences in video, Technion-Israel Inst. Technol., Haifa, Israel, Tech. Rep. CIS-2009-06, 2009) for a more complete discussion. Event modeling is devoted to describing events of interest formally and enabling recognition of these events as they occur in the video sequence. Event modeling can be further decomposed in the categories of pattern-recognition methods, state event models, and semantic event models. In this survey, we discuss this proposed taxonomy of the literature, offer a unifying terminology, and discuss popular event modeling formalisms (e.g., hidden Markov model) and their use in video event understanding using extensive examples from the literature. Finally, we consider the application domain of video event understanding in light of the proposed taxonomy, and propose future directions for research in this field.

The behavior of white and red blood cells, platelets, and circulating injected particles is one of the most studied areas of physiology. Most methods used to analyze the circulatory patterns of cells are time consuming. We describe a system named CellTrack, designed for fully automated tracking of circulating cells and micro-particles and retrieval of their behavioral characteristics. The task of automated blood cell tracking in vessels from in vivo video is particularly challenging because of the blood cells' nonrigid shapes, the instability inherent in in vivo videos, the abundance of moving objects and their frequent superposition. To tackle this, the CellTrack system operates on two levels: first, a global processing module extracts vessel borders and center lines based on color and temporal patterns. This enables the computation of the approximate direction of the blood flow in each vessel. Second, a local processing module extracts the locations and velocities of circulating cells. This is performed by artificial neural network classifiers that are designed to detect specific types of blood cells and micro-particles. The motion correspondence problem is then resolved by a novel algorithm that incorporates both the local and the global information. The system has been tested on a series of in vivo color video recordings of rat mesentery. Our results show that the synergy between the global and local information enables CellTrack to overcome many of the difficulties inherent in tracking methods that rely solely on local information. A comparison was made between manual measurements and the automatically extracted measurements of leukocytes and fluorescent microspheres circulatory velocities. This comparison revealed an accuracy of 97%. CellTrack also enabled a much larger volume of sampling in a fraction of time compared to the manual measurements. All these results suggest that our method can in fact constitute a reliable replacement for manual extraction of blood flow characteristics from in vivo videos.

The task of segmenting cell nuclei in microscope images is a classical image analysis problem. The accurate nuclei segmentation may contribute to development of successful system which automate the analysis of microscope images for pathology detection. In this article we describe a method for semi-supervised training of fuzzy logic engine. The fuzzy logic engine is applied to connect a set of parameters proven to be important for nucleus segmentation. In addition each parameter for itself is detected using a set of fuzzy logic rules. We present results of nuclei segmentation using fuzzy logic set of rules.

We describe a system for detection and classification of moving targets. The system’s change detection and tracking modules are based on background adaptation, with the help of information about targets obtained from preceding time steps. The classification module performs a hybrid classification that combines motion and appearance features. The system is able to perform real-time detection, tracking and classification of targets in outdoor settings. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed hybrid classifier architecture improves classification significantly, thereby permitting real-time discrimination among a considerable number of classes, some of which are quite similar.

An automatic cortical gray matter segmentation from a three-dimensional (3-D) brain images [magnetic resonance (MR) or computed tomography] is a well known problem in medical image processing. In this paper, we first formulate it as a geometric variational problem for propagation of two coupled bounding surfaces. An efficient numerical scheme is then used to implement the geodesic active surface model. Experimental results of cortex segmentation on real 3-D MR data are provided.

We use an unconditionally stable numerical scheme to implement a fast version of the geodesic active contour model. The proposed scheme is useful for object segmentation in images, like tracking moving objects in a sequence of images. The method is based on the Weickert-Romeney-Viergever (additive operator splitting) AOS scheme. It is applied at small regions, motivated by the Adalsteinsson-Sethian level set narrow band approach, and uses Sethian's (1996) fast marching method for re-initialization. Experimental results demonstrate the power of the new method for tracking in color movies.