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Computer Vision


Semester:

SS 2019

Type:

Lecture

Lecturer:

Credits:

V3 + Ü1 (6 ECTS credits)
Note: This page is for a course from a previous semester.
Find a list of current courses on the Teaching page.
Course Dates:

Type

Date

Room

Lecture / Exercise Monday, 10:30 - 12:00 TEMP2
Lecture / Exercise Tuesday, 14:30 - 16:00 H03

Lecture Description

Cameras and images form an ever-growing part of our daily lives. Billions of images and massive amounts of video data are becoming available on the Internet. Large search engines are being created to make sense out of this data. And more and more commercial applications are coming up, e.g. in surveillance and security, on consumer devices, for video special effects, in mobile robotics and automotive contexts, and for medical image processing. All those applications are building on visual capabilities. For us humans, those capabilities are natural. But how do we actually accomplish them? And how can we teach a machine to perform similar tasks for us?

The goal of Computer Vision is to develop methods that enable a machine to "understand" or analyze images and videos. This lecture will teach the fundamental Computer Vision techniques that underlie such capabilities. In addition, it will show current research developments and how they are applied to solve real-world tasks. The lecture is accompanied by programming exercises that will allow you to collect hands-on experience with the algorithms introduced in the lecture (there will be one exercise sheet roughly every two weeks).

Literature

In the last decades, Computer Vision has evolved into a rapidly growing field with research going into so many directions that no single book can cover them all. We will mainly make use of the following books:

  • D. Forsyth, J. Ponce, Computer Vision - A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 2002
  • R. Szeliski, Computer Vision - Algorithms and Applications, Springer, 2010
  • R. Hartley, A. Zisserman, Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004
  • I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, A. Courville, Deep Learning, 2016

However, a good part of the material presented in this class is the result of very recent research, so it hasn't found its way into textbooks yet. Wherever research papers are necessary for a deeper understanding, we will make them available on this web page or in the Moodle course room.

Course Schedule
Date Title Content Material
-- no class (RWTH DIES)
-- no class (RWTH DIES)
-- no class
Introduction Why vision? Applications, Challenges, Image Formation
Image Processing I Linear Filters, Gaussian Smoothing, Multi-scale Representations
-- no class
-- no class (Easter Monday)
Image Processing II Image Derivatives, Edge detection, Canny
Structure Extraction Line Fitting, Hough Transform, Gen. Hough Transform
Segmentation I Segmentation as Clustering, k-means, EM, Mean-Shift Segmentation
Exercise 1 Filtering, Derivatives, Edges, Hough Transform
Segmentation II Segmentation as Energy Minimization, Markov Random Fields, Graph Cuts
Categorization Sliding Window-based Object Detection, HOG, SVMs, Viola-Jones detector, AdaBoost
Local Features I Interest points, Harris Detector, Hessian Detector, Scale Invariance, Local Descriptors, SIFT
Local Features II Specific Object Recognition with Local Features, Geometric Verification, RANSAC
Exercise 2 Mean-Shift and Graph Cut Segmentation, Sliding-Window Detection
Deep Learning I Intro Neural Networks, Backpropagation, etc.
Deep Learning II CNNs, Current Architectures, VGGNet, GoogLeNet, ResNet
Exercise 3 Interest Point Detection & Matching, Homography Estimation
-- no class (RWTH DIES Sports Day)
-- no class (Excursion Week)
-- no class (Excursion Week)
Deep Learning III CNNs for Object Detection
Deep Learning IV CNNs for Semantic Segmentation, Human Pose Estimation, Matching
Exercise 4 CNNs
3D Reconstruction I Multi-View Stereo Basics, Disparity, Triangulation, Epipolar Geometry, Essential Matrix, Correspondence Search
3D Reconstruction II Camera Parameters, Calibration, Triangulation, DLT
3D Reconstruction III Fundamental Matrix, Eight-Point Algorithm, Active Stereo, Outlook to SfM
Repetition Repetition
Exercise 5 Eight-Point Algorithm, RANSAC, Triangulation
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