Video and Image Analysis using Statistical and Machine Learning Techniques

Digital videos and images are effective media for capturing spatial and ternporal information in the real world. The rapid growth of digital videos has motivated research aimed at developing effective algorithms, with the objective of obtaining useful information for a variety of application areas, such as security, commerce, medicine, geography, etc. This dissertation presents innovative and practical techniques, based on statistics and machine learning, that address some key research problems in video and image analysis, including video stabilization, object classification, image segmentation, and video indexing. A novel unsupervised multi-scale color image segmentation algorithm is proposed. The basic idea is to apply mean shift clustering to obtain an over-segmentation, and then merge regions at multiple scales to minimize the MDL criterion. The performance on the Berkeley segmentation benchmark compares favorably with some existing approaches. This algorithm can also operate on one-dimensional feature vectors representing each frame in ocean survey videos, which results in a novel framework for building a hierarchical video index. The advantage is to provide the user with the flexibility of browsing the videos at arbitrary levels of detail, which makes it more efficient for users to browse a long video in order to find interesting information based on the hierarchical index. Also, an empirical study on classification of ships in surveillance videos is presented. A comparative performance study on three classification algorithms is conducted. Based on this study, an effective feature extraction and classification algorithm for classifying ships in coastline surveillance videos is proposed. Finally, an empirical study on video stabilization is presented, which includes a comparative performance study on four motion estimation methods and three motion correction methods. Based on this study, an effective real-time video stabilization algorithm for coastline surveillance is proposed, which involves a novel ...