Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Cifre grant with Thomson-R&D on visual tracking

Participants : Patrick Pérez, Vijay Badrinarayanan.

no. Inria 2029, duration 36 months.

This contract started in March 2006 is associated with the supervision of V. Badrinarayanan's thesis funded by a Cifre grant. It concerns the problem of robust tracking of arbitrary objects in arbitrary videos. The first goal is the design of novel probabilistic ingredients to improve the robustness of existing tracking tools, with a first contribution on information-theoretic uncertainty assessment in probabilistic tracking as a generic tool for multiple cue fusion and intermittent adaptation. The second goal concerns the application, and possibly the specialization, of proposed generic techniques to tasks of interest to Thomson. Two scenarios are especially targeted: blurring of selected objects (typically faces) in tv news for business unit Thomson Grass Valley, and object colorization in film post-production for business unit Technicolor. In both cases, robust tracking tools (tracking a bounding box in the first case and the precise object outline in the second case) allowing the partial automatization of painstaking tasks are sought. Part of this work lead to the filing of the following European patent: “Method for tracking an object in a sequence of images and device implementing said method” by Vijay. B, P. Pérez, F. Le Clerc, L. Oisel.