Generating High-Quality Panorama by View Synthesis Based on Optical Flow Estimation

Generating high-quality panorama is a key element in promoting the development of VR content. The panoramas generated by the traditional image stitching algorithm have some limitations, such as artifacts and irregular shapes. We consider solving this problem from the perspective of view synthesis. We propose a view synthesis approach based on optical flow to generate a high-quality omnidirectional panorama. In the first stage, we present a novel optical flow estimation algorithm to establish a dense correspondence between the overlapping areas of the left and right views. The result obtained can be approximated as the parallax of the scene. In the second stage, the reconstructed version of the left and the right views is generated by warping the pixels under the guidance of optical flow, and the alpha blending algorithm is used to synthesize the final novel view. Experimental results demonstrate that the subjective experience obtained by our approach is better than the comparison algorithm without cracks or artifacts. Besides the commonly used image quality assessment PSNR and SSIM, we also calculate MP-PSNR, which can provide accurate high-quality predictions for synthesized views. Our approach can achieve an improvement of about 1 dB in MP-PSNR and PSNR and 25% in SSIM, respectively.

Development of an optical flow through detector for bubbles, crystals and particles in oils

Oscillating microbubbles, driven by the local sound field, and crystals are detected and sized in oils as they pass through an optical detector.

Visual Tracking with Object Center Displacement and CenterNet

Modern artificial intelligence systems have revolutionized approaches to scientific and technological challenges in a variety of fields, thus remarkable improvements in the quality of state-of-the-art computer vision and other techniques are observed; object tracking in video frames is a vital field of research that provides information about objects and their trajectories. This paper presents an object tracking method basing on optical flow generated between frames and a ConvNet method. Initially, optical center displacement is employed to detect possible the bounding box center of the tracked object. Then, CenterNet is used for object position correction. Given the initial set of points (i.e., bounding box) in first frame, the tracker tries to follow the motion of center of these points by looking at its direction of change in calculated optical flow with next frame, a correction mechanism takes place and waits for motions that surpass a correction threshold to launch position corrections.