• International Journal of Contents
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.19-23
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• 2011

This paper proposes a segmentation method for overlapped vehicles based on analysis of the vehicle location and the spatiotemporal association information. This method can be used in an intelligent transport system. In the proposed method, occlusion is detected by analyzing the association information based on a vehicle's location in continuous images, and occlusion segmentation is carried out by using the vehicle information prior to occlusion. In addition, the size variations of the vehicle to which association tracking is applied can be anticipated by learning the variations according to the overlapped vehicles' movements. To assess the performance of the suggested method, image data collected from CCTVs recording traffic information is used, and average success rate of occlusion segmentation is 96.9%.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.49-54
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• 2009

Visual occlusion method is a visual demand measuring technique which uses periodic vision/occlusion cycle to simulate driving environment. It became one of the most popular techniques for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces due to its robustness and cost-effectiveness. However, it has a limitation in that the vision/occlusion cycle forces the user to use the IVIS at a predetermined pace, while a driver decides when to use the device on his/her own in actual driving. This paper proposes a user-driven visual occlusion method for measuring the visual demand of in-vehicle interfaces. An experiment was conducted to examine the visual demand of an in-vehicle interface prototype using both the existing (system-driven) occlusion method and the proposed (user-driven) one. Two in-vehicle tasks were evaluated: address input and radio tuning. The results showed that, for the radio tuning task, there were significant differences in total shutter open time and resumability ratio between the methods. The user-driven visual occlusion method not only allows a better representation of drivers' behavior, but it also seems to provide more information on the chunkability of a task.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.99-105
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• 2017

Generally, stereo matching methods are used to estimate depth information based on color and spatial similarity. However, most depth estimation methods suffer from the occlusion region because occlusion regions cause inaccurate depth information. Moreover, they do not consider the temporal dimension when estimating the disparity. In this paper, we propose a temporal stereo matching method, considering occlusion and disregarding inaccurate temporal depth information. First, we apply a global stereo matching algorithm to estimate the depth information, we segment the image to occlusion and non-occlusion regions. After occlusion detection, we fill the occluded region with a reasonable disparity value that are obtained from neighboring pixels of the current pixel. Then, we apply a temporal disparity estimation method using the reliable information. Experimental results show that our method detects more accurate occlusion regions, compared to a conventional method. The proposed method increases the temporal consistency of estimated disparity maps and outperforms per-frame methods in noisy images.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.2547-2567
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• 2021

It has been widely acknowledged that occlusion impairments adversely distress many face recognition algorithms' performance. Therefore, it is crucial to solving the problem of face image occlusion in face recognition. To solve the image occlusion problem in face recognition, this paper aims to automatically de-occlude the human face majority or discriminative regions to improve face recognition performance. To achieve this, we decompose the generative process into two key stages and employ a separate generative adversarial network (GAN)-based network in both stages. The first stage generates an initial coarse face image without an occlusion mask. The second stage refines the result from the first stage by forcing it closer to real face images or ground truth. To increase the performance and minimize the artifacts in the generated result, a new refine loss (e.g., reconstruction loss, perceptual loss, and adversarial loss) is used to determine all differences between the generated de-occluded face image and ground truth. Furthermore, we build occluded face images and corresponding occlusion-free face images dataset. We trained our model on this new dataset and later tested it on real-world face images. The experiment results (qualitative and quantitative) and the comparative study confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed work in removing challenging occlusion masks with various structures, sizes, shapes, types, and positions.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.589-595
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• 2011

Objective: This study compares two visual occlusion methods for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces. Background: Visual occlusion is a visual demand measuring technique which uses periodic vision/occlusion cycle to simulate a driving(or mobile) environment. It has been widely used for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces. There are two major implementation methods for this technique: (1) occlusion using PLATO(portable liquid crystal apparatus for tachistoscopic occlusion) goggles; (2) occlusion using a software application on a touchscreen device. Method: An experiment was conducted to examine the visual demand of an in-vehicle interface prototype using the goggle-based and the touchscreen-based occlusion methods. Address input and radio tuning tasks were evaluated in the experiment. Results: The results showed that, for the radio tuning task, there were no significant differences in total shutter open time and resumability ratio between the two occlusionconditions. However, it took longer for the participants to input addresses with the touchscreen-based occlusion. Conclusion & Application: The results suggest that touchscreen-based method could be used as an alternative to traditional, gogglebased visual occlusion especially in less demanding visual tasks such as radio tuning.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.158-167
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• 2015

This study presents a new method to improve the speed of high quality volume rendering. We improve the speed of ambient occlusion which is one of the global illumination techniques used in traditional volume visualization. Calculating ambient occlusion takes much time because it determines an illumination value of a sample by integrating opacities of nearby samples. This study proposes an improved method for this by using local statistics such as averages and standard deviations. We calculate local statistics for each volume block, a set of nearby samples, in pre-processing time. In the rendering process, we efficiently determine the illumination value by assuming the density distribution as a normal distribution. As the results, we can generate high quality images that combine ambient occlusion illumination with local illumination in real time.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.15A no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2008

An occlusion culling method, one of visibility culling methods, excludes invisible objects or triangles which are covered by other objects. As it reduces computation quantity, occlusion culling is an effective method to handle complex scenes in real-time. But an existing common occlusion culling method, such as hardware occlusion query method, sends objects' data twice to GPU and this causes processing overheads once for occlusion culling test and the other is for rendering. And another existing hardware occlusion culling method, VCBP, can test objects' visibility quickly, but it neither test bounding volume nor return test result to application stage. In this paper, we propose a single pass occlusion culling method which uses temporal and spatial coherency, with effective occlusion culling hardware architecture. In our approach, the hardware performs occlusion culling test rapidly with cache on the rasterization stage where triangles are transformed into fragments. At the same time, hardware sends each primitive's visibility information to application stage. As a result, the application stage reduces data transmission quantity by excluding covered objects using the visibility information on previous frame and hierarchical spatial tree. Our proposed method improved maximum 44%, minimum 14% compared with S&W method based on hardware occlusion query. And the performance is increased 25% and 17% respectively, compared to maximum and minimum performance of CHC method which is based on occlusion culling method.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-42
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• 2018

Direct volume rendering (DVR) is an important 3D visualization method for medical images as it depicts the full volumetric data. However, because DVR renders the whole volume, regions of interests (ROIs) such as a tumor that are embedded within the volume maybe occluded from view. Thus, conventional 2D cross-sectional views are still widely used, while the advantages of the DVR are often neglected. In this study, we propose a new visualization algorithm where we augment the 2D slice of interest (SOI) from an image volume with volumetric information derived from the DVR of the same volume. Our occlusion-based DVR augmentation for SOI (ODAS) uses the occlusion information derived from the voxels in front of the SOI to calculate a depth parameter that controls the amount of DVR visibility which is used to provide 3D spatial cues while not impairing the visibility of the SOI. We outline the capabilities of our ODAS and through a variety of computer tomography (CT) medical image examples, compare it to a conventional fusion of the SOI and the clipped DVR.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.2094-2112
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• 2019

Focusing on the issue that the conventional Kernel Correlation Filter (KCF) algorithm has poor performance in handling scale change and obscured objects, this paper proposes an anti-occlusion and scale adaptive tracking algorithm in the basis of KCF. The average Peak-to Correlation Energy and the peak value of correlation filtering response are used as the confidence indexes to determine whether the target is obscured. In the case of non-occlusion, we modify the searching scheme of the KCF. Instead of searching for a target with a fixed sample size, we search for the target area with multiple scales and then resize it into the sample size to compare with the learnt model. The scale factor with the maximum filter response is the best target scaling and is updated as the optimal scale for the following tracking. Once occlusion is detected, the model updating and scale updating are stopped. Experiments have been conducted on the OTB benchmark video sequences for compassion with other state-of-the-art tracking methods. The results demonstrate the proposed method can effectively improve the tracking success rate and the accuracy in the cases of scale change and occlusion, and meanwhile ensure a real-time performance.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.904-911
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• 2022

Occlusion is one of the most challenging problems for computer vision-based construction monitoring. Due to the intrinsic dynamics of construction scenes, vision-based technologies inevitably suffer from occlusions. Previous researchers have proposed the occlusion handling methods by leveraging the prior information from the sequential images. However, these methods cannot be employed for construction object detection in non-sequential images. As an alternative occlusion handling method, this study proposes a data augmentation-based framework that can enhance the detection performance under occlusions. The proposed approach is specially designed for rebar occlusions, the distinctive type of occlusions frequently happen during construction worker detection. In the proposed method, the artificial rebars are synthetically generated to emulate possible rebar occlusions in construction sites. In this regard, the proposed method enables the model to train a variety of occluded images, thereby improving the detection performance without requiring sequential information. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by showing that the proposed method outperforms the baseline model without augmentation. The outcomes demonstrate the great potential of the data augmentation techniques for occlusion handling that can be readily applied to typical object detectors without changing their model architecture.