Privacy protection may be defined as replacing the original content in an image region with a new (less intrusive) content having modified target appearance information to make it less recognizable by applying a privacy protection technique. Indeed the development of privacy protection techniques needs also to be complemented with an established objective evaluation method to facilitate their assessment and comparison. Generally, existing evaluation methods rely on the use of subjective judgements or assume a specific target type in image data and use target detection and recognition accuracies to assess privacy protection. This work proposes a new annotation-free evaluation method that is neither subjective nor assumes a specific target type. It assesses two key aspects of privacy protection: protection and utility. Protection is quantified as an appearance similarity and utility is measured as a structural similarity between original and privacy-protected image regions. We performed an extensive experimentation using six challenging datasets (having 12 video sequences) including a new dataset (having six sequences) that contains visible and thermal imagery. The new dataset, called TST-Priv, is made available online below for community. We demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method by evaluating six image-based privacy protection techniques, and also show comparisons of the proposed method over existing methods.

We address two problems related to large-scale aerial monitoring of district heating networks. First, we propose a classification scheme to reduce the number of false alarms among automatically detected leakages in district heating networks. The leakages are detected in images captured by an airborne thermal camera, and each detection corresponds to an image region with abnormally high temperature. This approach yields a significant number of false positives, and we propose to reduce this number in two steps; by (a) using a building segmentation scheme in order to remove detections on buildings, and (b) to use a machine learning approach to classify the remaining detections as true or false leakages. We provide extensive experimental analysis on real-world data, showing that this post-processing step significantly improves the usefulness of the system. Second, we propose a method for characterization of leakages over time, i.e., repeating the image acquisition one or a few years later and indicate areas that suffer from an increased energy loss. We address the problem of finding trends in the degradation of pipe networks in order to plan for long-term maintenance, and propose a visualization scheme exploiting the consecutive data collections.

Automatically identifying harmful content in video is an important task with a wide range of applications. However, there is a lack of professionally labeled open datasets available. In this work VidHarm, an open dataset of 3589 video clips from film trailers annotated by professionals, is presented. An analysis of the dataset is performed, revealing among other things the relation between clip and trailer level annotations. Audiovisual models are trained on the dataset and an in-depth study of modeling choices conducted. The results show that performance is greatly improved by combining the visual and audio modality, pre-training on large-scale video recognition datasets, and class balanced sampling. Lastly, biases of the trained models are investigated using discrimination probing. VidHarm is openly available, and further details are available at the webpage https://vidharm.github.io/

The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2019 is the seventh annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of 81 trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis as well as the standard VOT methodology for long-term tracking analysis. The VOT2019 challenge was composed of five challenges focusing on different tracking domains: (i) VOT-ST2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB, (ii) VOT-RT2019 challenge focused on "real-time" short-term tracking in RGB, (iii) VOT-LT2019 focused on long-term tracking namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. Two new challenges have been introduced: (iv) VOT-RGBT2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB and thermal imagery and (v) VOT-RGBD2019 challenge focused on long-term tracking in RGB and depth imagery. The VOT-ST2019, VOT-RT2019 and VOT-LT2019 datasets were refreshed while new datasets were introduced for VOT-RGBT2019 and VOT-RGBD2019. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard short-term, long-term tracking and tracking with multi-channel imagery. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website(1).

We address short-term, single-object tracking, a topic that is currently seeing fast progress for visual video, for the case of thermal infrared (TIR) imagery. Tracking methods designed for TIR are often subject to a number of constraints, e.g., warm objects, low spatial resolution, and static camera. As TIR cameras become less noisy and get higher resolution these constraints are less relevant, and for emerging civilian applications, e.g., surveillance and automotive safety, new tracking methods are needed. Due to the special characteristics of TIR imagery, we argue that template-based trackers based on distribution fields should have an advantage over trackers based on spatial structure features. In this paper, we propose a templatebased tracking method (ABCD) designed specifically for TIR and not being restricted by any of the constraints above. The proposed tracker is evaluated on the VOT-TIR2015 and VOT2015 datasets using the VOT evaluation toolkit and a comparison of relative ranking of all common participating trackers in the challenges is provided. Experimental results show that the ABCD tracker performs particularly well on thermal infrared sequences.

We address short-term, single-object tracking, a topic that is currently seeing fast progress for visual video, for the case of thermal infrared (TIR) imagery. Tracking methods designed for TIR are often subject to a number of constraints, e.g., warm objects, low spatial resolution, and static camera. As TIR cameras become less noisy and get higher resolution these constraints are less relevant, and for emerging civilian applications, e.g., surveillance and automotive safety, new tracking methods are needed. Due to the special characteristics of TIR imagery, we argue that template-based trackers based on distribution fields should have an advantage over trackers based on spatial structure features. In this paper, we propose a templatebased tracking method (ABCD) designed specifically for TIR and not being restricted by any of the constraints above. The proposed tracker is evaluated on the VOT-TIR2015 and VOT2015 datasets using the VOT evaluation toolkit and a comparison of relative ranking of all common participating trackers in the challenges is provided. Experimental results show that the ABCD tracker performs particularly well on thermal infrared sequences.

The Thermal Infrared Visual Object Tracking challenge 2016, VOT-TIR2016, aims at comparing short-term single-object visual trackers that work on thermal infrared (TIR) sequences and do not apply pre-learned models of object appearance. VOT-TIR2016 is the second benchmark on short-term tracking in TIR sequences. Results of 24 trackers are presented. For each participating tracker, a short description is provided in the appendix. The VOT-TIR2016 challenge is similar to the 2015 challenge, the main difference is the introduction of new, more difficult sequences into the dataset. Furthermore, VOT-TIR2016 evaluation adopted the improvements regarding overlap calculation in VOT2016. Compared to VOT-TIR2015, a significant general improvement of results has been observed, which partly compensate for the more difficult sequences. The dataset, the evaluation kit, as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.

During recent years, thermal cameras have decreased in both size and cost while improving image quality. The area of use for such cameras has expanded with many exciting applications, many of which require tracking of objects. While being subject to extensive research in the visual domain, tracking in thermal imagery has historically been of interest mainly for military purposes. The available thermal infrared datasets for evaluating methods addressing these problems are few and the ones that do are not challenging enough for today’s tracking algorithms. Therefore, we hereby propose a thermal infrared dataset for evaluation of short-term tracking methods. The dataset consists of 20 sequences which have been collected from multiple sources and the data format used is in accordance with the Visual Object Tracking (VOT) Challenge.

In recent years, short-term single-object tracking has emerged has a popular research topic, as it constitutes the core of more general tracking systems. Many such tracking methods are based on matching a part of the image with a template that is learnt online and represented by, for example, a correlation filter or a distribution field. In order for such a tracker to be able to not only find the position, but also the scale, of the tracked object in the next frame, some kind of scale estimation step is needed. This step is sometimes separate from the position estimation step, but is nevertheless jointly evaluated in de facto benchmarks. However, for practical as well as scientific reasons, the scale estimation step should be evaluated separately – for example,theremightincertainsituationsbeothermethodsmore suitable for the task. In this paper, we describe an evaluation method for scale estimation in template-based short-term single-object tracking, and evaluate two state-of-the-art tracking methods where estimation of scale and position are separable.

We propose a system to automatically measure the body temperature of persons as they pass. In contrast to exisitng systems, the persons do not need to stop and look into a camera one-by-one. Instead, their eye corners are automatically detected and the temperatures therein measured using a thermal camera. The system handles multiple simultaneous persons and can thus be used where a flow of people pass, such as at airport gates.

In this paper we address the problem of automatically detecting leakages in underground pipes of district heating networks from images captured by an airborne thermal camera. The basic idea is to classify each relevant image region as a leakage if its temperature exceeds a threshold. This simple approach yields a significant number of false positives. We propose to address this issue by machine learning techniques and provide extensive experimental analysis on real-world data. The results show that this postprocessing step significantly improves the usefulness of the system.

We address the problem of reducing the number offalse alarms among automatically detected leakages in districtheating networks. The leakages are detected in images capturedby an airborne thermal camera, and each detection correspondsto an image region with abnormally high temperature. Thisapproach yields a significant number of false positives, and wepropose to reduce this number in two steps. First, we use abuilding segmentation scheme in order to remove detectionson buildings. Second, we extract features from the detectionsand use a Random forest classifier on the remaining detections.We provide extensive experimental analysis on real-world data,showing that this post-processing step significantly improves theusefulness of the system.

Thermal cameras have historically been of interest mainly for military applications. Increasing image quality and resolution combined with decreasing camera price and size during recent years have, however, opened up new application areas. They are now widely used for civilian applications, e.g., within industry, to search for missing persons, in automotive safety, as well as for medical applications. Thermal cameras are useful as soon as there exists a measurable temperature difference. Compared to cameras operating in the visual spectrum, they are advantageous due to their ability to see in total darkness, robustness to illumination variations, and less intrusion on privacy.

This thesis addresses the problem of automatic image analysis in thermal infrared images with a focus on machine learning methods. The main purpose of this thesis is to study the variations of processing required due to the thermal infrared data modality. In particular, three different problems are addressed: visual object tracking, anomaly detection, and modality transfer. All these are research areas that have been and currently are subject to extensive research. Furthermore, they are all highly relevant for a number of different real-world applications.

The first addressed problem is visual object tracking, a problem for which no prior information other than the initial location of the object is given. The main contribution concerns benchmarking of short-term single-object (STSO) visual object tracking methods in thermal infrared images. The proposed dataset, LTIR (Linköping Thermal Infrared), was integrated in the VOT-TIR2015 challenge, introducing the first ever organized challenge on STSO tracking in thermal infrared video. Another contribution also related to benchmarking is a novel, recursive, method for semi-automatic annotation of multi-modal video sequences. Based on only a few initial annotations, a video object segmentation (VOS) method proposes segmentations for all remaining frames and difficult parts in need for additional manual annotation are automatically detected. The third contribution to the problem of visual object tracking is a template tracking method based on a non-parametric probability density model of the object's thermal radiation using channel representations.

The second addressed problem is anomaly detection, i.e., detection of rare objects or events. The main contribution is a method for truly unsupervised anomaly detection based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The method employs joint training of the generator and an observation to latent space encoder, enabling stratification of the latent space and, thus, also separation of normal and anomalous samples. The second contribution is the previously unaddressed problem of obstacle detection in front of moving trains using a train-mounted thermal camera. Adaptive correlation filters are updated continuously and missed detections of background are treated as detections of anomalies, or obstacles. The third contribution to the problem of anomaly detection is a method for characterization and classification of automatically detected district heat leakages for the purpose of false alarm reduction.

Finally, the thesis addresses the problem of modality transfer between thermal infrared and visual spectrum images, a previously unaddressed problem. The contribution is a method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enabling perceptually realistic transformations of thermal infrared to visual images. By careful design of the loss function the method becomes robust to image pair misalignments. The method exploits the lower acuity for color differences than for luminance possessed by the human visual system, separating the loss into a luminance and a chrominance part.