Ramesh Visvanathan
Image and Visualisation Department, Siemens Corporate Research, USA.
There has been a significant increase in commercial products using imaging analysis techniques to solve real-world problems in diverse fields such as manufacturing, medical imaging, document analysis, transportation and public security, etc. This has been accelerated by various factors: more advanced algorithms, the availability of cheaper sensors, and faster processors. While algorithms continue to improve in performance, a major stumbling block in translating improvements in algorithms to faster deployment of image analysis systems is the lack of characterization of limits of algorithms and how they affect total system performance. The research community has realized the need for performance analysis and there have been significant efforts in the last few years to remedy the situation. Our efforts at Siemens Corporate Research have been on statistical modeling and characterization of modules and systems. The emphasis is on both white-box and black box methodologies to evaluate and optimize vision systems. In this talk we review the literature on performance characterization and then provide an overview of the status of our research in performance characterization of image and video understanding systems. Specific examples will be used to illustrate the issues in evaluation and validation of video analysis systems.