Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: The sixteen papers in this special section focus on human pose recovery and behavior analysis (HuPBA). This is one of the most challenging topics in computer vision, pattern analysis, and machine learning. It is of critical importance for application areas that include gaming, computer interaction, human robot interaction, security, commerce, assistive technologies and rehabilitation, sports, sign language recognition, and driver assistance technology, to mention just a few. In essence, HuPBA requires dealing with the articulated nature of the human body, changes in appearance due to clothing, and the inherent problems of clutter scenes, such as background artifacts, occlusions, and illumination changes. These papers represent the most recent research in this field, including new methods considering still images, image sequences, depth data, stereo vision, 3D vision, audio, and IMUs, among others.

Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.