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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2013). Texture-independent recognition of facial expressions in image snapshots and videos. MVA - Machine Vision and Applications, 24(4), 811–820.
Abstract: This paper addresses the static and dynamic recognition of basic facial expressions. It has two main contributions. First, we introduce a view- and texture-independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. We represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Second, we compare this dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that the former performs better than the latter. We provide evaluations of performance using three subspace learning techniques: linear discriminant analysis, non-parametric discriminant analysis and support vector machines.
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Cesar Isaza, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). Rendering ground truth data sets to detect shadows cast by static objects in outdoors. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 70(1), 557–571.
Abstract: In our work, we are particularly interested in studying the shadows cast by static objects in outdoor environments, during daytime. To assess the accuracy of a shadow detection algorithm, we need ground truth information. The collection of such information is a very tedious task because it is a process that requires manual annotation. To overcome this severe limitation, we propose in this paper a methodology to automatically render ground truth using a virtual environment. To increase the degree of realism and usefulness of the simulated environment, we incorporate in the scenario the precise longitude, latitude and elevation of the actual location of the object, as well as the sun’s position for a given time and day. To evaluate our method, we consider a qualitative and a quantitative comparison. In the quantitative one, we analyze the shadow cast by a real object in a particular geographical location and its corresponding rendered model. To evaluate qualitatively the methodology, we use some ground truth images obtained both manually and automatically.
Keywords: Synthetic ground truth data set; Sun position; Shadow detection; Static objects shadow detection
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Laura Igual, Agata Lapedriza, & Ricard Borras. (2013). Robust Gait-Based Gender Classification using Depth Cameras. EURASIPJ - EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 37(1), 72–80.
Abstract: This article presents a new approach for gait-based gender recognition using depth cameras, that can run in real time. The main contribution of this study is a new fast feature extraction strategy that uses the 3D point cloud obtained from the frames in a gait cycle. For each frame, these points are aligned according to their centroid and grouped. After that, they are projected into their PCA plane, obtaining a representation of the cycle particularly robust against view changes. Then, final discriminative features are computed by first making a histogram of the projected points and then using linear discriminant analysis. To test the method we have used the DGait database, which is currently the only publicly available database for gait analysis that includes depth information. We have performed experiments on manually labeled cycles and over whole video sequences, and the results show that our method improves the accuracy significantly, compared with state-of-the-art systems which do not use depth information. Furthermore, our approach is insensitive to illumination changes, given that it discards the RGB information. That makes the method especially suitable for real applications, as illustrated in the last part of the experiments section.
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Cesar Isaza, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2012). Evaluation of Intrinsic Image Algorithms to Detect the Shadows Cast by Static Objects Outdoors. SENS - Sensors, 12(10), 13333–13348.
Abstract: In some automatic scene analysis applications, the presence of shadows becomes a nuisance that is necessary to deal with. As a consequence, a preliminary stage in many computer vision algorithms is to attenuate their effect. In this paper, we focus our attention on the detection of shadows cast by static objects outdoors, as the scene is viewed for extended periods of time (days, weeks) from a fixed camera and considering daylight intervals where the main source of light is the sun. In this context, we report two contributions. First, we introduce the use of synthetic images for which ground truth can be generated automatically, avoiding the tedious effort of manual annotation. Secondly, we report a novel application of the intrinsic image concept to the automatic detection of shadows cast by static objects in outdoors. We make both a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation of several algorithms based on this image representation. For the quantitative evaluation, we used the synthetic data set, while for the qualitative evaluation we used both data sets. Our experimental results show that the evaluated methods can partially solve the problem of shadow detection.
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Fadi Dornaika, Abdelmalik Moujahid, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2013). Facial expression recognition using tracked facial actions: Classifier performance analysis. EAAI - Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 26(1), 467–477.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the analysis and recognition of facial expressions in continuous videos. More precisely, we study classifiers performance that exploit head pose independent temporal facial action parameters. These are provided by an appearance-based 3D face tracker that simultaneously provides the 3D head pose and facial actions. The use of such tracker makes the recognition pose- and texture-independent. Two different schemes are studied. The first scheme adopts a dynamic time warping technique for recognizing expressions where training data are given by temporal signatures associated with different universal facial expressions. The second scheme models temporal signatures associated with facial actions with fixed length feature vectors (observations), and uses some machine learning algorithms in order to recognize the displayed expression. Experiments quantified the performance of different schemes. These were carried out on CMU video sequences and home-made video sequences. The results show that the use of dimension reduction techniques on the extracted time series can improve the classification performance. Moreover, these experiments show that the best recognition rate can be above 90%.
Keywords: Visual face tracking; 3D deformable models; Facial actions; Dynamic facial expression recognition; Human–computer interaction
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