Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important for different applications in transportation, such as autonomous driving, vehicle collision warning, and pedestrian crossing detection. Common approaches to road detection are based on low-level road appearance (e.g., color or texture) and neglect of the scene geometry and context. Hence, using only low-level features makes these algorithms highly depend on structured roads, road homogeneity, and lighting conditions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to classify road geometries for road detection through the analysis of scene composition and temporal coherence. Road geometry classification is proposed by building corresponding models from training images containing prototypical road geometries. We propose adaptive shape models where spatial pyramids are steered by the inherent spatial structure of road images. To reduce the influence of lighting variations, invariant features are used. Large-scale experiments show that the proposed road geometry classifier yields a high recognition rate of 73.57% ± 13.1, clearly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. Including road shape information improves road detection results over existing appearance-based methods. Finally, it is shown that invariant features and temporal information provide robustness against disturbing imaging conditions.

Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has become an important topic in the pattern recognition community, and many solutions to this problemhave been proposed until now. Despite this fact, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light into the characteristics and behavior of the different methods. In this work we provide such an analysis focused on the classification task (i.e.,leaving out other learning tasks such as regression). In order to perform our study, we implemented
fourteen methods grouped into three different families. We analyze the performance of the approaches across a variety of well-known databases, and we also study their behavior in synthetic scenarios in order to highlight their characteristics. As a result of this analysis, we conclude that methods that extract global bag-level information show a clearly superior performance in general. In this sense, the analysis permits us to understand why some types of methods are more successful than others, and it permits us to establish guidelines in the design of new MIL
methods.

Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.