Abstract: Action recognition in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To facilitate comparative evaluation independently of person detection, the standard evaluation protocol for action recognition uses an oracle person detector to obtain perfect bounding box information at both training and test time. The assumption is that, in practice, a general person detector will provide candidate bounding boxes for action recognition. In this paper, we argue that this paradigm is suboptimal and that action class labels should already be considered during the detection stage. Motivated by the observation that body pose is strongly conditioned on action class, we show that: 1) the existing state-of-the-art generic person detectors are not adequate for proposing candidate bounding boxes for action classification; 2) due to limited training examples, the direct training of action-specific person detectors is also inadequate; and 3) using only a small number of labeled action examples, the transfer learning is able to adapt an existing detector to propose higher quality bounding boxes for subsequent action classification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate transfer learning for the task of action-specific person detection in still images. We perform extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets: 1) Stanford-40 and 2) PASCAL VOC 2012. For the action detection task (i.e., both person localization and classification of the action performed), our approach outperforms methods based on general person detection by 5.7% mean average precision (MAP) on Stanford-40 and 2.1% MAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state of the art with a MAP of 45.4% on Stanford-40 and 31.4% on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also evaluate our action detection approach for the task of action classification (i.e., recognizing actions without localizing them). For this task, our approach, without using any ground-truth person localization at test tim- , outperforms on both data sets state-of-the-art methods, which do use person locations.

Abstract: All known recursive filters based on the geodesic distance affinity are realized by two 1D recursions applied in two orthogonal directions of the image plane. The 2D extension of the filter is not valid and has theoretically drawbacks, which lead to known artifacts. In this paper, a maximum influence propagation method is proposed to approximate the 2D extension for the
geodesic distance-based recursive filter. The method allows to partially overcome the drawbacks of the 1D recursion approach. We show that our improved recursion better approximates the true geodesic distance filter, and the application of this improved filter for image denoising outperforms the existing recursive implementation of the geodesic distance. As an application,
we consider a geodesic distance-based filter for image denoising.
Experimental evaluation of our denoising method demonstrates comparable and for several test images better results, than stateof-the-art approaches, while our algorithm is considerably fasterwith computational complexity O(8P).

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the standard belief propagation (BP) sequential technique proposed in the tree-reweighted sequential method [15] to the fully connected CRF models with the geodesic distance affinity. The proposed method has been applied to the stereo matching problem. Also a new approach to the BP marginal solution is proposed that we call one-view occlusion detection (OVOD). In contrast to the standard winner takes all (WTA) estimation, the proposed OVOD solution allows to find occluded regions in the disparity map and simultaneously improve the matching result. As a result we can perform only
one energy minimization process and avoid the cost calculation for the second view and the left-right check procedure. We show that the OVOD approach considerably improves results for cost augmentation and energy minimization techniques in comparison with the standard one-view affinity space implementation. We apply our method to the Middlebury data set and reach state-ofthe-art especially for median, average and mean squared error metrics.