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Mariella Dimiccoli, Marc Bolaños, Estefania Talavera, Maedeh Aghaei, Stavri G. Nikolov, & Petia Radeva. (2017). SR-Clustering: Semantic Regularized Clustering for Egocentric Photo Streams Segmentation. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 155, 55–69.
Abstract: While wearable cameras are becoming increasingly popular, locating relevant information in large unstructured collections of egocentric images is still a tedious and time consuming processes. This paper addresses the problem of organizing egocentric photo streams acquired by a wearable camera into semantically meaningful segments. First, contextual and semantic information is extracted for each image by employing a Convolutional Neural Networks approach. Later, by integrating language processing, a vocabulary of concepts is defined in a semantic space. Finally, by exploiting the temporal coherence in photo streams, images which share contextual and semantic attributes are grouped together. The resulting temporal segmentation is particularly suited for further analysis, ranging from activity and event recognition to semantic indexing and summarization. Experiments over egocentric sets of nearly 17,000 images, show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2016). Multi-face tracking by extended bag-of-tracklets in egocentric photo-streams. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 146–156.
Abstract: Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
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Gerard Canal, Sergio Escalera, & Cecilio Angulo. (2016). A Real-time Human-Robot Interaction system based on gestures for assistive scenarios. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 65–77.
Abstract: Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.
Keywords: Gesture recognition; Human Robot Interaction; Dynamic Time Warping; Pointing location estimation
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, C. Canton-Ferrer, & Petia Radeva. (2018). Towards social pattern characterization from egocentric photo-streams. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 171, 104–117.
Abstract: Following the increasingly popular trend of social interaction analysis in egocentric vision, this article presents a comprehensive pipeline for automatic social pattern characterization of a wearable photo-camera user. The proposed framework relies merely on the visual analysis of egocentric photo-streams and consists of three major steps. The first step is to detect social interactions of the user where the impact of several social signals on the task is explored. The detected social events are inspected in the second step for categorization into different social meetings. These two steps act at event-level where each potential social event is modeled as a multi-dimensional time-series, whose dimensions correspond to a set of relevant features for each task; finally, LSTM is employed to classify the time-series. The last step of the framework is to characterize social patterns of the user. Our goal is to quantify the duration, the diversity and the frequency of the user social relations in various social situations. This goal is achieved by the discovery of recurrences of the same people across the whole set of social events related to the user. Experimental evaluation over EgoSocialStyle – the proposed dataset in this work, and EGO-GROUP demonstrates promising results on the task of social pattern characterization from egocentric photo-streams.
Keywords: Social pattern characterization; Social signal extraction; Lifelogging; Convolutional and recurrent neural networks
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Stefan Lonn, Petia Radeva, & Mariella Dimiccoli. (2019). Smartphone picture organization: A hierarchical approach. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 187, 102789.
Abstract: We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.
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