Abstract: Most of the techniques proposed for tackling the Structure from Motion problem (SFM) cannot deal with high percentages of missing data in the matrix of trajectories. Furthermore, an additional problem should be faced up when working with multiple object scenes: the rank of the matrix of trajectories should be estimated. This paper presents an iterative multiresolution scheme for SFM with missing data to be used in both the single and multiple object cases. The proposed scheme aims at recovering missing entries in the original input matrix. The objective is to improve the results by applying a factorization technique to the partially or totally filled in matrix instead of to the original input one. Experimental results obtained with synthetic and real data sequences, containing single and multiple objects, are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper presents an efficient technique for estimating the pose of an onboard stereo vision system relative to the environment’s dominant surface area, which is supposed to be the road surface. Unlike previous approaches, it can be used either for urban or highway scenarios since it is not based on a specific visual traffic feature extraction but on 3-D raw data points. The whole process is performed in the Euclidean space and consists of two stages. Initially, a compact 2-D representation of the original 3-D data points is computed. Then, a RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) based least-squares approach is used to fit a plane to the road. Fast RANSAC fitting is obtained by selecting points according to a probability function that takes into account the density of points at a given depth. Finally, stereo camera height and pitch angle are computed related to the fitted road plane. The proposed technique is intended to be used in driverassistance systems for applications such as vehicle or pedestrian detection. Experimental results on urban environments, which are the most challenging scenarios (i.e., flat/uphill/downhill driving, speed bumps, and car’s accelerations), are presented. These results are validated with manually annotated ground truth. Additionally, comparisons with previous works are presented to show the improvements in the central processing unit processing time, as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results.

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.