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Oscar Lopes, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Spherical Blurred Shape Model for 3-D Object and Pose Recognition: Quantitative Analysis and HCI Applications in Smart Environments. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(12), 2379–2390.
Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.
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Xavier Perez Sala, Sergio Escalera, Cecilio Angulo, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). A survey on model based approaches for 2D and 3D visual human pose recovery. SENS - Sensors, 14(3), 4189–4210.
Abstract: Human Pose Recovery has been studied in the field of Computer Vision for the last 40 years. Several approaches have been reported, and significant improvements have been obtained in both data representation and model design. However, the problem of Human Pose Recovery in uncontrolled environments is far from being solved. In this paper, we define a general taxonomy to group model based approaches for Human Pose Recovery, which is composed of five main modules: appearance, viewpoint, spatial relations, temporal consistence, and behavior. Subsequently, a methodological comparison is performed following the proposed taxonomy, evaluating current SoA approaches in the aforementioned five group categories. As a result of this comparison, we discuss the main advantages and drawbacks of the reviewed literature.
Keywords: human pose recovery; human body modelling; behavior analysis; computer vision
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Antonio Lopez, Theo Gevers, & Felipe Lumbreras. (2014). Combining Priors, Appearance and Context for Road Detection. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(3), 1168–1178.
Abstract: Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.
Keywords: Illuminant invariance; lane markings; road detection; road prior; road scene understanding; vanishing point; 3-D scene layout
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Noha Elfiky, Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Color Constancy using 3D Scene Geometry derived from a Single Image. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(9), 3855–3868.
Abstract: The aim of color constancy is to remove the effect of the color of the light source. As color constancy is inherently an ill-posed problem, most of the existing color constancy algorithms are based on specific imaging assumptions (e.g. grey-world and white patch assumption).
In this paper, 3D geometry models are used to determine which color constancy method to use for the different geometrical regions (depth/layer) found
in images. The aim is to classify images into stages (rough 3D geometry models). According to stage models; images are divided into stage regions using hard and soft segmentation. After that, the best color constancy methods is selected for each geometry depth. To this end, we propose a method to combine color constancy algorithms by investigating the relation between depth, local image statistics and color constancy. Image statistics are then exploited per depth to select the proper color constancy method. Our approach opens the possibility to estimate multiple illuminations by distinguishing
nearby light source from distant illuminations. Experiments on state-of-the-art data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art
single color constancy algorithms with an improvement of almost 50% of median angular error. When using a perfect classifier (i.e, all of the test images are correctly classified into stages); the performance of the proposed method achieves an improvement of 52% of the median angular error compared to the best-performing single color constancy algorithm.
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Ariel Amato. (2014). Moving cast shadow detection. ELCVIA - Electronic letters on computer vision and image analysis, 13(2), 70–71.
Abstract: Motion perception is an amazing innate ability of the creatures on the planet. This adroitness entails a functional advantage that enables species to compete better in the wild. The motion perception ability is usually employed at different levels, allowing from the simplest interaction with the ’physis’ up to the most transcendental survival tasks. Among the five classical perception system , vision is the most widely used in the motion perception field. Millions years of evolution have led to a highly specialized visual system in humans, which is characterized by a tremendous accuracy as well as an extraordinary robustness. Although humans and an immense diversity of species can distinguish moving object with a seeming simplicity, it has proven to be a difficult and non trivial problem from a computational perspective. In the field of Computer Vision, the detection of moving objects is a challenging and fundamental research area. This can be referred to as the ’origin’ of vast and numerous vision-based research sub-areas. Nevertheless, from the bottom to the top of this hierarchical analysis, the foundations still relies on when and where motion has occurred in an image. Pixels corresponding to moving objects in image sequences can be identified by measuring changes in their values. However, a pixel’s value (representing a combination of color and brightness) could also vary due to other factors such as: variation in scene illumination, camera noise and nonlinear sensor responses among others. The challenge lies in detecting if the changes in pixels’ value are caused by a genuine object movement or not. An additional challenging aspect in motion detection is represented by moving cast shadows. The paradox arises because a moving object and its cast shadow share similar motion patterns. However, a moving cast shadow is not a moving object. In fact, a shadow represents a photometric illumination effect caused by the relative position of the object with respect to the light sources. Shadow detection methods are mainly divided in two domains depending on the application field. One normally consists of static images where shadows are casted by static objects, whereas the second one is referred to image sequences where shadows are casted by moving objects. For the first case, shadows can provide additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object as well as the localization of the light source. Although the previous information can be extracted from static images as well as video sequences, the main focus in the second area is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance. In this context, a shadow can severely affect with the analysis and interpretation of the scene. The work done in the thesis is focused on the second case, thus it addresses the problem of detection and removal of moving cast shadows in video sequences in order to enhance the detection of moving object.
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