Abstract: IF: 3.064
Increasing mobility in everyday life has led to the concern for the safety of automotives and human life. Computer vision has become a valuable tool for developing driver assistance applications that target such a concern. Many such vision-based assisting systems rely on motion estimation, where optical flow has shown its potential. A variational formulation of optical flow that achieves a dense flow field involves a data term and regularization terms. Depending on the image sequence, the regularization has to appropriately be weighted for better accuracy of the flow field. Because a vehicle can be driven in different kinds of environments, roads, and speeds, optical-flow estimation has to be accurately computed in all such scenarios. In this paper, we first present the polar representation of optical flow, which is quite suitable for driving scenarios due to the possibility that it offers to independently update regularization factors in different directional components. Then, we study the influence of vehicle speed and scene texture on optical-flow accuracy. Furthermore, we analyze the relationships of these specific characteristics on a driving scenario (vehicle speed and road texture) with the regularization weights in optical flow for better accuracy. As required by the work in this paper, we have generated several synthetic sequences along with ground-truth flow fields.

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians with on-board vision systems is of paramount interest for assisting drivers to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. The core of a pedestrian detector is its classification module, which aims at deciding if a given image window contains a pedestrian. Given the difficulty of this task, many classifiers have been proposed during the last fifteen years. Among them, the so-called (deformable) part-based classifiers including multi-view modeling are usually top ranked in accuracy. Training such classifiers is not trivial since a proper aspect clustering and spatial part alignment of the pedestrian training samples are crucial for obtaining an accurate classifier. In this paper, first we perform automatic aspect clustering and part alignment by using virtual-world pedestrians, i.e., human annotations are not required. Second, we use a mixture-of-parts approach that allows part sharing among different aspects. Third, these proposals are integrated in a learning framework which also allows to incorporate real-world training data to perform domain adaptation between virtual- and real-world cameras. Overall, the obtained results on four popular on-board datasets show that our proposal clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art deformable part-based detector known as latent SVM.

Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.