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G. Zahnd, Simone Balocco, A. Serusclat, P. Moulin, M. Orkisz, & D. Vray. (2015). Progressive attenuation of the longitudinal kinetics in the common carotid artery: preliminary in vivo assessment Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. UMB - Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 41(1), 339–345.
Abstract: Longitudinal kinetics (LOKI) of the arterial wall consists of the shearing motion of the intima-media complex over the adventitia layer in the direction parallel to the blood flow during the cardiac cycle. The aim of this study was to investigate the local variability of LOKI amplitude along the length of the vessel. By use of a previously validated motion-estimation framework, 35 in vivo longitudinal B-mode ultrasound cine loops of healthy common carotid arteries were analyzed. Results indicated that LOKI amplitude is progressively attenuated along the length of the artery, as it is larger in regions located on the proximal side of the image (i.e., toward the heart) and smaller in regions located on the distal side of the image (i.e., toward the head), with an average attenuation coefficient of -2.5 ± 2.0%/mm. Reported for the first time in this study, this phenomenon is likely to be of great importance in improving understanding of atherosclerosis mechanisms, and has the potential to be a novel index of arterial stiffness.
Keywords: Arterial stiffness; Atherosclerosis; Common carotid artery; Longitudinal kinetics; Motion tracking; Ultrasound imaging
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G. Lisanti, I. Masi, Andrew Bagdanov, & Alberto del Bimbo. (2015). Person Re-identification by Iterative Re-weighted Sparse Ranking. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 37(8), 1629–1642.
Abstract: In this paper we introduce a method for person re-identification based on discriminative, sparse basis expansions of targets in terms of a labeled gallery of known individuals. We propose an iterative extension to sparse discriminative classifiers capable of ranking many candidate targets. The approach makes use of soft- and hard- re-weighting to redistribute energy among the most relevant contributing elements and to ensure that the best candidates are ranked at each iteration. Our approach also leverages a novel visual descriptor which we show to be discriminative while remaining robust to pose and illumination variations. An extensive comparative evaluation is given demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on single- and multi-shot person re-identification scenarios on the VIPeR, i-LIDS, ETHZ, and CAVIAR4REID datasets. The combination of our descriptor and iterative sparse basis expansion improves state-of-the-art rank-1 performance by six percentage points on VIPeR and by 20 on CAVIAR4REID compared to other methods with a single gallery image per person. With multiple gallery and probe images per person our approach improves by 17 percentage points the state-of-the-art on i-LIDS and by 72 on CAVIAR4REID at rank-1. The approach is also quite efficient, capable of single-shot person re-identification over galleries containing hundreds of individuals at about 30 re-identifications per second.
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Adriana Romero, Petia Radeva, & Carlo Gatta. (2015). Meta-parameter free unsupervised sparse feature learning. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 37(8), 1716–1722.
Abstract: We propose a meta-parameter free, off-the-shelf, simple and fast unsupervised feature learning algorithm, which exploits a new way of optimizing for sparsity. Experiments on CIFAR-10, STL- 10 and UCMerced show that the method achieves the state-of-theart performance, providing discriminative features that generalize well.
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Katerine Diaz, Francesc J. Ferri, & W. Diaz. (2015). Incremental Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors for Image Classification. TNNLS - IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 26(8), 1761–1775.
Abstract: Subspace-based methods have become popular due to their ability to appropriately represent complex data in such a way that both dimensionality is reduced and discriminativeness is enhanced. Several recent works have concentrated on the discriminative common vector (DCV) method and other closely related algorithms also based on the concept of null space. In this paper, we present a generalized incremental formulation of the DCV methods, which allows the update of a given model by considering the addition of new examples even from unseen classes. Having efficient incremental formulations of well-behaved batch algorithms allows us to conveniently adapt previously trained classifiers without the need of recomputing them from scratch. The proposed generalized incremental method has been empirically validated in different case studies from different application domains (faces, objects, and handwritten digits) considering several different scenarios in which new data are continuously added at different rates starting from an initial model.
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T. Mouats, N. Aouf, Angel Sappa, Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, & Ricardo Toledo. (2015). Multi-Spectral Stereo Odometry. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 16(3), 1210–1224.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of visual odometry for ground vehicles based on the simultaneous utilization of multispectral cameras. It encompasses a stereo rig composed of an optical (visible) and thermal sensors. The novelty resides in the localization of the cameras as a stereo setup rather
than two monocular cameras of different spectrums. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such task is attempted. Log-Gabor wavelets at different orientations and scales are used to extract interest points from both images. These are then described using a combination of frequency and spatial information within the local neighborhood. Matches between the pairs of multimodal images are computed using the cosine similarity function based
on the descriptors. Pyramidal Lucas–Kanade tracker is also introduced to tackle temporal feature matching within challenging sequences of the data sets. The vehicle egomotion is computed from the triangulated 3-D points corresponding to the matched features. A windowed version of bundle adjustment incorporating
Gauss–Newton optimization is utilized for motion estimation. An outlier removal scheme is also included within the framework to deal with outliers. Multispectral data sets were generated and used as test bed. They correspond to real outdoor scenarios captured using our multimodal setup. Finally, detailed results validating the proposed strategy are illustrated.
Keywords: Egomotion estimation; feature matching; multispectral odometry (MO); optical flow; stereo odometry; thermal imagery
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Mohammad Rouhani, Angel Sappa, & E. Boyer. (2015). Implicit B-Spline Surface Reconstruction. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(1), 22–32.
Abstract: This paper presents a fast and flexible curve, and surface reconstruction technique based on implicit B-spline. This representation does not require any parameterization and it is locally supported. This fact has been exploited in this paper to propose a reconstruction technique through solving a sparse system of equations. This method is further accelerated to reduce the dimension to the active control lattice. Moreover, the surface smoothness and user interaction are allowed for controlling the surface. Finally, a novel weighting technique has been introduced in order to blend small patches and smooth them in the overlapping regions. The whole framework is very fast and efficient and can handle large cloud of points with very low computational cost. The experimental results show the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm to describe objects with complex topologies. Comparisons with other fitting methods highlight the superiority of the proposed approach in the presence of noise and missing data.
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Miguel Oliveira, Angel Sappa, & Victor Santos. (2015). A probabilistic approach for color correction in image mosaicking applications. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 14(2), 508–523.
Abstract: Image mosaicking applications require both geometrical and photometrical registrations between the images that compose the mosaic. This paper proposes a probabilistic color correction algorithm for correcting the photometrical disparities. First, the image to be color corrected is segmented into several regions using mean shift. Then, connected regions are extracted using a region fusion algorithm. Local joint image histograms of each region are modeled as collections of truncated Gaussians using a maximum likelihood estimation procedure. Then, local color palette mapping functions are computed using these sets of Gaussians. The color correction is performed by applying those functions to all the regions of the image. An extensive comparison with ten other state of the art color correction algorithms is presented, using two different image pair data sets. Results show that the proposed approach obtains the best average scores in both data sets and evaluation metrics and is also the most robust to failures.
Keywords: Color correction; image mosaicking; color transfer; color palette mapping functions
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2015). Accurate stereo matching by two step global optimization. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(3), 1153–1163.
Abstract: In stereo matching cost filtering methods and energy minimization algorithms are considered as two different techniques. Due to their global extend energy minimization methods obtain good stereo matching results. However, they tend to fail in occluded regions, in which cost filtering approaches obtain better results. In this paper we intend to combine both approaches with the aim to improve overall stereo matching results. We show that a global optimization with a fully connected model can be solved by cost fil tering methods. Based on this observation we propose to perform stereo matching as a two-step energy minimization algorithm. We consider two MRF models: a fully connected model defined on the complete set of pixels in an image and a conventional locally connected model. We solve the energy minimization problem for the fully connected model, after which the marginal function of the solution is used as the unary potential in the locally connected MRF model. Experiments on the Middlebury stereo datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts results.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Jiaolong Xu, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Antonio Lopez. (2015). Recognizing Actions through Action-specific Person Detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(11), 4422–4432.
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.
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Lluis Garrido, M.Guerrieri, & Laura Igual. (2015). Image Segmentation with Cage Active Contours. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5557–5566.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework for image segmentation based on parametrized active contours. The evolving contour is parametrized according to a reduced set of control points that form a closed polygon and have a clear visual interpretation. The parametrization, called mean value coordinates, stems from the techniques used in computer graphics to animate virtual models. Our framework allows to easily formulate region-based energies to segment an image. In particular, we present three different local region-based energy terms: 1) the mean model; 2) the Gaussian model; 3) and the histogram model. We show the behavior of our method on synthetic and real images and compare the performance with state-of-the-art level set methods.
Keywords: Level sets; Mean value coordinates; Parametrized active contours; level sets; mean value coordinates
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2015). Global Color Sparseness and a Local Statistics Prior for Fast Bilateral Filtering. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5842–5853.
Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.
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Victor Campmany, Sergio Silva, Juan Carlos Moure, Antoni Espinosa, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2015). GPU-based pedestrian detection for autonomous driving. In Programming and Tunning Massive Parallel Systems. PUMPS.
Abstract: Pedestrian detection for autonomous driving has gained a lot of prominence during the last few years. Besides the fact that it is one of the hardest tasks within computer vision, it involves huge computational costs. The real-time constraints in the field are tight, and regular processors are not able to handle the workload obtaining an acceptable ratio of frames per second (fps). Moreover, multiple cameras are required to obtain accurate results, so the need to speed up the process is even higher. Taking the work in [1] as our baseline, we propose a CUDA implementation of a pedestrian detection system. Further, we introduce significant algorithmic adjustments and optimizations to adapt the problem to the GPU architecture. The aim is to provide a system capable of running in real-time obtaining reliable results.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; ADAS; CUDA; Pedestrian Detection
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Sergio Silva, Victor Campmany, Laura Sellart, Juan Carlos Moure, Antoni Espinosa, David Vazquez, et al. (2015). Autonomous GPU-based Driving. In Programming and Tunning Massive Parallel Systems.
Abstract: Human factors cause most driving accidents; this is why nowadays is common to hear about autonomous driving as an alternative. Autonomous driving will not only increase safety, but also will develop a system of cooperative self-driving cars that will reduce pollution and congestion. Furthermore, it will provide more freedom to handicapped people, elderly or kids.
Autonomous Driving requires perceiving and understanding the vehicle environment (e.g., road, traffic signs, pedestrians, vehicles) using sensors (e.g., cameras, lidars, sonars, and radars), selflocalization (requiring GPS, inertial sensors and visual localization in precise maps), controlling the vehicle and planning the routes. These algorithms require high computation capability, and thanks to NVIDIA GPU acceleration this starts to become feasible.
NVIDIA® is developing a new platform for boosting the Autonomous Driving capabilities that is able of managing the vehicle via CAN-Bus: the Drive™ PX. It has 8 ARM cores with dual accelerated Tegra® X1 chips. It has 12 synchronized camera inputs for 360º vehicle perception, 4G and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing vehicle communications and GPS and inertial sensors inputs for self-localization.
Our research group has been selected for testing Drive™ PX. Accordingly, we are developing a Drive™ PX based autonomous car. Currently, we are porting our previous CPU based algorithms (e.g., Lane Departure Warning, Collision Warning, Automatic Cruise Control, Pedestrian Protection, or Semantic Segmentation) for running in the GPU.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; ADAS; CUDA
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Victor Ponce, Sergio Escalera, Marc Perez, Oriol Janes, & Xavier Baro. (2015). Non-Verbal Communication Analysis in Victim-Offender Mediations. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 67(1), 19–27.
Abstract: We present a non-invasive ambient intelligence framework for the semi-automatic analysis of non-verbal communication applied to the restorative justice field. We propose the use of computer vision and social signal processing technologies in real scenarios of Victim–Offender Mediations, applying feature extraction techniques to multi-modal audio-RGB-depth data. We compute a set of behavioral indicators that define communicative cues from the fields of psychology and observational methodology. We test our methodology on data captured in real Victim–Offender Mediation sessions in Catalonia. We define the ground truth based on expert opinions when annotating the observed social responses. Using different state of the art binary classification approaches, our system achieves recognition accuracies of 86% when predicting satisfaction, and 79% when predicting both agreement and receptivity. Applying a regression strategy, we obtain a mean deviation for the predictions between 0.5 and 0.7 in the range [1–5] for the computed social signals.
Keywords: Victim–Offender Mediation; Multi-modal human behavior analysis; Face and gesture recognition; Social signal processing; Computer vision; Machine learning
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Michael Felsberg, & J.Laaksonen. (2015). Compact color texture description for texture classification. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 51, 16–22.
Abstract: Describing textures is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The classification problem involves assigning a category label to the texture class it belongs to. Several factors such as variations in scale, illumination and viewpoint make the problem of texture description extremely challenging. A variety of histogram based texture representations exists in literature.
However, combining multiple texture descriptors and assessing their complementarity is still an open research problem. In this paper, we first show that combining multiple local texture descriptors significantly improves the recognition performance compared to using a single best method alone. This
gain in performance is achieved at the cost of high-dimensional final image representation. To counter this problem, we propose to use an information-theoretic compression technique to obtain a compact texture description without any significant loss in accuracy. In addition, we perform a comprehensive
evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object recognition, for the problem of texture classification. Experiments are performed on four challenging texture datasets namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10. The experiments clearly demonstrate that our proposed compact multi-texture approach outperforms the single best texture method alone. In all cases, discriminative color names outperforms other color features for texture classification. Finally, we show that combining discriminative color names with compact texture representation outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7:8%, 4:3% and 5:0% on KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b and Texture-10 datasets respectively.
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