Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has benefited from computer vision and more recently, Deep Learning approaches, to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In our work, we test Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) with a dataset of deck areas of bridges for damage segmentation. We create a dataset for delamination and rebar exposure that has been collected from inspection records of bridges in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The dataset consists of 734 images with three labels per image, which makes it the largest dataset of images of bridge deck damage. This data allows us to estimate the performance of our method based on regions of agreement, which emulates the uncertainty of in-field inspections. We demonstrate the practicality of FCNs to perform automated semantic segmentation of surface damages. Our model achieves a mean accuracy of 89.7% for delamination and 78.4% for rebar exposure, and a weighted F1 score of 81.9%.

Abstract: Unique hue settings of 185 observers under three room-lighting conditions were used to evaluate the accuracy of full and mixed chromatic adaptation transform models of CIECAM02 in terms of unique hue reproduction. Perceptual hue shifts in CIECAM02 were evaluated for both models with no clear difference using the current Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE) recommendation for mixed chromatic adaptation ratio. Using our large dataset of unique hue data as a benchmark, an optimised parameter is proposed for chromatic adaptation under mixed illumination conditions that produces more accurate results in unique hue reproduction. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2013

Abstract: Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.

Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.

Abstract: The median graph has been shown to be a good choice to obtain a represen- tative of a set of graphs. However, its computation is a complex problem. Recently, graph embedding into vector spaces has been proposed to obtain approximations of the median graph. The problem with such an approach is how to go from a point in the vector space back to a graph in the graph space. The main contribution of this paper is the generalization of this previ- ous method, proposing a generic recursive procedure that permits to recover the graph corresponding to a point in the vector space, introducing only the amount of approximation inherent to the use of graph matching algorithms. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we compare it with the set me- dian and with the other state-of-the-art embedding-based methods for the median graph computation. The experiments are carried out using four dif- ferent databases (one semi-artificial and three containing real-world data). Results show that with the proposed approach we can obtain better medi- ans, in terms of the sum of distances to the training graphs, than with the previous existing methods.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel method for continuous visual event recognition (CVER) on a large scale video dataset using max-margin Hough transformation framework. Due to high scalability, diverse real environmental state and wide scene variability direct application of action recognition/detection methods such as spatio-temporal interest point (STIP)-local feature based technique, on the whole dataset is practically infeasible. To address this problem, we apply a motion region extraction technique which is based on motion segmentation and region clustering to identify possible candidate “event of interest” as a preprocessing step. On these candidate regions a STIP detector is applied and local motion features are computed. For activity representation we use generalized Hough transform framework where each feature point casts a weighted vote for possible activity class centre. A max-margin frame work is applied to learn the feature codebook weight. For activity detection, peaks in the Hough voting space are taken into account and initial event hypothesis is generated using the spatio-temporal information of the participating STIPs. For event recognition a verification Support Vector Machine is used. An extensive evaluation on benchmark large scale video surveillance dataset (VIRAT) and as well on a small scale benchmark dataset (MSR) shows that the proposed method is applicable on a wide range of continuous visual event recognition applications having extremely challenging conditions.

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.

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.