Abstract: Product graph has been shown to be an efficient way for matching subgraphs. This paper reports the extension of the product graph methodology for subgraph matching applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. This paper focuses on the two major limitations of the previous version of product graph: (1) Spurious nodes and edges in the graph representation and (2) Inefficient node and edge attributes. To deal with noisy information of vectorized graphical documents, we consider a dual graph representation on the original graph representing the graphical information and the product graph is computed between the dual graphs of the query graphs and the input graph.
The dual graph with redundant edges is helpful for efficient and tolerating encoding of the structural information of the graphical documents. The adjacency matrix of the product graph locates similar path information of two graphs and exponentiating the adjacency matrix finds similar paths of greater lengths. Nodes joining similar paths between two graphs are found by combining different exponentials of adjacency matrices. An experimental investigation reveals that the recall obtained by this approach is quite encouraging.

Abstract: Recognizing object categories in real world images is a challenging problem in computer vision. The deformable part based framework is currently the most successful approach for object detection. Generally, HOG are used for image representation within the part-based framework. For action recognition, the bag-of-word framework has shown to provide promising results. Within the bag-of-words framework, local image patches are described by SIFT descriptor. Contrary to object detection and action recognition, combining color and shape has shown to provide the best performance for object and scene recognition.
In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the problem of person detection in still images. Standard person detection approaches rely on intensity based features for image representation while ignoring the color. Channel based descriptors is one of the most commonly used approaches in object recognition. This inspires us to evaluate incorporating color information using the channel based fusion approach for the task of person detection.
In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of object detection in still images. Due to high dimensionality, channel based fusion increases the computational cost. Moreover, channel based fusion has been found to obtain inferior results for object category where one of the visual varies significantly. On the other hand, late fusion is known to provide improved results for a wide range of object categories. A consequence of late fusion strategy is the need of a pure color descriptor. Therefore, we propose to use Color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact and computationally efficient. Consequently color attributes are combined with traditional shape features providing excellent results for object detection task.
Finally, we focus on the problem of action detection and classification in still images. We investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in still images. We also evaluate different fusion approaches for combining color and shape information for action recognition. Additionally, an analysis is performed to validate the contribution of color for action recognition. Our results clearly demonstrate that combining color and shape information significantly improve the performance of both action classification and detection in still images.

Abstract: Robust visual pose estimation is at the core of many computer vision applications, being fundamental for Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry problems. During the last decades, many approaches have been proposed to solve these problems, being RANSAC one of the most accepted and used. However, with the arrival of new challenges, such as large driving scenarios for autonomous vehicles, along with the improvements in the data gathering frameworks, new issues must be considered. One of these issues is the capability of a technique to deal with very large amounts of data while meeting the realtime
constraint. With this purpose in mind, we present a novel technique for the problem of robust camera-pose estimation that is more suitable for dealing with large amount of data, which additionally, helps improving the results. The method is based on a combination of a very fast coarse-evaluation function and a robust ℓ1-averaging procedure. Such scheme leads to high-quality results while taking considerably less time than RANSAC.
Experimental results on the challenging KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite are provided, showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Scene text extraction methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priori knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organisation through which text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects. Therefore humans are able to detect text even in languages and scripts never seen before. In this paper, we argue that the text extraction problem could be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We present a method built around a perceptual organisation framework that exploits collaboration of proximity and similarity laws to create text-group hypotheses. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm is competitive with state of the art approaches on a standard dataset covering text in variable orientations and two languages.

Abstract: State-of-the-art deformable part-based models based on latent SVM have shown excellent results on human detection. In this paper, we propose to train a multiview deformable part-based model with automatically generated part examples from virtual-world data. The method is efficient as: (i) the part detectors are trained with precisely extracted virtual examples, thus no latent learning is needed, (ii) the multiview pedestrian detector enhances the performance of the pedestrian root model, (iii) a top-down approach is used for part detection which reduces the searching space. We evaluate our model on Daimler and Karlsruhe Pedestrian Benchmarks with publicly available Caltech pedestrian detection evaluation framework and the result outperforms the state-of-the-art latent SVM V4.0, on both average miss rate and speed (our detector is ten times faster).

Abstract: Structural pattern recognition approaches offer the most expressive, convenient, powerful but computational expensive representations of underlying relational information. To benefit from mature, less expensive and efficient state-of-the-art machine learning models of statistical pattern recognition they must be mapped to a low-dimensional vector space. Our method of explicit graph embedding bridges the gap between structural and statistical pattern recognition. We extract the topological, structural and attribute information from a graph and encode numeric details by fuzzy histograms and symbolic details by crisp histograms. The histograms are concatenated to achieve a simple and straightforward embedding of graph into a low-dimensional numeric feature vector. Experimentation on standard public graph datasets shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods of graph embedding for richly attributed graphs.

Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated both at staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario: old music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of images using two kinds of degradations: local noise and 3D distortions. This paper describes the dataset, distortion methods, evaluation metrics, the participant's methods and the obtained results.

Abstract: The increasing ubiquitousness of digital information in our daily lives has positioned video as a favored information vehicle, and given rise to an astonishing generation of social media and surveillance footage. This raises a series of technological demands for automatic video understanding and management, which together with the compromising attentional limitations of human operators, have motivated the research community to guide its steps towards a better attainment of such capabilities. As a result, current trends on cognitive vision promise to recognize complex events and self-adapt to different environments, while managing and integrating several types of knowledge. Future directions suggest to reinforce the multi-modal fusion of information sources and the communication with end-users.