Abstract: Automatic pain detection is a long expected solution to a prevalent medical problem of pain management. This is more relevant when the subject of pain is young children or patients with limited ability to communicate about their pain experience. Computer vision-based analysis of facial pain expression provides a way of efficient pain detection. When deep machine learning methods came into the scene, automatic pain detection exhibited even better performance. In this paper, we figured out three important factors to exploit in automatic pain detection: spatial information available regarding to pain in each of the facial video frames, temporal axis information regarding to pain expression pattern in a subject video sequence, and variation of face resolution. We employed a combination of convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network to setup a deep hybrid pain detection framework that is able to exploit both spatial and temporal pain information from facial video. In order to analyze the effect of different facial resolutions, we introduce a super-resolution algorithm to generate facial video frames with different resolution setups. We investigated the performance on the publicly available UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain database. As a contribution, the paper provides novel and important information regarding to the performance of a hybrid deep learning framework for pain detection in facial images of different resolution.

Abstract: Automatic understanding of human activity and action is very important and challenging research area of Computer Vision with wide applications in video surveillance, motion analysis, virtual reality interfaces, video indexing, content based video retrieval, HCI and health care. This thesis presents a series of techniques to solve the problem of human action recognition in video. First approach towards this goal is based on a probabilistic optimization model of body parts using Hidden Markov Model. This strong model based approach is able to distinguish between similar actions by only considering the body parts having major contributions to the actions. In next approach, we apply a weak model based human detector and actions are represented by Bag-of-key poses model to capture the human pose changes during the actions. To tackle the problem of human action recognition in complex scenes, a selective spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) detector is proposed by using a mechanism similar to that of the non-classical receptive field inhibition that is exhibited by most oriented selective neuron in the primary visual cortex. An extension of the selective STIP detector is applied to multi-view action recognition system by introducing a novel 4D STIPs (3D space + time). Finally, we use our STIP detector on large scale continuous visual event recognition problem and propose a novel generalized max-margin Hough transformation framework for activity detection

Abstract: Automatically changing the expression and physical features of a face from an input image is a topic that has been traditionally tackled in a 2D domain. In this paper, we bring this problem to 3D and propose a framework that given an
input RGB video of a human face under a neutral expression, initially computes his/her 3D shape and then performs a transfer to a new and potentially non-observed expression. For this purpose, we parameterize the rest shape –obtained from standard factorization approaches over the input video– using a triangular
mesh which is further clustered into larger macro-segments. The expression transfer problem is then posed as a direct mapping between this shape and a source shape, such as the blend shapes of an off-the-shelf 3D dataset of human facial expressions. The mapping is resolved to be geometrically consistent between 3D models by requiring points in specific regions to map on semantic
equivalent regions. We validate the approach on several synthetic and real examples of input faces that largely differ from the source shapes, yielding very realistic expression transfers even in cases with topology changes, such as a synthetic video sequence of a single-eyed cyclops.

Abstract: Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet-and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.

Abstract: Autonomous driving models should ideally be evaluated by deploying
them on a fleet of physical vehicles in the real world. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for the vast majority of researchers. An attractive alternative is to evaluate models offline, on a pre-collected validation dataset with ground truth annotation. In this paper, we investigate the relation between various online and offline metrics for evaluation of autonomous driving models. We find that offline prediction error is not necessarily correlated with driving quality, and two models with identical prediction error can differ dramatically in their driving performance. We show that the correlation of offline evaluation with driving quality can be significantly improved by selecting an appropriate validation dataset and
suitable offline metrics.

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.

Abstract: Avoiding vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes is a critical requirement for nowadays advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) and future self-driving vehicles. Accordingly, detecting pedestrians from raw sensor data has a history of more than 15 years of research, with vision playing a central role.
During the last years, deep learning has boosted the accuracy of image-based pedestrian detectors.
However, detection is just the first step towards answering the core question, namely is the vehicle going to crash with a pedestrian provided preventive actions are not taken? Therefore, knowing as soon as possible if a detected pedestrian has the intention of crossing the road ahead of the vehicle is
essential for performing safe and comfortable maneuvers that prevent a crash. However, compared to pedestrian detection, there is relatively little literature on detecting pedestrian intentions. This paper aims to contribute along this line by presenting a new vision-based approach which analyzes the
pose of a pedestrian along several frames to determine if he or she is going to enter the road or not. We present experiments showing 750 ms of anticipation for pedestrians crossing the road, which at a typical urban driving speed of 50 km/h can provide 15 additional meters (compared to a pure pedestrian detector) for vehicle automatic reactions or to warn the driver. Moreover, in contrast with state-of-the-art methods, our approach is monocular, neither requiring stereo nor optical flow information.