Abstract: Video alignment is important in different areas of computer vision such as wide baseline matching, action recognition, change detection, video copy detection and frame dropping prevention. Current video alignment methods usually deal with a relatively simple case of fixed or rigidly attached cameras or simultaneous acquisition. Therefore, in this paper we propose a joint video alignment for bringing two video sequences into a spatio-temporal alignment. Specifically, the novelty of the paper is to formulate the video alignment to fold the spatial and temporal alignment into a single alignment framework. This simultaneously satisfies a frame-correspondence and frame-alignment similarity; exploiting the knowledge among neighbor frames by a standard pairwise Markov random field (MRF). This new formulation is able to handle the alignment of sequences recorded at different times by independent moving cameras that follows a similar trajectory, and also generalizes the particular cases that of fixed geometric transformation and/or linear temporal mapping. We conduct experiments on different scenarios such as sequences recorded simultaneously or by moving cameras to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The proposed method provides the highest video alignment accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods on sequences recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times.

Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important for different applications in transportation, such as autonomous driving, vehicle collision warning, and pedestrian crossing detection. Common approaches to road detection are based on low-level road appearance (e.g., color or texture) and neglect of the scene geometry and context. Hence, using only low-level features makes these algorithms highly depend on structured roads, road homogeneity, and lighting conditions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to classify road geometries for road detection through the analysis of scene composition and temporal coherence. Road geometry classification is proposed by building corresponding models from training images containing prototypical road geometries. We propose adaptive shape models where spatial pyramids are steered by the inherent spatial structure of road images. To reduce the influence of lighting variations, invariant features are used. Large-scale experiments show that the proposed road geometry classifier yields a high recognition rate of 73.57% ± 13.1, clearly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. Including road shape information improves road detection results over existing appearance-based methods. Finally, it is shown that invariant features and temporal information provide robustness against disturbing imaging conditions.

Abstract: We analyze the feasibility of a cheap eye-tracker where the hardware consists of a single webcam and a Raspberry Pi device. Our aim is to discover the limits of such a system and to see whether it provides an acceptable performance. We base our work on the open source Opengazer (Zielinski, 2013) and we propose several improvements to create a robust, real-time system. After assessing the accuracy of our eye-tracker in elaborated experiments involving 18 subjects under 4 different system setups, we developed a simple game to see how it performs in practice and we also installed it on a Raspberry Pi to create a portable stand-alone eye-tracker which achieves 1.62° horizontal accuracy with 3 fps refresh rate for a building cost of 70 Euros.

Abstract: We present a method for the cost estimation of custom hoses from CAD models. They can come in two formats, which are easy to generate: a STL file or the image of a CAD drawing showing several orthogonal projections. The challenges in either cases are, first, to obtain from them a high level 3D description of the shape, and second, to learn a regression function for the prediction of the manufacturing time, based on geometric features of the reconstructed shape. The chosen description is the 3D line along the medial axis of the tube and the diameter of the circular sections along it. In order to extract it from STL files, we have adapted RANSAC, a robust parametric fitting algorithm. As for CAD drawing images, we propose a new technique for 3D reconstruction from data entered on any number of orthogonal projections. The regression function is a Gaussian process, which does not constrain the function to adopt any specific form and is governed by just two parameters. We assess the accuracy of the manufacturing time estimation by k-fold cross validation on 171 STL file models for which the time is provided by an expert. The results show the feasibility of the method, whereby the relative error for 80% of the testing samples is below 15%.

Abstract: We present a novel method to auto-calibrate gaze estimators based on gaze patterns obtained from other viewers. Our method is based on the observation that the gaze patterns of humans are indicative of where a new viewer will look at [12]. When a new viewer is looking at a stimulus, we first estimate a topology of gaze points (initial gaze points). Next, these points are transformed so that they match the gaze patterns of other humans to find the correct gaze points. In a flexible uncalibrated setup with a web camera and no chin rest, the proposed method was tested on ten subjects and ten images. The method estimates the gaze points after looking at a stimulus for a few seconds with an average accuracy of 4.3 im. Although the reported performance is lower than what could be achieved with dedicated hardware or calibrated setup, the proposed method still provides a sufficient accuracy to trace the viewer attention. This is promising considering the fact that auto-calibration is done in a flexible setup , without the use of a chin rest, and based only on a few seconds of gaze initialization data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use human gaze patterns in order to auto-calibrate gaze estimators.

Abstract: We present different techniques to adapt a pedestrian classifier trained with synthetic images and the corresponding automatically generated annotations to operate with far infrared (FIR) images. The information contained in this kind of images allow us to develop a robust pedestrian detector invariant to extreme illumination changes.

Abstract: We propose a method that aims to lessen the significant accuracy degradation
that a discriminative classifier can suffer when it is trained in a specific domain (source domain) and applied in a different one (target domain). The principal reason for this degradation is the discrepancies in the distribution of the features that feed the classifier in different domains. Therefore, we propose a domain adaptation method that maps the features from the different domains into a common subspace and learns a discriminative domain-invariant classifier within it. Our algorithm combines bilinear classifiers and multi-task learning for domain adaptation.
The bilinear classifier encodes the feature transformation and classification
parameters by a matrix decomposition. In this way, specific feature transformations for multiple domains and a shared classifier are jointly learned in a multi-task learning framework. Focusing on domain adaptation for visual object detection, we apply this method to the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model for cross domain pedestrian detection. Experimental results show that our method significantly avoids the domain drift and improves the accuracy when compared to several baselines.