Abstract: Deformable object models capture variations in an object’s appearance that can be represented as image deformations. Other effects such as out-of-plane rotations, three-dimensional articulations, and self-occlusions are often captured by considering mixture of deformable models, one per object aspect. A more scalable approach is representing instead the variations at the level of the object parts, applying the concept of a mixture locally. Combining a few part variations can in fact cheaply generate a large number of global appearances.
A limited version of this idea was proposed by Yang and Ramanan [1], for human pose dectection. In this paper we apply it to the task of generic object category detection and extend it in several ways. First, we propose a model for the relationship between part appearances more general than the tree of Yang and Ramanan [1], which is more suitable for generic categories. Second, we treat part locations as well as their appearance as latent variables so that training does not need part annotations but only the object bounding boxes. Third, we modify the weakly-supervised learning of Felzenszwalb et al. and Girshick et al. [2], [3] to handle a significantly more complex latent structure.
Our model is evaluated on standard object detection benchmarks and is found to improve over existing approaches, yielding state-of-the-art results for several object categories.

Abstract: DEMO

Abstract: Dense, robust and real-time computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely used algorithm that propagates consistency constraints along several paths across the image. This work presents a real-time system producing reliable disparity estimation results on the new embedded energy efficient GPU devices. Our design runs on a Tegra X1 at 42 frames per second (fps) for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.

Abstract: Depth can complement RGB with useful cues about object volumes and scene layout. However, RGB-D image datasets are still too small for directly training deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in contrast to the massive monomodal RGB datasets. Previous works in RGB-D recognition typically combine two separate networks for RGB and depth data, pretrained with a large RGB dataset and then fine tuned to the respective target RGB and depth datasets. These approaches have several limitations: 1) only use low-level filters learned from RGB data, thus not being able to exploit properly depth-specific patterns, and 2) RGB and depth features are only combined at high-levels but rarely at lower-levels. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages both knowledge acquired from large RGB datasets together with depth-specific cues learned from the limited depth data, obtaining more effective multi-source and multi-modal representations. We propose a multi-modal combination method that selects discriminative combinations of layers from the different source models and target modalities, capturing both high-level properties of the task and intrinsic low-level properties of both modalities.

Abstract: Depth estimation provides essential information to perform autonomous driving and driver assistance. Especially, Monocular Depth Estimation is interesting from a practical point of view, since using a single camera is cheaper than many other options and avoids the need for continuous calibration strategies as required by stereo-vision approaches. State-of-the-art methods for Monocular Depth Estimation are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). A promising line of work consists of introducing additional semantic information about the traffic scene when training CNNs for depth estimation. In practice, this means that the depth data used for CNN training is complemented with images having pixel-wise semantic labels, which usually are difficult to annotate (eg crowded urban images). Moreover, so far it is common practice to assume that the same raw training data is associated with both types of ground truth, ie, depth and semantic labels. The main contribution of this paper is to show that this hard constraint can be circumvented, ie, that we can train CNNs for depth estimation by leveraging the depth and semantic information coming from heterogeneous datasets. In order to illustrate the benefits of our approach, we combine KITTI depth and Cityscapes semantic segmentation datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art results on Monocular Depth Estimation.

Abstract: Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.
In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.
In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.

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.

Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene