Abstract: The increase in the use of parallel distributed architectures in order to solve large-scale scientific problems has generated the need for performance prediction for both deterministic applications and non-deterministic applications. In particular, the performance prediction of data dependent programs is an extremely challenging problem because for a specific issue the input datasets may cause different execution times. Generally, a parallel application is characterized as a collection of tasks and their interrelations. If the application is time-critical it is not enough to work with only one value per task, and consequently knowledge of the distribution of task execution times is crucial. The development of a new prediction methodology to estimate the performance of data-dependent parallel applications is the primary target of this study. This approach makes it possible to evaluate the parallel performance of an application without the need of implementation. A real data-dependent arterial structure detection application model is used to apply the methodology proposed. The predicted times obtained using the new methodology for genuine datasets are compared with predicted times that arise from using only one execution value per task. Finally, the experimental study shows that the new methodology generates more precise predictions.

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.
In this thesis we tackle the problem of recognizing and describing meaningful
events in video sequences from different domains, and communicating the resulting
knowledge to end-users by means of advanced interfaces for human–computer interaction. This problem is addressed by designing the high-level modules of a cognitive
vision framework exploiting ontological knowledge. Ontologies allow us to define the
relevant concepts in a domain and the relationships among them; we prove that the
use of ontologies to organize, centralize, link, and reuse different types of knowledge
is a key factor in the materialization of our objectives.
The proposed framework contributes to: (i) automatically learn the characteristics
of different scenarios in a domain; (ii) reason about uncertain, incomplete, or vague
information from visual –camera’s– or linguistic –end-user’s– inputs; (iii) derive plausible interpretations of complex events from basic spatiotemporal developments; (iv)
facilitate natural interfaces that adapt to the needs of end-users, and allow them to
communicate efficiently with the system at different levels of interaction; and finally,
(v) find mechanisms to guide modeling processes, maintain and extend the resulting
models, and to exploit multimodal resources synergically to enhance the former tasks.
We describe a holistic methodology to achieve these goals. First, the use of prior
taxonomical knowledge is proved useful to guide MAP-MRF inference processes in
the automatic identification of semantic regions, with independence of a particular scenario. Towards the recognition of complex video events, we combine fuzzy
metric-temporal reasoning with SGTs, thus assessing high-level interpretations from
spatiotemporal data. Here, ontological resources like T–Boxes, onomasticons, or factual databases become useful to derive video indexing and retrieval capabilities, and
also to forward highlighted content to smart user interfaces. There, we explore the
application of ontologies to discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic principles, or scene augmentation techniques towards advanced communication by means of natural language dialogs and synthetic visualizations. Ontologies become fundamental to
coordinate, adapt, and reuse the different modules in the system.
The suitability of our ontological framework is demonstrated by a series of applications that especially benefit the field of smart video surveillance, viz. automatic generation of linguistic reports about the content of video sequences in multiple natural
languages; content-based filtering and summarization of these reports; dialogue-based
interfaces to query and browse video contents; automatic learning of semantic regions
in a scenario; and tools to evaluate the performance of components and models in the
system, via simulation and augmented reality.

Abstract: The influence of class orderings in the evaluation of incremental learning has received very little attention. In this paper, we investigate the impact of class orderings for incrementally learned classifiers. We propose a method to compute various orderings for a dataset. The orderings are derived by simulated annealing optimization from the confusion matrix and reflect different incremental learning scenarios, including maximally and minimally confusing tasks. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art incremental learning methods on the proposed orderings. Results show that orderings can have a significant impact on performance and the ranking of the methods.

Abstract: The interest in action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last years. In this paper, we present a survey on current deep learning methodologies for action and gesture recognition in image sequences. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning
for approaching both tasks. We review the details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions.
We summarize and discuss the main works proposed so far with particular interest on how they treat the temporal dimension of data, discussing their main features and identify opportunities and challenges for future research.

Abstract: The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modeling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness, orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images, and a natural bacteria-centered coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimizing an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modeling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at this http URL

Abstract: The issue of ethnic bias has proven to affect the performance of face recognition in previous works, while it still remains to be vacant in face anti-spoofing. Therefore, in order to study the ethnic bias for face anti-spoofing, we introduce the largest CASIA-SURF Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing (CeFA) dataset, covering 3 ethnicities, 3 modalities, 1,607 subjects, and 2D plus 3D attack types. Five protocols are introduced to measure the affect under varied evaluation conditions, such as cross-ethnicity, unknown spoofs or both of them. As our knowledge, CASIA-SURF CeFA is the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels in current released datasets. Then, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion method as a strong baseline to alleviate the ethnic bias, which employs a partially shared fusion strategy to learn complementary information from multiple modalities. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability for other existing datasets, i.e., CASIA-SURF, OULU-NPU and SiW datasets. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/face-anti-spoofing/welcome/challengecvpr2020?authuser=0.

Abstract: The log-polar space variant representation, motivated by biological vision, has been widely studied in the literature. Its data reduction and invariance properties made it useful in many vision applications. However, due to its nature, it fails in preserving features in the periphery. In the current work, as an attempt to overcome this problem, we propose a novel space-variant representation. It is evaluated and proved to be better than the log-polar representation in preserving the peripheral information, crucial for on-board mobile vision applications. The evaluation is performed by comparing log-polar and the proposed representation once they are used for estimating dense optical flow.

Abstract: The main interest of this thesis focuses on computational methodologies able to
reduce the degree of complexity of learning algorithms and its application to physical
activity recognition.
Random Projections will be used to reduce the computational complexity in Multiple Classifier Systems. A new boosting algorithm and a new one-class classification
methodology have been developed. In both cases, random projections are used for
reducing the dimensionality of the problem and for generating diversity, exploiting in
this way the benefits that ensembles of classifiers provide in terms of performances
and stability. Moreover, the new one-class classification methodology, based on an ensemble strategy able to approximate a multidimensional convex-hull, has been proved
to over-perform state-of-the-art one-class classification methodologies.
The practical focus of the thesis is towards Physical Activity Recognition. A new
hardware platform for wearable computing application has been developed and used
for collecting data of activities of daily living allowing to study the optimal features
set able to successful classify activities.
Based on the classification methodologies developed and the study conducted on
physical activity classification, a machine learning architecture capable to provide a
continuous authentication mechanism for mobile-devices users has been worked out,
as last part of the thesis. The system, based on a personalized classifier, states on
the analysis of the characteristic gait patterns typical of each individual ensuring an
unobtrusive and continuous authentication mechanism