Abstract: This paper presents a bag of feature based method for visual object recognition. Our contribution is focussed on the selection of the best feature descriptor. It is implemented by using a novel multi-table reinforcement learning method that selects among five of classical descriptors (i.e., Spin, SIFT, SURF, C-SIFT and PHOW) the one that best describes each image. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing the improvements achieved with the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study between two road approximation techniques—planar surfaces—from stereo vision data. The first approach is carried out in the v-disparity space and is based on a voting scheme, the Hough transform. The second one consists in computing the best fitting plane for the whole 3D road data points, directly in the Euclidean space, by using least squares fitting. The comparative study is initially performed over a set of different synthetic surfaces
(e.g., plane, quadratic surface, cubic surface) digitized by a virtual stereo head; then real data obtained with a commercial stereo head are used. The comparative study is intended to be used as a criterion for fining the best technique according to the road geometry. Additionally, it highlights common problems driven from a wrong assumption about the scene’s prior knowledge.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.

Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.

Abstract: This paper presents a computational model to recover the most likely interpretation of the 3D scene structure from a planar image, where some objects may occlude others. The estimated scene interpretation is obtained by integrating some global and local cues and provides both the complete disoccluded objects that form the scene and their ordering according to depth. Our method first computes several distal scenes which are compatible with the proximal planar image. To compute these different hypothesized scenes, we propose a perceptually inspired object disocclusion method, which works by minimizing the Euler's elastica as well as by incorporating the relatability of partially occluded contours and the convexity of the disoccluded objects. Then, to estimate the preferred scene we rely on a Bayesian model and define probabilities taking into account the global complexity of the objects in the hypothesized scenes as well as the effort of bringing these objects in their relative position in the planar image, which is also measured by an Euler's elastica-based quantity. The model is illustrated with numerical experiments on, both, synthetic and real images showing the ability of our model to reconstruct the occluded objects and the preferred perceptual order among them. We also present results on images of the Berkeley dataset with provided figure-ground ground-truth labeling.

Abstract: This paper presents a domain adaptation strategy to efficiently train network architectures for estimating the relative camera pose in multi-view scenarios. The network architectures are fed by a pair of simultaneously acquired images, hence in order to improve the accuracy of the solutions, and due to the lack of large datasets with pairs of overlapped images, a domain adaptation strategy is proposed. The domain adaptation strategy consists on transferring the knowledge learned from synthetic images to real-world scenarios. For this, the networks are firstly trained using pairs of synthetic images, which are captured at the same time by a pair of cameras in a virtual environment; and then, the learned weights of the networks are transferred to the real-world case, where the networks are retrained with a few real images. Different virtual 3D scenarios are generated to evaluate the relationship between the accuracy on the result and the similarity between virtual and real scenarios—similarity on both geometry of the objects contained in the scene as well as relative pose between camera and objects in the scene. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing that the accuracy of all the evaluated networks for estimating the camera pose improves when the proposed domain adaptation strategy is used, highlighting the importance on the similarity between virtual-real scenarios.

Abstract: This paper presents a first approach to build colour and structural descriptors for information retrieval on a people database. Queries are formulated in terms of their appearance that allows to seek people wearing specific clothes of a given colour name or texture. Descriptors are automatically computed by following three essential steps. A colour naming labelling from pixel properties. A region seg- mentation step based on colour properties of pixels combined with edge information. And a high level step that models the region arrangements in order to build clothes structure. Results are tested on large set of images from real scenes taken at the entrance desk of a building.

Abstract: This paper presents a full pipeline to classify sample sets of corn kernels. The proposed approach follows a segmentation-classification scheme. The image segmentation is performed through a well known deep learningbased approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, while the classification is performed hrough a novel-lightweight network specially designed for this task—good corn kernel, defective corn kernel and impurity categories are considered. As a second contribution, a carefully annotated multitouching corn kernel dataset has been generated. This dataset has been used for training the segmentation and the classification modules. Quantitative evaluations have been
performed and comparisons with other approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed pipeline.