Alejandro Gonzalez Alzate, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, & Jaume Amores. (2017). On-Board Object Detection: Multicue, Multimodal, and Multiview Random Forest of Local Experts. Cyber - IEEE Transactions on cybernetics, 47(11), 3980–3990.
Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, object detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities, and a strong multiview (MV) classifier that accounts for different object views and poses. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multicue, multimodality, and strong MV classifier) affect accuracy both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component, we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition light detection and ranging, a type of modality that is starting to receive increasing attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the accuracy, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient.
Keywords: Multicue; multimodal; multiview; object detection
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Sounak Dey, Palaiahnakote Shivakumara, K.S. Raghunanda, Umapada Pal, Tong Lu, G. Hemantha Kumar, et al. (2017). Script independent approach for multi-oriented text detection in scene image. NEUCOM - Neurocomputing, 242, 96–112.
Abstract: Developing a text detection method which is invariant to scripts in natural scene images is a challeng- ing task due to different geometrical structures of various scripts. Besides, multi-oriented of text lines in natural scene images make the problem more challenging. This paper proposes to explore ring radius transform (RRT) for text detection in multi-oriented and multi-script environments. The method finds component regions based on convex hull to generate radius matrices using RRT. It is a fact that RRT pro- vides low radius values for the pixels that are near to edges, constant radius values for the pixels that represent stroke width, and high radius values that represent holes created in background and convex hull because of the regular structures of text components. We apply k -means clustering on the radius matrices to group such spatially coherent regions into individual clusters. Then the proposed method studies the radius values of such cluster components that are close to the centroid and far from the cen- troid to detect text components. Furthermore, we have developed a Bangla dataset (named as ISI-UM dataset) and propose a semi-automatic system for generating its ground truth for text detection of arbi- trary orientations, which can be used by the researchers for text detection and recognition in the future. The ground truth will be released to public. Experimental results on our ISI-UM data and other standard datasets, namely, ICDAR 2013 scene, SVT and MSRA data, show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of multi-lingual and multi-oriented text detection ability.
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Anjan Dutta, Pau Riba, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2017). Pyramidal Stochastic Graphlet Embedding for Document Pattern Classification. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 33–38).
Abstract: Document pattern classification methods using graphs have received a lot of attention because of its robust representation paradigm and rich theoretical background. However, the way of preserving and the process for delineating documents with graphs introduce noise in the rendition of underlying data, which creates instability in the graph representation. To deal with such unreliability in representation, in this paper, we propose Pyramidal Stochastic Graphlet Embedding (PSGE).
Given a graph representing a document pattern, our method first computes a graph pyramid by successively reducing the base graph. Once the graph pyramid is computed, we apply Stochastic Graphlet Embedding (SGE) for each level of the pyramid and combine their embedded representation to obtain a global delineation of the original graph. The consideration of pyramid of graphs rather than just a base graph extends the representational power of the graph embedding, which reduces the instability caused due to noise and distortion. When plugged with support
vector machine, our proposed PSGE has outperformed the state-of-the-art results in recognition of handwritten words as well as graphical symbols
Keywords: graph embedding; hierarchical graph representation; graph clustering; stochastic graphlet embedding; graph classification
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Cristina Sanchez Montes, F. Javier Sanchez, Cristina Rodriguez de Miguel, Henry Cordova, Jorge Bernal, Maria Lopez Ceron, et al. (2017). Histological Prediction Of Colonic Polyps By Computer Vision. Preliminary Results. In 25th United European Gastroenterology Week.
Abstract: during colonoscopy, clinicians perform visual inspection of the polyps to predict histology. Kudo’s pit pattern classification is one of the most commonly used for optical diagnosis. These surface patterns present a contrast with respect to their neighboring regions and they can be considered as bright regions in the image that can attract the attention of computational methods.
Keywords: polyps; histology; computer vision
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Lluis Gomez, Y. Patel, Marçal Rusiñol, C.V. Jawahar, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2017). Self‐supervised learning of visual features through embedding images into text topic spaces. In 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: End-to-end training from scratch of current deep architectures for new computer vision problems would require Imagenet-scale datasets, and this is not always possible. In this paper we present a method that is able to take advantage of freely available multi-modal content to train computer vision algorithms without human supervision. We put forward the idea of performing self-supervised learning of visual features by mining a large scale corpus of multi-modal (text and image) documents. We show that discriminative visual features can be learnt efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. For this we leverage the hidden semantic structures discovered in the text corpus with a well-known topic modeling technique. Our experiments demonstrate state of the art performance in image classification, object detection, and multi-modal retrieval compared to recent self-supervised or natural-supervised approaches.
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Rada Deeb, Damien Muselet, Mathieu Hebert, Alain Tremeau, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2017). 3D color charts for camera spectral sensitivity estimation. In 28th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Estimating spectral data such as camera sensor responses or illuminant spectral power distribution from raw RGB camera outputs is crucial in many computer vision applications.
Usually, 2D color charts with various patches of known spectral reflectance are
used as reference for such purpose. Deducing n-D spectral data (n»3) from 3D RGB inputs is an ill-posed problem that requires a high number of inputs. Unfortunately, most of the natural color surfaces have spectral reflectances that are well described by low-dimensional linear models, i.e. each spectral reflectance can be approximated by a weighted sum of the others. It has been shown that adding patches to color charts does not help in practice, because the information they add is redundant with the information provided by the first set of patches. In this paper, we propose to use spectral data of
higher dimensionality by using 3D color charts that create inter-reflections between the surfaces. These inter-reflections produce multiplications between natural spectral curves and so provide non-linear spectral curves. We show that such data provide enough information for accurate spectral data estimation.
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Ivet Rafegas, Javier Vazquez, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Susana Alvarez. (2017). Enhancing spatio-chromatic representation with more-than-three color coding for image description. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 34(5), 827–837.
Abstract: Extraction of spatio-chromatic features from color images is usually performed independently on each color channel. Usual 3D color spaces, such as RGB, present a high inter-channel correlation for natural images. This correlation can be reduced using color-opponent representations, but the spatial structure of regions with small color differences is not fully captured in two generic Red-Green and Blue-Yellow channels. To overcome these problems, we propose a new color coding that is adapted to the specific content of each image. Our proposal is based on two steps: (a) setting the number of channels to the number of distinctive colors we find in each image (avoiding the problem of channel correlation), and (b) building a channel representation that maximizes contrast differences within each color channel (avoiding the problem of low local contrast). We call this approach more-than-three color coding (MTT) to enhance the fact that the number of channels is adapted to the image content. The higher color complexity an image has, the more channels can be used to represent it. Here we select distinctive colors as the most predominant in the image, which we call color pivots, and we build the new color coding using these color pivots as a basis. To evaluate the proposed approach we measure its efficiency in an image categorization task. We show how a generic descriptor improves its performance at the description level when applied on the MTT coding.
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Onur Ferhat. (2017). Analysis of Head-Pose Invariant, Natural Light Gaze Estimation Methods (Fernando Vilariño, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Eye tracker devices have traditionally been only used inside laboratories, requiring trained professionals and elaborate setup mechanisms. However, in the recent years the scientific work on easier–to–use eye trackers which require no special hardware—other than the omnipresent front facing cameras in computers, tablets, and mobiles—is aiming at making this technology common–place. These types of trackers have several extra challenges that make the problem harder, such as low resolution images provided by a regular webcam, the changing ambient lighting conditions, personal appearance differences, changes in head pose, and so on. Recent research in the field has focused on all these challenges in order to provide better gaze estimation performances in a real world setup.
In this work, we aim at tackling the gaze tracking problem in a single camera setup. We first analyze all the previous work in the field, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each tried idea. We start our work on the gaze tracker with an appearance–based gaze estimation method, which is the simplest idea that creates a direct mapping between a rectangular image patch extracted around the eye in a camera image, and the gaze point (or gaze direction). Here, we do an extensive analysis of the factors that affect the performance of this tracker in several experimental setups, in order to address these problems in future works. In the second part of our work, we propose a feature–based gaze estimation method, which encodes the eye region image into a compact representation. We argue that this type of representation is better suited to dealing with head pose and lighting condition changes, as it both reduces the dimensionality of the input (i.e. eye image) and breaks the direct connection between image pixel intensities and the gaze estimation. Lastly, we use a face alignment algorithm to have robust face pose estimation, using a 3D model customized to the subject using the tracker. We combine this with a convolutional neural network trained on a large dataset of images to build a face pose invariant gaze tracker.
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Pau Rodriguez, Guillem Cucurull, Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2017). Age and gender recognition in the wild with deep attention. PR - Pattern Recognition, 72, 563–571.
Abstract: Face analysis in images in the wild still pose a challenge for automatic age and gender recognition tasks, mainly due to their high variability in resolution, deformation, and occlusion. Although the performance has highly increased thanks to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), it is still far from optimal when compared to other image recognition tasks, mainly because of the high sensitiveness of CNNs to facial variations. In this paper, inspired by biology and the recent success of attention mechanisms on visual question answering and fine-grained recognition, we propose a novel feedforward attention mechanism that is able to discover the most informative and reliable parts of a given face for improving age and gender classification. In particular, given a downsampled facial image, the proposed model is trained based on a novel end-to-end learning framework to extract the most discriminative patches from the original high-resolution image. Experimental validation on the standard Adience, Images of Groups, and MORPH II benchmarks show that including attention mechanisms enhances the performance of CNNs in terms of robustness and accuracy.
Keywords: Age recognition; Gender recognition; Deep neural networks; Attention mechanisms
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Laura Lopez-Fuentes, Claudio Rossi, & Harald Skinnemoen. (2017). River segmentation for flood monitoring. In Data Science for Emergency Management at Big Data 2017.
Abstract: Floods are major natural disasters which cause deaths and material damages every year. Monitoring these events is crucial in order to reduce both the affected people and the economic losses. In this work we train and test three different Deep Learning segmentation algorithms to estimate the water area from river images, and compare their performances. We discuss the implementation of a novel data chain aimed to monitor river water levels by automatically process data collected from surveillance cameras, and to give alerts in case of high increases of the water level or flooding. We also create and openly publish the first image dataset for river water segmentation.
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Luis Herranz, Shuqiang Jiang, & Ruihan Xu. (2017). Modeling Restaurant Context for Food Recognition. TMM - IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 19(2), 430–440.
Abstract: Food photos are widely used in food logs for diet monitoring and in social networks to share social and gastronomic experiences. A large number of these images are taken in restaurants. Dish recognition in general is very challenging, due to different cuisines, cooking styles, and the intrinsic difficulty of modeling food from its visual appearance. However, contextual knowledge can be crucial to improve recognition in such scenario. In particular, geocontext has been widely exploited for outdoor landmark recognition. Similarly, we exploit knowledge about menus and location of restaurants and test images. We first adapt a framework based on discarding unlikely categories located far from the test image. Then, we reformulate the problem using a probabilistic model connecting dishes, restaurants, and locations. We apply that model in three different tasks: dish recognition, restaurant recognition, and location refinement. Experiments on six datasets show that by integrating multiple evidences (visual, location, and external knowledge) our system can boost the performance in all tasks.
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2017). Error-tolerant coarse-to-fine matching model for hierarchical graphs. In Pasquale Foggia, Cheng-Lin Liu, & Mario Vento (Eds.), 11th IAPR-TC-15 International Workshop on Graph-Based Representations in Pattern Recognition (Vol. 10310, pp. 107–117). Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: Graph-based representations are effective tools to capture structural information from visual elements. However, retrieving a query graph from a large database of graphs implies a high computational complexity. Moreover, these representations are very sensitive to noise or small changes. In this work, a novel hierarchical graph representation is designed. Using graph clustering techniques adapted from graph-based social media analysis, we propose to generate a hierarchy able to deal with different levels of abstraction while keeping information about the topology. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching method is defined. These approaches are validated using real scenarios such as classification of colour images and handwritten word spotting.
Keywords: Graph matching; Hierarchical graph; Graph-based representation; Coarse-to-fine matching
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Pau Riba, Anjan Dutta, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2017). Graph-based deep learning for graphics classification. In 12th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (pp. 29–30).
Abstract: Graph-based representations are a common way to deal with graphics recognition problems. However, previous works were mainly focused on developing learning-free techniques. The success of deep learning frameworks have proved that learning is a powerful tool to solve many problems, however it is not straightforward to extend these methodologies to non euclidean data such as graphs. On the other hand, graphs are a good representational structure for graphical entities. In this work, we present some deep learning techniques that have been proposed in the literature for graph-based representations and
we show how they can be used in graphics recognition problems
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Pau Riba, Josep Llados, Alicia Fornes, & Anjan Dutta. (2017). Large-scale graph indexing using binary embeddings of node contexts for information spotting in document image databases. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 87, 203–211.
Abstract: Graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their representational power in front of classical appearance-based representations. However, retrieving a query graph from a large dataset of graphs implies a high computational complexity. The most important property for a large-scale retrieval is the search time complexity to be sub-linear in the number of database examples. With this aim, in this paper we propose a graph indexation formalism applied to visual retrieval. A binary embedding is defined as hashing keys for graph nodes. Given a database of labeled graphs, graph nodes are complemented with vectors of attributes representing their local context. Then, each attribute vector is converted to a binary code applying a binary-valued hash function. Therefore, graph retrieval is formulated in terms of finding target graphs in the database whose nodes have a small Hamming distance from the query nodes, easily computed with bitwise logical operators. As an application example, we validate the performance of the proposed methods in different real scenarios such as handwritten word spotting in images of historical documents or symbol spotting in architectural floor plans.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Sounak Dey, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2017). Handwriting Recognition by Attribute embedding and Recurrent Neural Networks. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1038–1043).
Abstract: Handwriting recognition consists in obtaining the transcription of a text image. Recent word spotting methods based on attribute embedding have shown good performance when recognizing words. However, they are holistic methods in the sense that they recognize the word as a whole (i.e. they find the closest word in the lexicon to the word image). Consequently,
these kinds of approaches are not able to deal with out of vocabulary words, which are common in historical manuscripts. Also, they cannot be extended to recognize text lines. In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose a handwriting recognition method that adapts the attribute embedding to sequence learning. Concretely, the method learns the attribute embedding of patches of word images with a convolutional neural network. Then, these embeddings are presented as a sequence to a recurrent neural network that produces the transcription. We obtain promising results even without the use of any kind of dictionary or language model
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