Abstract: Issues such as content identification, document and image security, audience measurement, ownership and copyright among others can be settled by the use of digital watermarking. Many recent video watermarking methods show drops in visual quality of the sequences. The present work addresses the aforementioned issue by introducing a robust and imperceptible non-blind color video frame watermarking algorithm. The method divides frames into moving and non-moving parts. The non-moving part of each color channel is processed separately using a block-based watermarking scheme. Blocks with an entropy lower than the average entropy of all blocks are subject to a further process for embedding the watermark image. Finally a watermarked frame is generated by adding moving parts to it. Several signal processing attacks are applied to each watermarked frame in order to perform experiments and are compared with some recent algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust against common signal processing attacks.

Abstract: Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.
Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.
In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.

Abstract: Many scene text understanding methods approach the endtoend recognition problem from a word-spotting perspective and take huge benet from using small per-image lexicons. Such customized lexicons are normally assumed as given and their source is rarely discussed.
In this paper we propose a method that generates contextualized lexicons
for scene images using only visual information. For this, we exploit
the correlation between visual and textual information in a dataset consisting
of images and textual content associated with them. Using the topic modeling framework to discover a set of latent topics in such a dataset allows us to re-rank a xed dictionary in a way that prioritizes the words that are more likely to appear in a given image. Moreover, we train a CNN that is able to reproduce those word rankings but using only the image raw pixels as input. We demonstrate that the quality of the automatically obtained custom lexicons is superior to a generic frequency-based baseline.

Abstract: Nonverbal communication is an intrinsic part in daily face-to-face meetings. A frequently observed behavior during social interactions is mirroring, in which one person tends to mimic the attitude of the counterpart. This paper shows that a computer vision system could be used to predict the perception of competence in dyadic interactions through the automatic detection of mirroring
events. To prove our hypothesis, we developed: (1) A social assistant for mirroring detection, using a wearable device which includes a video camera and (2) an automatic classifier for the perception of competence, using the number of nodding gestures and mirroring events as predictors. For our study, we used a mixed-method approach in an experimental design where 48 participants acting as customers interacted with a confederated psychologist. We found that the number of nods or mirroring events has a significant influence on the perception of competence. Our results suggest that: (1) Customer mirroring is a better predictor than psychologist mirroring; (2) the number of psychologist’s nods is a better predictor than the number of customer’s nods; (3) except for the psychologist mirroring, the computer vision algorithm we used worked about equally well whether it was acquiring images from wearable smartglasses or fixed cameras.

Abstract: Part detection is an important aspect of object recognition. Most approaches apply object proposals to generate hundreds of possible part bounding box candidates which are then evaluated by part classifiers. Recently several methods have investigated directly regressing to a limited set of bounding boxes from deep neural network representation. However, for object parts such methods may be unfeasible due to their relatively small size with respect to the image. We propose a hierarchical method for object and part detection. In a single network we first detect the object and then regress to part location proposals based only on the feature representation inside the object. Experiments show that our hierarchical approach outperforms a network which directly regresses the part locations. We also show that our approach obtains part detection accuracy comparable or better than state-of-the-art on the CUB-200 bird and Fashionista clothing item datasets with only a fraction of the number of part proposals.

Abstract: Photorealistic virtual environments are crucial for developing and testing automated driving systems in a safe way during trials. As commercially available simulators are expensive and bulky, this paper presents a low-cost, extendable, and easy-to-use (LEE) virtual environment with the aim to highlight its utility for level 3 driving automation. In particular, an experiment is performed using the presented simulator to explore the influence of different variables regarding control transfer of the car after the system was driving autonomously in a highway scenario. The results show that the speed of the car at the time when the system needs to transfer the control to the human driver is critical.

Abstract: Poster