Abstract: At the beginning of the 21th century, traffic accidents have become a major problem not only for developed countries but also for emerging ones. As in other scientific areas in which Artificial Intelligence is becoming a key actor, advanced driver assistance systems, and concretely pedestrian protection systems based on Computer Vision, are becoming a strong topic of research aimed at improving the safety of pedestrians. However, the challenge is of considerable complexity due to the varying appearance of humans (e.g., clothes, size, aspect ratio, shape, etc.), the dynamic nature of on-board systems and the unstructured moving environments that urban scenarios represent. In addition, the required performance is demanding both in terms of computational time and detection rates. In this thesis, instead of focusing on improving specific tasks as it is frequent in the literature, we present a global approach to the problem. Such a global overview starts by the proposal of a generic architecture to be used as a framework both to review the literature and to organize the studied techniques along the thesis. We then focus the research on tasks such as foreground segmentation, object classification and refinement following a general viewpoint and exploring aspects that are not usually analyzed. In order to perform the experiments, we also present a novel pedestrian dataset that consists of three subsets, each one addressed to the evaluation of a different specific task in the system. The results presented in this thesis not only end with a proposal of a pedestrian detection system but also go one step beyond by pointing out new insights, formalizing existing and proposed algorithms, introducing new techniques and evaluating their performance, which we hope will provide new foundations for future research in the area.

Abstract: En este artículo presentamos los resultados de un experimento de categorización de color en el que las muestras se presentaron sobre un fondo multicolor (Mondrian) para simular los efectos del contexto. Los resultados se comparan con los de un experimento previo que, utilizando un paradigma diferente, determinó las fronteras sin tener en cuenta el contexto. El análisis de los resultados muestra que las fronteras obtenidas con el experimento en contexto presentan menos confusión que las obtenidas en el experimento sin contexto.

Abstract: This work develops a new architecture for multiple-target tracking in unconstrained dynamic scenes, which consists of a detection level which feeds a two-stage tracking system. A remarkable characteristic of the system is its ability to track several targets while they group and split, without using 3D information. Thus, special attention is given to the feature-selection and appearance-computation modules, and to those modules involved in tracking through groups. The system aims to work as a stand-alone application in complex and dynamic scenarios. No a-priori knowledge about either the scene or the targets, based on a previous training period, is used. Hence, the scenario is completely unknown beforehand. Successful tracking has been demonstrated in well-known databases of both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Accurate and robust localisations have been yielded during long-term target merging and occlusions.

Abstract: This paper presents a symbol spotting approach for indexing by content a database of line-drawing images. As line-drawings are digital-born documents designed by vectorial softwares, instead of using a pixel-based approach, we present a spotting method based on vector primitives. Graphical symbols are represented by a set of vectorial primitives which are described by an off-the-shelf shape descriptor. A relational indexing strategy aims to retrieve symbol locations into the target documents by using a combined numerical-relational description of 2D structures. The zones which are likely to contain the queried symbol are validated by a Hough-like voting scheme. In addition, a performance evaluation framework for symbol spotting in graphical documents is proposed. The presented methodology has been evaluated with a benchmarking set of architectural documents achieving good performance results.

Abstract: The gamut mapping algorithm is one of the most promising methods to achieve computational color constancy. However, so far, gamut mapping algorithms are restricted to the use of pixel values to estimate the illuminant. Therefore, in this paper, gamut mapping is extended to incorporate the statistical nature of images. It is analytically shown that the proposed gamut mapping framework is able to include any linear filter output. The main focus is on the local n-jet describing the derivative structure of an image. It is shown that derivatives have the advantage over pixel values to be invariant to disturbing effects (i.e. deviations of the diagonal model) such as saturated colors and diffuse light. Further, as the n-jet based gamut mapping has the ability to use more information than pixel values alone, the combination of these algorithms are more stable than the regular gamut mapping algorithm. Different methods of combining are proposed. Based on theoretical and experimental results conducted on large scale data sets of hyperspectral, laboratory and realworld scenes, it can be derived that (1) in case of deviations of the diagonal model, the derivative-based approach outperforms the pixel-based gamut mapping, (2) state-of-the-art algorithms are outperformed by the n-jet based gamut mapping, (3) the combination of the different n-jet based gamut

Abstract: Traffic sign classification represents a classical application of multi-object recognition processing in uncontrolled adverse environments. Lack of visibility, illumination changes, and partial occlusions are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel system for multi-class classification of traffic signs based on error correcting output codes (ECOC). ECOC is based on an ensemble of binary classifiers that are trained on bi-partition of classes. We classify a wide set of traffic signs types using robust error correcting codings. Moreover, we introduce the novel β-correction decoding strategy that outperforms the state-of-the-art decoding techniques, classifying a high number of classes with great success.