Abstract: Feature matching is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision, having multiple applications such as tracking, image classification and retrieval, shape recognition and stereo fusion. In numerous domains, it is useful to represent the local structure of the matching features to increase the matching accuracy or to make the correspondence invariant to certain transformations (affine, homography, etc. . . ). However, encoding this knowledge requires complicating the model by establishing high-order relationships between the model elements, and therefore increasing the complexity of the optimization problem.
The importance of many-to-many matching is sometimes dismissed in the literature. Most methods are restricted to perform one-to-one matching, and are usually validated on synthetic, or non-realistic datasets. In a real challenging environment, with scale, pose and illumination variations of the object of interest, as well as the presence of occlusions, clutter, and noisy observations, many-to-many matching is necessary to achieve satisfactory results. As a consequence, finding the most likely many-to-many correspondence often involves a challenging combinatorial optimization process.
In this work, we design and demonstrate matching algorithms that compute many-to-many correspondences, applied to several challenging problems. Our goal is to make use of high-order representations to improve the expressive power of the matching, at the same time that we make feasible the process of inference or optimization of such models. We effectively use graphical models as our preferred representation because they provide an elegant probabilistic framework to tackle structured prediction problems.
We introduce a matching-based tracking algorithm which performs matching between frames of a video sequence in order to solve the difficult problem of headlight tracking at night-time. We also generalise this algorithm to solve the problem of data association applied to various tracking scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of such approach in real video sequences and we show that our tracking algorithm can be used to improve the accuracy of a headlight classification system.
In the second part of this work, we move from single (point) matching to dense (region) matching and we introduce a new hierarchical image representation. We make use of such model to develop a high-order many-to-many matching between pairs of images. We show that the use of high-order models in comparison to simpler models improves not only the accuracy of the results, but also the convergence speed of the inference algorithm.
Finally, we keep exploiting the idea of region matching to design a fully unsupervised image co-segmentation algorithm that is able to perform competitively with state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our method also overcomes the typical drawbacks of some of the past works, such as avoiding the necessity of variate appearances on the image backgrounds. The region matching in this case is applied to effectively exploit inter-image information. We also extend this work to perform co-segmentation of videos, being the first time that such problem is addressed, as a way to perform video object segmentation

Abstract: Understanding the content of the images is one of the greatest challenges of computer vision. Recognition of objects appearing in images, identifying and interpreting their actions are the main purposes of Image Understanding. This thesis seeks to identify what is present in a picture by categorizing and locating all the objects in the scene.
Images are composed by pixels, and one possibility consists of assigning to each pixel an object category, which is commonly known as semantic segmentation. By incorporating information as a contextual cue, we are able to resolve the ambiguity within categories at the pixel-level. We propose three levels of scale in order to resolve such ambiguity.
Another possibility to represent the objects is the object detection task. In this case, the aim is to recognize and localize the whole object by accurately placing a bounding box around it. We present two new approaches. The first one is focused on improving the object representation of deformable part models with the concept of factorized appearances. The second approach addresses the issue of reducing the computational cost for multi-class recognition. The results given have been validated on several commonly used datasets, reaching international recognition and state-of-the-art within the field

Abstract: Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.
In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.
In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.

Abstract: In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.
In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.
Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.
As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.