Abstract: This paper presents a direct and stochastic technique for real-time estimation of on-board stereo head’s position and orientation. Unlike existing works which rely on feature extraction either in the image domain or in 3D space, our proposed approach directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs’ brightness. The pose parameters are tracked using the particle filtering framework which implicitly enforces the smoothness constraints on the estimated parameters. The proposed technique can be used with a driver assistance applications as well as with augmented reality applications. Extended experiments on urban environments with different road geometries are presented. Comparisons with a 3D data-based approach are presented. Moreover, we provide a performance study aiming at evaluating the accuracy of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Face recognition applications commonly suffer from three main drawbacks: a reduced training set, information lying in high-dimensional subspaces, and the need to incorporate new people to recognize. In the recent literature, the extension of a face classifier in order to include new people in the model has been solved using online feature extraction techniques. The most successful approaches of those are the extensions of the principal component analysis or the linear discriminant analysis. In the current paper, a new online boosting algorithm is introduced: a face recognition method that extends a boosting-based classifier by adding new classes while avoiding the need of retraining the classifier each time a new person joins the system. The classifier is learned using the multitask learning principle where multiple verification tasks are trained together sharing the same feature space. The new classes are added taking advantage of the structure learned previously, being the addition of new classes not computationally demanding. The present proposal has been (experimentally) validated with two different facial data sets by comparing our approach with the current state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that the proposed online boosting algorithm fares better in terms of final accuracy. In addition, the global performance does not decrease drastically even when the number of classes of the base problem is multiplied by eight.

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: An efficient method to overcome adverse effects of occlusion upon object tracking is presented. The method is based on matching paths of objects in time and solves a complex occlusion-caused problem of merging separate segments of the same path.

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of symbol spotting in technical document images applied to scanned and vectorized line drawings. Like any information spotting architecture, our approach has two components. First, symbols are decomposed in primitives which are compactly represented and second a primitive indexing structure aims to efficiently retrieve similar primitives. Primitives are encoded in terms of attributed strings representing closed regions. Similar strings are clustered in a lookup table so that the set median strings act as indexing keys. A voting scheme formulates hypothesis in certain locations of the line drawing image where there is a high presence of regions similar to the queried ones, and therefore, a high probability to find the queried graphical symbol. The proposed approach is illustrated in a framework consisting in spotting furniture symbols in architectural drawings. It has been proved to work even in the presence of noise and distortion introduced by the scanning and raster-to-vector processes.

Abstract: Given a set of graphs, the median graph has been theoretically presented as a useful concept to infer a representative of the set. However, the computation of the median graph is a highly complex task and its practical application has been very limited up to now. In this work we present two major contributions. On one side, and from a theoretical point of view, we show new theoretical properties of the median graph. On the other side, using these new properties, we present a new approximate algorithm based on the genetic search, that improves the computation of the median graph. Finally, we perform a set of experiments on real data, where none of the existing algorithms for the median graph computation could be applied up to now due to their computational complexity. With these results, we show how the concept of the median graph can be used in real applications and leaves the box of the only-theoretical concepts, demonstrating, from a practical point of view, that can be a useful tool to represent a set of graphs.

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel approach to generate augmented video sequences in real-time, involving interactions between virtual and real agents in real scenarios. On the one hand, real agent motion is estimated by means of a multi-object tracking algorithm, which determines real objects' position over the scenario for each time step. On the other hand, virtual agents are provided with behavior models considering their interaction with the environment and with other agents. The resulting framework allows to generate video sequences involving behavior-based virtual agents that react to real agent behavior and has applications in education, simulation, and in the game and movie industries. We show the performance of the proposed approach in an indoor and outdoor scenario simulating human and vehicle agents. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We present a novel approach to generate augmented video sequences in real-time, involving interactions between virtual and real agents in real scenarios. On the one hand, real agent motion is estimated by means of a multi-object tracking algorithm, which determines real objects' position over the scenario for each time step. On the other hand, virtual agents are provided with behavior models considering their interaction with the environment and with other agents. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.