Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2016). Multi-face tracking by extended bag-of-tracklets in egocentric photo-streams. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 146–156.
Abstract: Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
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Hugo Jair Escalante, Victor Ponce, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Alicia Morales-Reyes, & Jose Martinez-Carranza. (2017). Evolving weighting schemes for the Bag of Visual Words. Neural Computing and Applications - Neural Computing and Applications, 28(5), 925–939.
Abstract: The Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) is an established representation in computer vision. Taking inspiration from text mining, this representation has proved
to be very effective in many domains. However, in most cases, standard term-weighting schemes are adopted (e.g.,term-frequency or TF-IDF). It remains open the question of whether alternative weighting schemes could boost the
performance of methods based on BoVW. More importantly, it is unknown whether it is possible to automatically learn and determine effective weighting schemes from
scratch. This paper brings some light into both of these unknowns. On the one hand, we report an evaluation of the most common weighting schemes used in text mining, but rarely used in computer vision tasks. Besides, we propose an evolutionary algorithm capable of automatically learning weighting schemes for computer vision problems. We report empirical results of an extensive study in several computer vision problems. Results show the usefulness of the proposed method.
Keywords: Bag of Visual Words; Bag of features; Genetic programming; Term-weighting schemes; Computer vision
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Onur Ferhat, & Fernando Vilariño. (2016). Low Cost Eye Tracking: The Current Panorama. CIN - Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, , Article ID 8680541.
Abstract: Despite the availability of accurate, commercial gaze tracker devices working with infrared (IR) technology, visible light gaze tracking constitutes an interesting alternative by allowing scalability and removing hardware requirements. Over the last years, this field has seen examples of research showing performance comparable to the IR alternatives. In this work, we survey the previous work on remote, visible light gaze trackers and analyze the explored techniques from various perspectives such as calibration strategies, head pose invariance, and gaze estimation techniques. We also provide information on related aspects of research such as public datasets to test against, open source projects to build upon, and gaze tracking services to directly use in applications. With all this information, we aim to provide the contemporary and future researchers with a map detailing previously explored ideas and the required tools.
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M. Oliver, G. Haro, Mariella Dimiccoli, B. Mazin, & C. Ballester. (2016). A Computational Model for Amodal Completion. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 56(3), 511–534.
Abstract: This paper presents a computational model to recover the most likely interpretation
of the 3D scene structure from a planar image, where some objects may occlude others. The estimated scene interpretation is obtained by integrating some global and local cues and provides both the complete disoccluded objects that form the scene and their ordering according to depth.
Our method first computes several distal scenes which are compatible with the proximal planar image. To compute these different hypothesized scenes, we propose a perceptually inspired object disocclusion method, which works by minimizing the Euler's elastica as well as by incorporating the relatability of partially occluded contours and the convexity of the disoccluded objects. Then, to estimate the preferred scene we rely on a Bayesian model and define probabilities taking into account the global complexity of the objects in the hypothesized scenes as well as the effort of bringing these objects in their relative position in the planar image, which is also measured by an Euler's elastica-based quantity. The model is illustrated with numerical experiments on, both, synthetic and real images showing the ability of our model to reconstruct the occluded objects and the preferred perceptual order among them. We also present results on images of the Berkeley dataset with provided figure-ground ground-truth labeling.
Keywords: Perception; visual completion; disocclusion; Bayesian model;relatability; Euler elastica
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David Sanchez-Mendoza, David Masip, & Agata Lapedriza. (2015). Emotion recognition from mid-level features. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 67(Part 1), 66–74.
Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.
Keywords: Facial expression; Emotion recognition; Action units; Computer vision
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C. Alejandro Parraga, & Arash Akbarinia. (2016). NICE: A Computational Solution to Close the Gap from Colour Perception to Colour Categorization. Plos - PLoS One, 11(3), e0149538.
Abstract: The segmentation of visible electromagnetic radiation into chromatic categories by the human visual system has been extensively studied from a perceptual point of view, resulting in several colour appearance models. However, there is currently a void when it comes to relate these results to the physiological mechanisms that are known to shape the pre-cortical and cortical visual pathway. This work intends to begin to fill this void by proposing a new physiologically plausible model of colour categorization based on Neural Isoresponsive Colour Ellipsoids (NICE) in the cone-contrast space defined by the main directions of the visual signals entering the visual cortex. The model was adjusted to fit psychophysical measures that concentrate on the categorical boundaries and are consistent with the ellipsoidal isoresponse surfaces of visual cortical neurons. By revealing the shape of such categorical colour regions, our measures allow for a more precise and parsimonious description, connecting well-known early visual processing mechanisms to the less understood phenomenon of colour categorization. To test the feasibility of our method we applied it to exemplary images and a popular ground-truth chart obtaining labelling results that are better than those of current state-of-the-art algorithms.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2016). On the completeness of feature-driven maximally stable extremal regions. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 74, 9–16.
Abstract: By definition, local image features provide a compact representation of the image in which most of the image information is preserved. This capability offered by local features has been overlooked, despite being relevant in many application scenarios. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the performance of feature-driven Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) in terms of the coverage of informative image parts (completeness). This type of features results from an MSER extraction on saliency maps in which features related to objects boundaries or even symmetry axes are highlighted. These maps are intended to be suitable domains for MSER detection, allowing this detector to provide a better coverage of informative image parts. Our experimental results, which were based on a large-scale evaluation, show that feature-driven MSER have relatively high completeness values and provide more complete sets than a traditional MSER detection even when sets of similar cardinality are considered.
Keywords: Local features; Completeness; Maximally Stable Extremal Regions
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Eugenio Alcala, Laura Sellart, Vicenc Puig, Joseba Quevedo, Jordi Saludes, David Vazquez, et al. (2016). Comparison of two non-linear model-based control strategies for autonomous vehicles. In 24th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (pp. 846–851).
Abstract: This paper presents the comparison of two nonlinear model-based control strategies for autonomous cars. A control oriented model of vehicle based on a bicycle model is used. The two control strategies use a model reference approach. Using this approach, the error dynamics model is developed. Both controllers receive as input the longitudinal, lateral and orientation errors generating as control outputs the steering angle and the velocity of the vehicle. The first control approach is based on a non-linear control law that is designed by means of the Lyapunov direct approach. The second approach is based on a sliding mode-control that defines a set of sliding surfaces over which the error trajectories will converge. The main advantage of the sliding-control technique is the robustness against non-linearities and parametric uncertainties in the model. However, the main drawback of first order sliding mode is the chattering, so it has been implemented a high order sliding mode control. To test and compare the proposed control strategies, different path following scenarios are used in simulation.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; Control
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Joan Mas, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2016). An Interactive Transcription System of Census Records using Word-Spotting based Information Transfer. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 54–59).
Abstract: This paper presents a system to assist in the transcription of historical handwritten census records in a crowdsourcing platform. Census records have a tabular structured layout. They consist in a sequence of rows with information of homes ordered by street address. For each household snippet in the page, the list of family members is reported. The censuses are recorded in intervals of a few years and the information of individuals in each household is quite stable from a point in time to the next one. This redundancy is used to assist the transcriber, so the redundant information is transferred from the census already transcribed to the next one. Household records are aligned from one year to the next one using the knowledge of the ordering by street address. Given an already transcribed census, a query by string word spotting is applied. Thus, names from the census in time t are used as queries in the corresponding home record in time t+1. Since the search is constrained, the obtained precision-recall values are very high, with an important reduction in the transcription time. The proposed system has been tested in a real citizen-science experience where non expert users transcribe the census data of their home town.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Alicia Fornes, Jordi Cucurull, & Josep Llados. (2016). Election Tally Sheets Processing System. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 364–368).
Abstract: In paper based elections, manual tallies at polling station level produce myriads of documents. These documents share a common form-like structure and a reduced vocabulary worldwide. On the other hand, each tally sheet is filled by a different writer and on different countries, different scripts are used. We present a complete document analysis system for electoral tally sheet processing combining state of the art techniques with a new handwriting recognition subprocess based on unsupervised feature discovery with Variational Autoencoders and sequence classification with BLSTM neural networks. The whole system is designed to be script independent and allows a fast and reliable results consolidation process with reduced operational cost.
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Anders Hast, & Alicia Fornes. (2016). A Segmentation-free Handwritten Word Spotting Approach by Relaxed Feature Matching. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 150–155).
Abstract: The automatic recognition of historical handwritten documents is still considered challenging task. For this reason, word spotting emerges as a good alternative for making the information contained in these documents available to the user. Word spotting is defined as the task of retrieving all instances of the query word in a document collection, becoming a useful tool for information retrieval. In this paper we propose a segmentation-free word spotting approach able to deal with large document collections. Our method is inspired on feature matching algorithms that have been applied to image matching and retrieval. Since handwritten words have different shape, there is no exact transformation to be obtained. However, the sufficient degree of relaxation is achieved by using a Fourier based descriptor and an alternative approach to RANSAC called PUMA. The proposed approach is evaluated on historical marriage records, achieving promising results.
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Alejandro Gonzalez Alzate, Zhijie Fang, Yainuvis Socarras, Joan Serrat, David Vazquez, Jiaolong Xu, et al. (2016). Pedestrian Detection at Day/Night Time with Visible and FIR Cameras: A Comparison. SENS - Sensors, 16(6), 820.
Abstract: Despite all the significant advances in pedestrian detection brought by computer vision for driving assistance, it is still a challenging problem. One reason is the extremely varying lighting conditions under which such a detector should operate, namely day and night time. Recent research has shown that the combination of visible and non-visible imaging modalities may increase detection accuracy, where the infrared spectrum plays a critical role. The goal of this paper is to assess the accuracy gain of different pedestrian models (holistic, part-based, patch-based) when training with images in the far infrared spectrum. Specifically, we want to compare detection accuracy on test images recorded at day and nighttime if trained (and tested) using (a) plain color images, (b) just infrared images and (c) both of them. In order to obtain results for the last item we propose an early fusion approach to combine features from both modalities. We base the evaluation on a new dataset we have built for this purpose as well as on the publicly available KAIST multispectral dataset.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; FIR
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Daniel Hernandez, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, & Juan Carlos Moure. (2017). GPU-accelerated real-time stixel computation. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 1054–1062).
Abstract: The Stixel World is a medium-level, compact representation of road scenes that abstracts millions of disparity pixels into hundreds or thousands of stixels. The goal of this work is to implement and evaluate a complete multi-stixel estimation pipeline on an embedded, energyefficient, GPU-accelerated device. This work presents a full GPU-accelerated implementation of stixel estimation that produces reliable results at 26 frames per second (real-time) on the Tegra X1 for disparity images of 1024×440 pixels and stixel widths of 5 pixels, and achieves more than 400 frames per second on a high-end Titan X GPU card.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; GPU; Stixel
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Marçal Rusiñol, J. Chazalon, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2016). Filtrage de descripteurs locaux pour l'amélioration de la détection de documents. In Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework.In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements.
Keywords: Local descriptors; mobile capture; document matching; keypoint selection
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, V. Poulain d'Andecy, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2016). Human-Document Interaction – a new frontier for document image analysis. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 369–374).
Abstract: All indications show that paper documents will not cede in favour of their digital counterparts, but will instead be used increasingly in conjunction with digital information. An open challenge is how to seamlessly link the physical with the digital – how to continue taking advantage of the important affordances of paper, without missing out on digital functionality. This paper
presents the authors’ experience with developing systems for Human-Document Interaction based on augmented document interfaces and examines new challenges and opportunities arising for the document image analysis field in this area. The system presented combines state of the art camera-based document
image analysis techniques with a range of complementary tech-nologies to offer fluid Human-Document Interaction. Both fixed and nomadic setups are discussed that have gone through user testing in real-life environments, and use cases are presented that span the spectrum from business to educational application
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