|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez. (2010). Combining Context and Appearance for Road Detection (Antonio Lopez, & Theo Gevers, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.
|
|
|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Geographic Information for vision-based Road Detection. In IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (621–626).
Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.
Keywords: road detection
|
|
|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). 3D Scene Priors for Road Detection. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (57–64).
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important in different areas of computer vision such as autonomous driving, car collision warning and pedestrian crossing detection. However, current vision-based road detection methods are usually based on low-level features and they assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions. Therefore, in this paper, contextual 3D information is used in addition to low-level cues. Low-level photometric invariant cues are derived from the appearance of roads. Contextual cues used include horizon lines, vanishing points, 3D scene layout and 3D road stages. Moreover, temporal road cues are included. All these cues are sensitive to different imaging conditions and hence are considered as weak cues. Therefore, they are combined to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. To this end, the low-level, contextual and temporal cues are combined in a Bayesian framework to classify road sequences. Large scale experiments on road sequences show that the road detection method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios (tunnels, urban and highway). Further, using the combined cues outperforms all other individual cues. Finally, the proposed method provides highest road detection accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: road detection
|
|
|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Learning photometric invariance for object detection. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 90(1), 45–61.
Abstract: Impact factor: 3.508 (the last available from JCR2009SCI). Position 4/103 in the category Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Quartile
Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.
Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is computed composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, our fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the proposed method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Further, the proposed method is extended to deal with temporal data by predicting the evolution of observations over time.
Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning, and outperforms state-of-the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition. Considering sequential data, the proposed method (extended to deal with future observations) outperforms the other methods
Keywords: road detection
|
|
|
|
Jose Seabra, F. Javier Sanchez, Francesco Ciompi, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Ultrasonographic Plaque Characterization using a Rayleigh Mixture Model. In 7th IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (1–4).
Abstract: From Nano to Macro
A correct modelling of tissue morphology is determinant for the identification of vulnerable plaques. This paper aims at describing the plaque composition by means of a Rayleigh Mixture Model applied to ultrasonic data. The effectiveness of using a mixture of distributions is established through synthetic and real ultrasonic data samples. Furthermore, the proposed mixture model is used in a plaque classification problem in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) images of coronary plaques. A classifier tested on a set of 67 in-vitro plaques, yields an overall accuracy of 86% and sensitivity of 92%, 94% and 82%, for fibrotic, calcified and lipidic tissues, respectively. These results strongly suggest that different plaques types can be distinguished by means of the coefficients and Rayleigh parameters of the mixture distribution.
|
|
|
|
Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Boix, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Harmony Potentials for Joint Classification and Segmentation. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (3280–3287).
Abstract: Hierarchical conditional random fields have been successfully applied to object segmentation. One reason is their ability to incorporate contextual information at different scales. However, these models do not allow multiple labels to be assigned to a single node. At higher scales in the image, this yields an oversimplified model, since multiple classes can be reasonable expected to appear within one region. This simplified model especially limits the impact that observations at larger scales may have on the CRF model. Neglecting the information at larger scales is undesirable since class-label estimates based on these scales are more reliable than at smaller, noisier scales. To address this problem, we propose a new potential, called harmony potential, which can encode any possible combination of class labels. We propose an effective sampling strategy that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Results show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging datasets: Pascal VOC 2009 and MSRC-21.
|
|
|
|
Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & C.G.M. Snoek. (2010). Evaluating Color Descriptors for Object and Scene Recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(9), 1582–1596.
Abstract: Impact factor: 5.308
Image category recognition is important to access visual information on the level of objects and scene types. So far, intensity-based descriptors have been widely used for feature extraction at salient points. To increase illumination invariance and discriminative power, color descriptors have been proposed. Because many different descriptors exist, a structured overview is required of color invariant descriptors in the context of image category recognition. Therefore, this paper studies the invariance properties and the distinctiveness of color descriptors (software to compute the color descriptors from this paper is available from http://www.colordescriptors.com) in a structured way. The analytical invariance properties of color descriptors are explored, using a taxonomy based on invariance properties with respect to photometric transformations, and tested experimentally using a data set with known illumination conditions. In addition, the distinctiveness of color descriptors is assessed experimentally using two benchmarks, one from the image domain and one from the video domain. From the theoretical and experimental results, it can be derived that invariance to light intensity changes and light color changes affects category recognition. The results further reveal that, for light intensity shifts, the usefulness of invariance is category-specific. Overall, when choosing a single descriptor and no prior knowledge about the data set and object and scene categories is available, the OpponentSIFT is recommended. Furthermore, a combined set of color descriptors outperforms intensity-based SIFT and improves category recognition by 8 percent on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and by 7 percent on the Mediamill Challenge.
|
|
|
|
Lluis Pere de las Heras. (2010). Syntactic Model for Semantic Document Analysis (Vol. 158).
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Agnes Borras, & Josep Llados. (2010). Relational Indexing of Vectorial Primitives for Symbol Spotting in Line-Drawing Images. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(3), 188–201.
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.
Keywords: Document image analysis and recognition, Graphics recognition, Symbol spotting ,Vectorial representations, Line-drawings
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Farshad Nourbakhsh, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Ernest Valveny, & Josep Llados. (2010). Perceptual Image Retrieval by Adding Color Information to the Shape Context Descriptor. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (1594–1597).
Abstract: In this paper we present a method for the retrieval of images in terms of perceptual similarity. Local color information is added to the shape context descriptor in order to obtain an object description integrating both shape and color as visual cues. We use a color naming algorithm in order to represent the color information from a perceptual point of view. The proposed method has been tested in two different applications, an object retrieval scenario based on color sketch queries and a color trademark retrieval problem. Experimental results show that the addition of the color information significantly outperforms the sole use of the shape context descriptor.
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados. (2010). Efficient Logo Retrieval Through Hashing Shape Context Descriptors. In 9th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (215–222).
Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach towards the retrieval of words from graphical document images. In graphical documents, due to presence of multi-oriented characters in non-structured layout, word indexing is a challenging task. The proposed approach uses recognition results of individual components to form character pairs with the neighboring components. An indexing scheme is designed to store the spatial description of components and to access them efficiently. Given a query text word (ascii/unicode format), the character pairs present in it are searched in the document. Next the retrieved character pairs are linked sequentially to form character string. Dynamic programming is applied to find different instances of query words. A string edit distance is used here to match the query word as the objective function. Recognition of multi-scale and multi-oriented character component is done using Support Vector Machine classifier. To consider multi-oriented character strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experimental results show that the method is efficient to locate a query word from multi-oriented text in graphical documents.
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados. (2010). Symbol Spotting in Digital Libraries:Focused Retrieval over Graphic-rich Document Collections. Springer.
Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed.
Keywords: Focused Retrieval , Graphical Pattern Indexation,Graphics Recognition ,Pattern Recognition , Performance Evaluation , Symbol Description ,Symbol Spotting
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Josep Llados, & Gemma Sanchez. (2010). Symbol Spotting in Vectorized Technical Drawings Through a Lookup Table of Region Strings. PAA - Pattern Analysis and Applications, 13(3), 321–331.
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.
|
|
|
|
Marçal Rusiñol, K. Bertet, Jean-Marc Ogier, & Josep Llados. (2010). Symbol Recognition Using a Concept Lattice of Graphical Patterns. In Graphics Recognition. Achievements, Challenges, and Evolution. 8th International Workshop, GREC 2009. Selected Papers (Vol. 6020, pp. 187–198). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a new approach to recognize symbols by the use of a concept lattice. We propose to build a concept lattice in terms of graphical patterns. Each model symbol is decomposed in a set of composing graphical patterns taken as primitives. Each one of these primitives is described by boundary moment invariants. The obtained concept lattice relates which symbolic patterns compose a given graphical symbol. A Hasse diagram is derived from the context and is used to recognize symbols affected by noise. We present some preliminary results over a variation of the dataset of symbols from the GREC 2005 symbol recognition contest.
|
|
|
|
Marc Serra. (2010). Estimating Intrinsic Images from Physical and Categorical Color Cues (Vol. 151). Master's thesis, , .
|
|
