Abstract: Egocentric images offer a hands-free way to record daily experiences and special events, where social interactions are of special interest. A natural question that arises is how to extract and track the appearance of multiple persons in a social event captured by a wearable camera. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple-faces in low temporal resolution egocentric sequences acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of sequences imposes additional challenges to the multitracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution (2 fpm), abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination conditions and in the target location are very frequent. To overcome such a difficulty, we propose to generate, for each detected face, a set of correspondences along the whole sequence that we call tracklet and to take advantage of their redundancy to deal with both false positive face detections and unreliable tracklets. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which are aimed to correspond to specific persons. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT. We validated our method over a dataset of 18.000 images from 38 egocentric sequences with 52 trackable persons and compared to the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

Abstract: Given a user wearing a low frame rate wearable camera during a day, this work aims to automatically detect the moments when the user gets engaged into a social interaction solely by reviewing the automatically captured photos by the worn camera. The proposed method, inspired by the sociological concept of F-formation, exploits distance and orientation of the appearing individuals -with respect to the user- in the scene from a bird-view perspective. As a result, the interaction pattern over the sequence can be understood as a two-dimensional time series that corresponds to the temporal evolution of the distance and orientation features over time. A Long-Short Term Memory-based Recurrent Neural Network is then trained to classify each time series. Experimental evaluation over a dataset of 30.000 images has shown promising results on the proposed method for social interaction detection in egocentric photo-streams.

Abstract: arxiv1703.01790
Given an unconstrained stream of images captured by a wearable photo-camera (2fpm), we propose an unsupervised bottom-up approach for automatic clustering appearing faces into the individual identities present in these data. The problem is challenging since images are acquired under real world conditions; hence the visible appearance of the people in the images undergoes intensive variations. Our proposed pipeline consists of first arranging the photo-stream into events, later, localizing the appearance of multiple people in them, and
finally, grouping various appearances of the same person across different events. Experimental results performed on a dataset acquired by wearing a photo-camera during one month, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the considered purpose.

Abstract: We present a sample dataset featuring pedestrians generated using the ARCANE framework, a new framework for generating datasets in CARLA (0.9.13). We provide use cases for pedestrian detection, autoencoding, pose estimation, and pose lifting. We also showcase baseline results.

Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.

Abstract: In handball videos recorded during the training, multiple players are present in the scene at the same time. Although they all might move and interact, not all players contribute to the currently relevant exercise nor practice the given handball techniques. The goal of this experiment is to automatically determine players on training footage that perform given handball techniques and are therefore considered active. It is a very challenging task for which a precise object detector is needed that can handle cluttered scenes with poor illumination, with many players present in different sizes and distances from the camera, partially occluded, moving fast. To determine which of the detected players are active, additional information is needed about the level of player activity. Since many handball actions are characterized by considerable changes in speed, position, and variations in the player's appearance, we propose using spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and optical flow (OF). Therefore, we propose an active player detection method combining the YOLO object detector and two activity measures based on STIPs and OF. The performance of the proposed method and activity measures are evaluated on a custom handball video dataset acquired during handball training lessons.