Abstract: Visual tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most state-of-the-art visual trackers either rely on luminance information or use simple color representations for image description. Contrary to visual tracking, for object
recognition and detection, sophisticated color features when combined with luminance have shown to provide excellent performance. Due to the complexity of the tracking problem, the desired color feature should be computationally
efficient, and possess a certain amount of photometric invariance while maintaining high discriminative power.
This paper investigates the contribution of color in a tracking-by-detection framework. Our results suggest that color attributes provides superior performance for visual tracking. We further propose an adaptive low-dimensional
variant of color attributes. Both quantitative and attributebased evaluations are performed on 41 challenging benchmark color sequences. The proposed approach improves the baseline intensity-based tracker by 24% in median distance precision. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms
state-of-the-art tracking methods while running at more than 100 frames per second.

Abstract: Active learning emerged as an alternative to alleviate the effort to label huge amount of data for data hungry applications (such as image/video indexing and retrieval, autonomous driving, etc.). The goal of active learning is to automatically select a number of unlabeled samples for annotation (according to a budget), based on an acquisition function, which indicates how valuable a sample is for training the model. The learning loss method is a task-agnostic approach which attaches a module to learn to predict the target loss of unlabeled data, and select data with the highest loss for labeling. In this work, we follow this strategy but we define the acquisition function as a learning to rank problem and rethink the structure of the loss prediction module, using a simple but effective listwise approach. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art active learning approaches for both image classification and regression tasks.

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.

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.