P. Ricaurte, C. Chilan, Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Angel Sappa. (2014). Feature Point Descriptors: Infrared and Visible Spectra. SENS - Sensors, 14(2), 3690–3701.
Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the behavior of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in images from long-wave infrared spectral band and compare them with the results obtained in the visible spectrum. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are analyzed using a state of the art framework. Experimental results using a cross-spectral outdoor image data set are presented and conclusions from these experiments are given.
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Oualid M. Benkarim, Petia Radeva, & Laura Igual. (2014). Label Consistent Multiclass Discriminative Dictionary Learning for MRI Segmentation. In 8th Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (Vol. 8563, pp. 138–147). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: The automatic segmentation of multiple subcortical structures in brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) still remains a challenging task. In this paper, we address this problem using sparse representation and discriminative dictionary learning, which have shown promising results in compression, image denoising and recently in MRI segmentation. Particularly, we use multiclass dictionaries learned from a set of brain atlases to simultaneously segment multiple subcortical structures.
We also impose dictionary atoms to be specialized in one given class using label consistent K-SVD, which can alleviate the bias produced by unbalanced libraries, present when dealing with small structures. The proposed method is compared with other state of the art approaches for the segmentation of the Basal Ganglia of 35 subjects of a public dataset.
The promising results of the segmentation method show the eciency of the multiclass discriminative dictionary learning algorithms in MRI segmentation problems.
Keywords: MRI segmentation; sparse representation; discriminative dic- tionary learning; multiclass classi cation
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Oscar Lopes, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Spherical Blurred Shape Model for 3-D Object and Pose Recognition: Quantitative Analysis and HCI Applications in Smart Environments. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(12), 2379–2390.
Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.
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Onur Ferhat, Fernando Vilariño, & F. Javier Sanchez. (2014). A cheap portable eye-tracker solution for common setups. JEMR - Journal of Eye Movement Research, 7(3), 1–10.
Abstract: We analyze the feasibility of a cheap eye-tracker where the hardware consists of a single webcam and a Raspberry Pi device. Our aim is to discover the limits of such a system and to see whether it provides an acceptable performance. We base our work on the open source Opengazer (Zielinski, 2013) and we propose several improvements to create a robust, real-time system which can work on a computer with 30Hz sampling rate. After assessing the accuracy of our eye-tracker in elaborated experiments involving 12 subjects under 4 different system setups, we install it on a Raspberry Pi to create a portable stand-alone eye-tracker which achieves 1.42° horizontal accuracy with 3Hz refresh rate for a building cost of 70 Euros.
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Noha Elfiky, Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Color Constancy using 3D Scene Geometry derived from a Single Image. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(9), 3855–3868.
Abstract: The aim of color constancy is to remove the effect of the color of the light source. As color constancy is inherently an ill-posed problem, most of the existing color constancy algorithms are based on specific imaging assumptions (e.g. grey-world and white patch assumption).
In this paper, 3D geometry models are used to determine which color constancy method to use for the different geometrical regions (depth/layer) found
in images. The aim is to classify images into stages (rough 3D geometry models). According to stage models; images are divided into stage regions using hard and soft segmentation. After that, the best color constancy methods is selected for each geometry depth. To this end, we propose a method to combine color constancy algorithms by investigating the relation between depth, local image statistics and color constancy. Image statistics are then exploited per depth to select the proper color constancy method. Our approach opens the possibility to estimate multiple illuminations by distinguishing
nearby light source from distant illuminations. Experiments on state-of-the-art data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art
single color constancy algorithms with an improvement of almost 50% of median angular error. When using a perfect classifier (i.e, all of the test images are correctly classified into stages); the performance of the proposed method achieves an improvement of 52% of the median angular error compared to the best-performing single color constancy algorithm.
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Naveen Onkarappa, Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Angel Sappa. (2014). Cross-spectral Stereo Correspondence using Dense Flow Fields. In 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (Vol. 3, pp. 613–617).
Abstract: This manuscript addresses the cross-spectral stereo correspondence problem. It proposes the usage of a dense flow field based representation instead of the original cross-spectral images, which have a low correlation. In this way, working in the flow field space, classical cost functions can be used as similarity measures. Preliminary experimental results on urban environments have been obtained showing the validity of the proposed approach.
Keywords: Cross-spectral Stereo Correspondence; Dense Optical Flow; Infrared and Visible Spectrum
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Naveen Onkarappa, & Angel Sappa. (2014). Speed and Texture: An Empirical Study on Optical-Flow Accuracy in ADAS Scenarios. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(1), 136–147.
Abstract: IF: 3.064
Increasing mobility in everyday life has led to the concern for the safety of automotives and human life. Computer vision has become a valuable tool for developing driver assistance applications that target such a concern. Many such vision-based assisting systems rely on motion estimation, where optical flow has shown its potential. A variational formulation of optical flow that achieves a dense flow field involves a data term and regularization terms. Depending on the image sequence, the regularization has to appropriately be weighted for better accuracy of the flow field. Because a vehicle can be driven in different kinds of environments, roads, and speeds, optical-flow estimation has to be accurately computed in all such scenarios. In this paper, we first present the polar representation of optical flow, which is quite suitable for driving scenarios due to the possibility that it offers to independently update regularization factors in different directional components. Then, we study the influence of vehicle speed and scene texture on optical-flow accuracy. Furthermore, we analyze the relationships of these specific characteristics on a driving scenario (vehicle speed and road texture) with the regularization weights in optical flow for better accuracy. As required by the work in this paper, we have generated several synthetic sequences along with ground-truth flow fields.
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Monica Piñol. (2014). Reinforcement Learning of Visual Descriptors for Object Recognition (Ricardo Toledo, & Angel Sappa, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.
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Mohammad Rouhani, E. Boyer, & Angel Sappa. (2014). Non-Rigid Registration meets Surface Reconstruction. In International Conference on 3D Vision (pp. 617–624).
Abstract: Non rigid registration is an important task in computer vision with many applications in shape and motion modeling. A fundamental step of the registration is the data association between the source and the target sets. Such association proves difficult in practice, due to the discrete nature of the information and its corruption by various types of noise, e.g. outliers and missing data. In this paper we investigate the benefit of the implicit representations for the non-rigid registration of 3D point clouds. First, the target points are described with small quadratic patches that are blended through partition of unity weighting. Then, the discrete association between the source and the target can be replaced by a continuous distance field induced by the interface. By combining this distance field with a proper deformation term, the registration energy can be expressed in a linear least square form that is easy and fast to solve. This significantly eases the registration by avoiding direct association between points. Moreover, a hierarchical approach can be easily implemented by employing coarse-to-fine representations. Experimental results are provided for point clouds from multi-view data sets. The qualitative and quantitative comparisons show the outperformance and robustness of our framework. %in presence of noise and outliers.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Generic Subclass Ensemble: A Novel Approach to Ensemble Classification. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1254–1259).
Abstract: Multiple classifier systems, also known as classifier ensembles, have received great attention in recent years because of their improved classification accuracy in different applications. In this paper, we propose a new general approach to ensemble classification, named generic subclass ensemble, in which each base classifier is trained with data belonging to a subset of classes, and thus discriminates among a subset of target categories. The ensemble classifiers are then fused using a combination rule. The proposed approach differs from existing methods that manipulate the target attribute, since in our approach individual classification problems are not restricted to two-class problems. We perform a series of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the generic subclass approach on a set of benchmark datasets. Experimental results with multilayer perceptrons show that the proposed approach presents a viable alternative to the most commonly used ensemble classification approaches.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Gang Hu, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). A Framework of Multi-Classifier Fusion for Human Action Recognition. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1260–1265).
Abstract: The performance of different action-recognition methods using skeleton joint locations have been recently studied by several computer vision researchers. However, the potential improvement in classification through classifier fusion by ensemble-based methods has remained unattended. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an ensemble of five action learning techniques, each performing the recognition task from a different perspective. The underlying rationale of the fusion approach is that different learners employ varying structures of input descriptors/features to be trained. These varying structures cannot be attached and used by a single learner. In addition, combining the outputs of several learners can reduce the risk of an unfortunate selection of a poorly performing learner. This leads to having a more robust and general-applicable framework. Also, we propose two simple, yet effective, action description techniques. In order to improve the recognition performance, a powerful combination strategy is utilized based on the Dempster-Shafer theory, which can effectively make use of diversity of base learners trained on different sources of information. The recognition results of the individual classifiers are compared with those obtained from fusing the classifiers' output, showing advanced performance of the proposed methodology.
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, & Oriol Pujol. (2014). On the Design of an ECOC-Compliant Genetic Algorithm. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(2), 865–884.
Abstract: Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
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Michal Drozdzal, Jordi Vitria, Santiago Segui, Carolina Malagelada, Fernando Azpiroz, & Petia Radeva. (2014). Intestinal event segmentation for endoluminal video analysis. In 21st IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 3592–3596).
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Michal Drozdzal. (2014). Sequential image analysis for computer-aided wireless endoscopy (Petia Radeva, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a technique for inner-visualization of the entire small intestine and, thus, offers an interesting perspective on intestinal motility. The two major drawbacks of this technique are: 1) huge amount of data acquired by WCE makes the motility analysis tedious and 2) since the capsule is the first tool that offers complete inner-visualization of the small intestine,the exact importance of the observed events is still an open issue. Therefore, in this thesis, a novel computer-aided system for intestinal motility analysis is presented. The goal of the system is to provide an easily-comprehensible visual description of motility-related intestinal events to a physician. In order to do so, several tools based either on computer vision concepts or on machine learning techniques are presented. A method for transforming 3D video signal to a holistic image of intestinal motility, called motility bar, is proposed. The method calculates the optimal mapping from video into image from the intestinal motility point of view.
To characterize intestinal motility, methods for automatic extraction of motility information from WCE are presented. Two of them are based on the motility bar and two of them are based on frame-per-frame analysis. In particular, four algorithms dealing with the problems of intestinal contraction detection, lumen size estimation, intestinal content characterization and wrinkle frame detection are proposed and validated. The results of the algorithms are converted into sequential features using an online statistical test. This test is designed to work with multivariate data streams. To this end, we propose a novel formulation of concentration inequality that is introduced into a robust adaptive windowing algorithm for multivariate data streams. The algorithm is used to obtain robust representation of segments with constant intestinal motility activity. The obtained sequential features are shown to be discriminative in the problem of abnormal motility characterization.
Finally, we tackle the problem of efficient labeling. To this end, we incorporate active learning concepts to the problems present in WCE data and propose two approaches. The first one is based the concepts of sequential learning and the second one adapts the partition-based active learning to an error-free labeling scheme. All these steps are sufficient to provide an extensive visual description of intestinal motility that can be used by an expert as decision support system.
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Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Xu Hu, & Xavier Roca. (2014). Toward Real-Time Pedestrian Detection Based on a Deformable Template Model. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(1), 355–364.
Abstract: Most advanced driving assistance systems already include pedestrian detection systems. Unfortunately, there is still a tradeoff between precision and real time. For a reliable detection, excellent precision-recall such a tradeoff is needed to detect as many pedestrians as possible while, at the same time, avoiding too many false alarms; in addition, a very fast computation is needed for fast reactions to dangerous situations. Recently, novel approaches based on deformable templates have been proposed since these show a reasonable detection performance although they are computationally too expensive for real-time performance. In this paper, we present a system for pedestrian detection based on a hierarchical multiresolution part-based model. The proposed system is able to achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy due to the local deformations of the parts while exhibiting a speedup of more than one order of magnitude due to a fast coarse-to-fine inference technique. Moreover, our system explicitly infers the level of resolution available so that the detection of small examples is feasible with a very reduced computational cost. We conclude this contribution by presenting how a graphics processing unit-optimized implementation of our proposed system is suitable for real-time pedestrian detection in terms of both accuracy and speed.
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