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Sergio Escalera, Marti Soler, Stephane Ayache, Umut Guçlu, Jun Wan, Meysam Madadi, et al. (2019). ChaLearn Looking at People: Inpainting and Denoising Challenges. In The Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning (pp. 23–44).
Abstract: Dealing with incomplete information is a well studied problem in the context of machine learning and computational intelligence. However, in the context of computer vision, the problem has only been studied in specific scenarios (e.g., certain types of occlusions in specific types of images), although it is common to have incomplete information in visual data. This chapter describes the design of an academic competition focusing on inpainting of images and video sequences that was part of the competition program of WCCI2018 and had a satellite event collocated with ECCV2018. The ChaLearn Looking at People Inpainting Challenge aimed at advancing the state of the art on visual inpainting by promoting the development of methods for recovering missing and occluded information from images and video. Three tracks were proposed in which visual inpainting might be helpful but still challenging: human body pose estimation, text overlays removal and fingerprint denoising. This chapter describes the design of the challenge, which includes the release of three novel datasets, and the description of evaluation metrics, baselines and evaluation protocol. The results of the challenge are analyzed and discussed in detail and conclusions derived from this event are outlined.
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Sergio Escalera, Markus Weimer, Mikhail Burtsev, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Ryan Lowe, et al. (2018). Introduction to NIPS 2017 Competition Track. In Sergio Escalera, & Markus Weimer (Eds.), The NIPS ’17 Competition: Building Intelligent Systems (pp. 1–23). Springer.
Abstract: Competitions have become a popular tool in the data science community to solve hard problems, assess the state of the art and spur new research directions. Companies like Kaggle and open source platforms like Codalab connect people with data and a data science problem to those with the skills and means to solve it. Hence, the question arises: What, if anything, could NIPS add to this rich ecosystem?
In 2017, we embarked to find out. We attracted 23 potential competitions, of which we selected five to be NIPS 2017 competitions. Our final selection features competitions advancing the state of the art in other sciences such as “Classifying Clinically Actionable Genetic Mutations” and “Learning to Run”. Others, like “The Conversational Intelligence Challenge” and “Adversarial Attacks and Defences” generated new data sets that we expect to impact the progress in their respective communities for years to come. And “Human-Computer Question Answering Competition” showed us just how far we as a field have come in ability and efficiency since the break-through performance of Watson in Jeopardy. Two additional competitions, DeepArt and AI XPRIZE Milestions, were also associated to the NIPS 2017 competition track, whose results are also presented within this chapter.
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Sergio Escalera, Junior Fabian, Pablo Pardo, Xavier Baro, Jordi Gonzalez, Hugo Jair Escalante, et al. (2015). ChaLearn Looking at People 2015: Apparent Age and Cultural Event Recognition Datasets and Results. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 243–251).
Abstract: Following previous series on Looking at People (LAP) competitions [14, 13, 11, 12, 2], in 2015 ChaLearn ran two new competitions within the field of Looking at People: (1) age estimation, and (2) cultural event recognition, both in
still images. We developed a crowd-sourcing application to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). In terms of cultural event recognition, one hundred categories had to be recognized. These
tasks involved scene understanding and human body analysis. This paper summarizes both challenges and data, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competition.
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Sergio Escalera, Josep Moya, Laura Igual, Veronica Violant, & Maria Teresa Anguera. (2012). Automatic Human Behavior Analysis in ADHD. In Eunethydis 2nd International ADHD Conference.
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Sergio Escalera, Josep Moya, Laura Igual, Veronica Violant, & Maria Teresa Anguera. (2012). Análisis Comportamental Automatizado de TDAH: la Influencia de la Variable Motivación. In IPSI – Cosmocaixa, Jornadas "Empremtes del present, efectes en la psicoanàlisi, la cultura i la societat.
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Baro, Pablo Pardo, Junior Fabian, Marc Oliu, et al. (2015). ChaLearn Looking at People 2015 new competitions: Age Estimation and Cultural Event Recognition. In IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IJCNN2015 (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: Following previous series on Looking at People (LAP) challenges [1], [2], [3], in 2015 ChaLearn runs two new competitions within the field of Looking at People: age and cultural event recognition in still images. We propose thefirst crowdsourcing application to collect and label data about apparent
age of people instead of the real age. In terms of cultural event recognition, tens of categories have to be recognized. This involves scene understanding and human analysis. This paper summarizes both challenges and data, providing some initial baselines. The results of the first round of the competition were presented at ChaLearn LAP 2015 IJCNN special session on computer vision and robotics http://www.dtic.ua.es/∼jgarcia/IJCNN2015.
Details of the ChaLearn LAP competitions can be found at http://gesture.chalearn.org/.
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Baro, Miguel Reyes, Oscar Lopes, Isabelle Guyon, et al. (2013). Multi-modal Gesture Recognition Challenge 2013: Dataset and Results. In 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 445–452).
Abstract: The recognition of continuous natural gestures is a complex and challenging problem due to the multi-modal nature of involved visual cues (e.g. fingers and lips movements, subtle facial expressions, body pose, etc.), as well as technical limitations such as spatial and temporal resolution and unreliable
depth cues. In order to promote the research advance on this field, we organized a challenge on multi-modal gesture recognition. We made available a large video database of 13; 858 gestures from a lexicon of 20 Italian gesture categories recorded with a KinectTM camera, providing the audio, skeletal model, user mask, RGB and depth images. The focus of the challenge was on user independent multiple gesture learning. There are no resting positions and the gestures are performed in continuous sequences lasting 1-2 minutes, containing between 8 and 20 gesture instances in each sequence. As a result, the dataset contains around 1:720:800 frames. In addition to the 20 main gesture categories, ‘distracter’ gestures are included, meaning that additional audio
and gestures out of the vocabulary are included. The final evaluation of the challenge was defined in terms of the Levenshtein edit distance, where the goal was to indicate the real order of gestures within the sequence. 54 international teams participated in the challenge, and outstanding results
were obtained by the first ranked participants.
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Baro, & Jamie Shotton. (2016). Guest Editor Introduction to the Special Issue on Multimodal Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28, 1489–1491.
Abstract: The sixteen papers in this special section focus on human pose recovery and behavior analysis (HuPBA). This is one of the most challenging topics in computer vision, pattern analysis, and machine learning. It is of critical importance for application areas that include gaming, computer interaction, human robot interaction, security, commerce, assistive technologies and rehabilitation, sports, sign language recognition, and driver assistance technology, to mention just a few. In essence, HuPBA requires dealing with the articulated nature of the human body, changes in appearance due to clothing, and the inherent problems of clutter scenes, such as background artifacts, occlusions, and illumination changes. These papers represent the most recent research in this field, including new methods considering still images, image sequences, depth data, stereo vision, 3D vision, audio, and IMUs, among others.
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Baro, Fernando Alonso, & Martha Mackay. (2016). Care Respite: a remote monitoring eHealth system for improving ambient assisted living. In Human Motion Analysis for Healthcare Applications.
Abstract: Advances in technology that capture human motion have been quite remarkable during the last five years. New sensors have been developed, such as the Microsoft Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro live, PrimeSense Carmine and Leap Motion. Their main advantages are their non-intrusive nature, low cost and widely available support for developers offered by large corporations or Open Communities. Although they were originally developed for computer games, they have inspired numerous healthcare related ideas and projects in areas such as Medical Disorder Diagnosis, Assisted Living, Rehabilitation and Surgery.
In Assisted Living, human motion analysis allows continuous monitoring of elderly and vulnerable people and their activities to potentially detect life-threatening events such as falls. Human motion analysis in rehabilitation provides the opportunity for motivating patients through gamification, evaluating prescribed programmes of exercises and assessing patients’ progress. In operating theatres, surgeons may use a gesture-based interface to access medical information or control a tele-surgery system. Human motion analysis may also be used to diagnose a range of mental and physical diseases and conditions.
This event will discuss recent advances in human motion sensing and provide an application to healthcare for networking and exploring potential synergies and collaborations.
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Hugo Jair Escalante, Xavier Baro, & Isabelle Guyon. (2018). Looking at People Special Issue. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 126(2-4), 141–143.
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Sergio Escalera, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2009). Multimodal laughter recognition in video conversations. In 2nd IEEE Workshop on CVPR for Human communicative Behavior analysis (110–115).
Abstract: Laughter detection is an important area of interest in the Affective Computing and Human-computer Interaction fields. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal methodology based on the fusion of audio and visual cues to deal with the laughter recognition problem in face-to-face conversations. The audio features are extracted from the spectogram and the video features are obtained estimating the mouth movement degree and using a smile and laughter classifier. Finally, the multi-modal cues are included in a sequential classifier. Results over videos from the public discussion blog of the New York Times show that both types of features perform better when considered together by the classifier. Moreover, the sequential methodology shows to significantly outperform the results obtained by an Adaboost classifier.
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Sergio Escalera, David Masip, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Online Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(3), 458–467.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.
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Sergio Escalera, David M.J. Tax, Oriol Pujol, Petia Radeva, & Robert P.W. Duin. (2008). Subclass Problem-Dependent Design for Error-Correcting Output Codes. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol.30(6):1041–1054.
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Sergio Escalera, Ana Puig, Oscar Amoros, & Maria Salamo. (2011). Intelligent GPGPU Classification in Volume Visualization: a framework based on Error-Correcting Output Codes. CGF - Computer Graphics Forum, 30(7), 2107–2115.
Abstract: IF JCR 1.455 2010 25/99
In volume visualization, the definition of the regions of interest is inherently an iterative trial-and-error process finding out the best parameters to classify and render the final image. Generally, the user requires a lot of expertise to analyze and edit these parameters through multi-dimensional transfer functions. In this paper, we present a framework of intelligent methods to label on-demand multiple regions of interest. These methods can be split into a two-level GPU-based labelling algorithm that computes in time of rendering a set of labelled structures using the Machine Learning Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In a pre-processing step, ECOC trains a set of Adaboost binary classifiers from a reduced pre-labelled data set. Then, at the testing stage, each classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabelled samples and combined to perform multi-class labelling. We also propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allows to highly parallelize the testing stage. To exploit that parallelism we implemented the testing stage in GPU-OpenCL. The empirical results on different data sets for several volume structures shows high computational performance and classification accuracy.
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Multi-class Binary Symbol Classification with Circular Blurred Shape Models. In 15th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (Vol. 5716, 1005–1014). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Multi-class binary symbol classification requires the use of rich descriptors and robust classifiers. Shape representation is a difficult task because of several symbol distortions, such as occlusions, elastic deformations, gaps or noise. In this paper, we present the Circular Blurred Shape Model descriptor. This descriptor encodes the arrangement information of object parts in a correlogram structure. A prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed to the symbol. Moreover, we learn the new feature space using a set of Adaboost classifiers, which are combined in the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework to deal with the multi-class categorization problem. The presented work has been validated over different multi-class data sets, and compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors, showing significant performance improvements.
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