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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2013). Large scale continuous visual event recognition using max-margin Hough transformation framework. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 117(10), 1356–1368.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel method for continuous visual event recognition (CVER) on a large scale video dataset using max-margin Hough transformation framework. Due to high scalability, diverse real environmental state and wide scene variability direct application of action recognition/detection methods such as spatio-temporal interest point (STIP)-local feature based technique, on the whole dataset is practically infeasible. To address this problem, we apply a motion region extraction technique which is based on motion segmentation and region clustering to identify possible candidate “event of interest” as a preprocessing step. On these candidate regions a STIP detector is applied and local motion features are computed. For activity representation we use generalized Hough transform framework where each feature point casts a weighted vote for possible activity class centre. A max-margin frame work is applied to learn the feature codebook weight. For activity detection, peaks in the Hough voting space are taken into account and initial event hypothesis is generated using the spatio-temporal information of the participating STIPs. For event recognition a verification Support Vector Machine is used. An extensive evaluation on benchmark large scale video surveillance dataset (VIRAT) and as well on a small scale benchmark dataset (MSR) shows that the proposed method is applicable on a wide range of continuous visual event recognition applications having extremely challenging conditions.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Marco Pedersoli, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2008). View-Invariant Human Action Detection using Component-Wise HMM of Body Parts. In Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, 5th International Conference (Vol. 5098, 208–217). LNCS.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Selective Spatio-Temporal Interest Points. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 396–410.
Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2011). A Selective Spatio-Temporal Interest Point Detector for Human Action Recognition in Complex Scenes. In 13th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 1776–1783).
Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper we present a new approach for STIP detection by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. Our method is significantly different from existing STIP detectors and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-visual words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on existing benchmark datasets, and more challenging datasets of complex scenes, validate our approach and show state-of-the-art performance.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Ognjen Rudovic, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2008). View-Invariant Human-Body Detection with Extension to Human Action Recognition using Component-Wise HMM of Body Parts. In 8th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Facial Expression Recognition based on Multi-view Observations with Application to Social Robotics. In 1st Workshop on Computer Vision for Affective Computing (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: Human-robot interaction is a hot topic nowadays in the social robotics community. One crucial aspect is represented by the affective communication which comes encoded through the facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for facial expression recognition, which exploits an efficient and adaptive graph-based label propagation (semi-supervised mode) in a multi-observation framework. The facial features are extracted using an appearance-based 3D face tracker, view- and texture independent. Our method has been extensively tested on the CMU dataset, and has been conveniently compared with other methods for graph construction. With the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the recognized facial
expression.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2015). Multi-observation Face Recognition in Videos based on Label Propagation. In 6th Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures AMFG2015 (pp. 10–17).
Abstract: In order to deal with the huge amount of content generated by social media, especially for indexing and retrieval purposes, the focus shifted from single object recognition to multi-observation object recognition. Of particular interest is the problem of face recognition (used as primary cue for persons’ identity assessment), since it is highly required by popular social media search engines like Facebook and Youtube. Recently, several approaches for graph-based label propagation were proposed. However, the associated graphs were constructed in an ad-hoc manner (e.g., using the KNN graph) that cannot cope properly with the rapid and frequent changes in data appearance, a phenomenon intrinsically related with video sequences. In this paper, we
propose a novel approach for efficient and adaptive graph construction, based on a two-phase scheme: (i) the first phase is used to adaptively find the neighbors of a sample and also to find the adequate weights for the minimization function of the second phase; (ii) in the second phase, the
selected neighbors along with their corresponding weights are used to locally and collaboratively estimate the sparse affinity matrix weights. Experimental results performed on Honda Video Database (HVDB) and a subset of video
sequences extracted from the popular TV-series ’Friends’ show a distinct advantage of the proposed method over the existing standard graph construction methods.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & D. Gatica-Perez. (2012). Inferring competitive role patterns in reality TV show through nonverbal analysis. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 56(1), 207–226.
Abstract: This paper introduces a new facet of social media, namely that depicting social interaction. More concretely, we address this problem from the perspective of nonverbal behavior-based analysis of competitive meetings. For our study, we made use of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, which features a competition for a real, highly paid corporate job. Our analysis is centered around two tasks regarding a person's role in a meeting: predicting the person with the highest status, and predicting the fired candidates. We address this problem by adopting both supervised and unsupervised strategies. The current study was carried out using nonverbal audio cues. Our approach is based only on the nonverbal interaction dynamics during the meeting without relying on the spoken words. The analysis is based on two types of data: individual and relational measures. Results obtained from the analysis of a full season of the show are promising (up to 85.7% of accuracy in the first case and up to 92.8% in the second case). Our approach has been conveniently compared with the Influence Model, demonstrating its superiority.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2008). Dynamic Vs. Static Recognition of Facial Expressions. In Rabuñal (Ed.), Ambient Intelligence. European Conference (Vol. 5355, 13–25). LNCS.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2009). Natural Facial Expression Recognition Using Dynamic and Static Schemes. In 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 5875, 730–739). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Affective computing is at the core of a new paradigm in HCI and AI represented by human-centered computing. Within this paradigm, it is expected that machines will be enabled with perceiving capabilities, making them aware about users’ affective state. The current paper addresses the problem of facial expression recognition from monocular videos sequences. We propose a dynamic facial expression recognition scheme, which is proven to be very efficient. Furthermore, it is conveniently compared with several static-based systems adopting different magnitude of facial expression. We provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM). We also provide performance evaluations using arbitrary test video sequences.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2010). Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition Using Laplacian Eigenmaps-Based Manifold Learning. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (156–161).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for tracking, modelling and recognition of facial expressions. The main contributions are: (i) a view- and texture independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker; (ii) the complexity of the non-linear facial expression space is modelled through a manifold, whose structure is learned using Laplacian Eigenmaps. The projected facial expressions are afterwards recognized based on Nearest Neighbor classifier; (iii) with the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the perceived facial expression.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2011). A Discriminative Non-Linear Manifold Learning Technique for Face Recognition. In Informatics Engineering and Information Science (Vol. 254, pp. 339–353). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel non-linear discriminative analysis technique for manifold learning. The proposed approach is a discriminant version of Laplacian Eigenmaps which takes into account the class label information in order to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction. By following the large margin concept, the graph Laplacian is split in two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques. The experimental results confirm that our method outperforms, in general, the existing ones. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). A Supervised Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Approach for Manifold Learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(6), 2432–2444.
Abstract: IF= 2.61
IF=2.61 (2010)
In this paper we introduce a novel supervised manifold learning technique called Supervised Laplacian Eigenmaps (S-LE), which makes use of class label information to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction by adopting the large margin concept. The graph Laplacian is split into two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data. Our approach has two important characteristics: (i) it adaptively estimates the local neighborhood surrounding each sample based on data density and similarity and (ii) the objective function simultaneously maximizes the local margin between heterogeneous samples and pushes the homogeneous samples closer to each other.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques, demonstrating its superiority. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variations in their appearance (such as hand or body pose, for instance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Appearance-based Face Recognition Using A Supervised Manifold Learning Framework. In IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 465–470). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: Many natural image sets, depicting objects whose appearance is changing due to motion, pose or light variations, can be considered samples of a low-dimension nonlinear manifold embedded in the high-dimensional observation space (the space of all possible images). The main contribution of our work is represented by a Supervised Laplacian Eigemaps (S-LE) algorithm, which exploits the class label information for mapping the original data in the embedded space. Our proposed approach benefits from two important properties: i) it is discriminative, and ii) it adaptively selects the neighbors of a sample without using any predefined neighborhood size. Experiments were conducted on four face databases and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms many linear and non-linear embedding techniques. Although we've focused on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be extended to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Embedding new observations via sparse-coding for non-linear manifold learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(1), 480–492.
Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.
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