Abstract: In this paper we describe a framework to learn a model of shape variability in a set of patterns. The framework is based on the Active Appearance Model (AAM) and permits to combine shape deformations with appearance variability. We have used two modifications of the Blurred Shape Model (BSM) descriptor as basic shape and appearance features to learn the model. These modifications permit to overcome the rigidity of the original BSM, adapting it to the deformations of the shape to be represented. We have applied this framework to representation and classification of handwritten digits and symbols. We show that results of the proposed methodology outperform the original BSM approach.

Abstract: Clothing is still manually manufactured for the most part nowadays, resulting in discrepancies between nominal and real dimensions, and potentially ill-fitting garments. Hence, it is common in the apparel industry to manually perform measures at preshipment time. We present an automatic method to obtain such measures from a single image of a garment that speeds up this task. It is generic and extensible in the sense that it does not depend explicitly on the garment shape or type. Instead, it learns through a probabilistic graphical model to identify the different contour parts. Subsequently, a set of Lasso regressors, one per desired measure, can predict the actual values of the measures. We present results on a dataset of 130 images of jackets and 98 of pants, of varying sizes and styles, obtaining 1.17 and 1.22 cm of mean absolute error, respectively.

Abstract: We present a method for the cost estimation of custom hoses from CAD models. They can come in two formats, which are easy to generate: a STL file or the image of a CAD drawing showing several orthogonal projections. The challenges in either cases are, first, to obtain from them a high level 3D description of the shape, and second, to learn a regression function for the prediction of the manufacturing time, based on geometric features of the reconstructed shape. The chosen description is the 3D line along the medial axis of the tube and the diameter of the circular sections along it. In order to extract it from STL files, we have adapted RANSAC, a robust parametric fitting algorithm. As for CAD drawing images, we propose a new technique for 3D reconstruction from data entered on any number of orthogonal projections. The regression function is a Gaussian process, which does not constrain the function to adopt any specific form and is governed by just two parameters. We assess the accuracy of the manufacturing time estimation by k-fold cross validation on 171 STL file models for which the time is provided by an expert. The results show the feasibility of the method, whereby the relative error for 80% of the testing samples is below 15%.

Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.

Abstract: A crucial part of image classification consists of capturing non-local spatial semantics of image content. This paper describes the multi-scale hybrid vision transformer (MSHViT), an extension of the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone, for multi-label sewer defect classification. To better model spatial semantics in the images, features are aggregated at different scales non-locally through the use of a lightweight vision transformer, and a smaller set of tokens was produced through a novel Sinkhorn clustering-based tokenizer using distinct cluster centers. The proposed MSHViT and Sinkhorn tokenizer were evaluated on the Sewer-ML multi-label sewer defect classification dataset, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 2.53 percentage points.

Abstract: A key topic in classification is the accuracy loss produced when the data distribution in the training (source) domain differs from that in the testing (target) domain. This is being recognized as a very relevant problem for many
computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and object category recognition. In this paper, we present a novel domain adaptation method that leverages multiple target domains (or sub-domains) in a hierarchical adaptation tree. The core idea is to exploit the commonalities and differences of the jointly considered target domains.
Given the relevance of structural SVM (SSVM) classifiers, we apply our idea to the adaptive SSVM (A-SSVM), which only requires the target domain samples together with the existing source-domain classifier for performing the desired adaptation. Altogether, we term our proposal as hierarchical A-SSVM (HA-SSVM).
As proof of concept we use HA-SSVM for pedestrian detection, object category recognition and face recognition. In the former we apply HA-SSVM to the deformable partbased model (DPM) while in the rest HA-SSVM is applied to multi-category classifiers. We will show how HA-SSVM is effective in increasing the detection/recognition accuracy with respect to adaptation strategies that ignore the structure of the target data. Since, the sub-domains of the target data are not always known a priori, we shown how HA-SSVM can incorporate sub-domain discovery for object category recognition.

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians with on-board vision systems is of paramount interest for assisting drivers to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. The core of a pedestrian detector is its classification module, which aims at deciding if a given image window contains a pedestrian. Given the difficulty of this task, many classifiers have been proposed during the last fifteen years. Among them, the so-called (deformable) part-based classifiers including multi-view modeling are usually top ranked in accuracy. Training such classifiers is not trivial since a proper aspect clustering and spatial part alignment of the pedestrian training samples are crucial for obtaining an accurate classifier. In this paper, first we perform automatic aspect clustering and part alignment by using virtual-world pedestrians, i.e., human annotations are not required. Second, we use a mixture-of-parts approach that allows part sharing among different aspects. Third, these proposals are integrated in a learning framework which also allows to incorporate real-world training data to perform domain adaptation between virtual- and real-world cameras. Overall, the obtained results on four popular on-board datasets show that our proposal clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art deformable part-based detector known as latent SVM.