Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. From a purely computational perspective, we built a low-level computational model (CIWaM) of early sensory processing based on multi-resolution wavelets with the aim of replicating brightness and colour (Otazu et al., 2010, Journal of Vision, 10(12):5) induction effects. Furthermore, we successfully used the CIWaM architecture to define a computational saliency model (Murray et al, 2011, CVPR, 433-440; Vanrell et al, submitted to AVA/BMVA'12). From a biological perspective, neurophysiological evidence suggests that perceived brightness information may be explicitly represented in V1. In this work we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such effects. To this end, we consider the model by Z.Li (Li, 1999, Network:Comput. Neural Syst., 10, 187-212) which is based on biological data and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences, namely, layer 2-3 pyramidal cells, interneurons, and horizontal intracortical connections. This model has proven to account for phenomena such as visual saliency, which share with brightness induction the relevant effect of contextual influences (the ones modelled by CIWaM). In the proposed model, the input to the network is derived from a complete multiscale and multiorientation wavelet decomposition taken from the computational model (CIWaM).
This model successfully accounts for well known pyschophysical effects (among them: the White's and modied White's effects, the Todorovic, Chevreul, achromatic ring patterns, and grating induction effects) for static contexts and also for brigthness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. From a methodological point of view, we conclude that the results obtained by the computational model (CIWaM) are compatible with the ones obtained by the neurodynamical model proposed here.

Abstract: In this paper we propose the construction of a visual content layer which describes the visual appearance of geographic locations in a city. We captured, by means of a Mobile Mapping system, a huge set of georeferenced images (>500K) which cover the whole city of Barcelona. For each image, hundreds of region descriptions are computed off-line and described as a hash code. All this information is extracted without an object of reference, which allows to search for any type of objects using their visual appearance. A new Visual Content layer is built over Google Maps, allowing the object recognition information to be organized and fused with other content, like satellite images, street maps, and business locations.

Abstract: Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants and received 135 submissions from academia and industry, including 28 participants and 72 submissions for Task 1, and 25 participants and 63 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.

Abstract: This article describes a new collection of still image dataset which are dedicated to interactions between people. Human action recognition from still images have been a hot topic recently, but most of them are actions performed by a single person, like running, walking, riding bikes, phoning and so on and there is no interactions between people in one image. The dataset collected in this paper are concentrating on human interaction between two people aiming to explore this new topic in the research area of action recognition from still images.

Abstract: This article describes a novel approach to the modeling of human actions in 3D. The method we propose is based on a “bag of poses” model that represents human actions as histograms of key-pose occurrences over the course of a video sequence. Actions are first represented as 3D poses using a sequence of 36 direction cosines corresponding to the angles 12 joints form with the world coordinate frame in an articulated human body model. These pose representations are then projected to three-dimensional, action-specific principal eigenspaces which we refer to as aSpaces. We introduce a method for key-pose selection based on a local-motion energy optimization criterion and we show that this method is more stable and more resistant to noisy data than other key-poses selection criteria for action recognition.