Jose Manuel Alvarez, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Road Detection Based on Illuminant Invariance. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 12(1), 184–193.
Abstract: By using an onboard camera, it is possible to detect the free road surface ahead of the ego-vehicle. Road detection is of high relevance for autonomous driving, road departure warning, and supporting driver-assistance systems such as vehicle and pedestrian detection. The key for vision-based road detection is the ability to classify image pixels as belonging or not to the road surface. Identifying road pixels is a major challenge due to the intraclass variability caused by lighting conditions. A particularly difficult scenario appears when the road surface has both shadowed and nonshadowed areas. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach to vision-based road detection that is robust to shadows. The novelty of our approach relies on using a shadow-invariant feature space combined with a model-based classifier. The model is built online to improve the adaptability of the algorithm to the current lighting and the presence of other vehicles in the scene. The proposed algorithm works in still images and does not depend on either road shape or temporal restrictions. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on real-world road sequences with heavy traffic and shadows show that the method is robust to shadows and lighting variations. Moreover, the proposed method provides the highest performance when compared with hue-saturation-intensity (HSI)-based algorithms.
Keywords: road detection
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Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). On-board image-based vehicle detection and tracking. TIM - Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control, 33(7), 783–805.
Abstract: In this paper we present a computer vision system for daytime vehicle detection and localization, an essential step in the development of several types of advanced driver assistance systems. It has a reduced processing time and high accuracy thanks to the combination of vehicle detection with lane-markings estimation and temporal tracking of both vehicles and lane markings. Concerning vehicle detection, our main contribution is a frame scanning process that inspects images according to the geometry of image formation, and with an Adaboost-based detector that is robust to the variability in the different vehicle types (car, van, truck) and lighting conditions. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the most likely three-dimensional locations of vehicles on the road ahead. With regards to the lane-markings estimation component, we have two main contributions. First, we employ a different image feature to the other commonly used edges: we use ridges, which are better suited to this problem. Second, we adapt RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane markings to the image features. We qualitatively assess our vehicle detection system in sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. The processed videos are available on a web page associated with this paper. A quantitative evaluation of the system has shown quite accurate results (a low number of false positives and negatives) at a reasonable computation time.
Keywords: vehicle detection
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Muhammad Anwer Rao, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Opponent Colors for Human Detection. In J. Vitria, J.M. Sanches, & M. Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 363–370). LNCS. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.
Abstract: Human detection is a key component in fields such as advanced driving assistance and video surveillance. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. Finding good features to build human models for further detection is probably one of the most important issues to face. Currently, shape, texture and motion features have deserve extensive attention in the literature. However, color-based features, which are important in other domains (e.g., image categorization), have received much less attention. In fact, the use of RGB color space has become a kind of choice by default. The focus has been put in developing first and second order features on top of RGB space (e.g., HOG and co-occurrence matrices, resp.). In this paper we evaluate the opponent colors (OPP) space as a biologically inspired alternative for human detection. In particular, by feeding OPP space in the baseline framework of Dalal et al. for human detection (based on RGB, HOG and linear SVM), we will obtain better detection performance than by using RGB space. This is a relevant result since, up to the best of our knowledge, OPP space has not been previously used for human detection. This suggests that in the future it could be worth to compute co-occurrence matrices, self-similarity features, etc., also on top of OPP space, i.e., as we have done with HOG in this paper.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Color; Part Based Models
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Muhammad Anwer Rao, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Color Contribution to Part-Based Person Detection in Different Types of Scenarios. In W. Kropatsch A. Berciano H. Molina D. D. P. Real (Ed.), 14th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (Vol. 6855, pp. 463–470). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.
Abstract: Camera-based person detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications. The task is diffcult because the great variety of backgrounds (scenarios, illumination) in which persons are present, as well as their intra-class variability (pose, clothe, occlusion). In fact, the class person is one of the included in the popular PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) challenge. A breakthrough for this challenge, regarding person detection, is due to Felzenszwalb et al. These authors proposed a part-based detector that relies on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and latent support vector machines (LatSVM) to learn a model of the whole human body and its constitutive parts, as well as their relative position. Since the approach of Felzenszwalb et al. appeared new variants have been proposed, usually giving rise to more complex models. In this paper, we focus on an issue that has not attracted suficient interest up to now. In particular, we refer to the fact that HOG is usually computed from RGB color space, but other possibilities exist and deserve the corresponding investigation. In this paper we challenge RGB space with the opponent color space (OPP), which is inspired in the human vision system.We will compute the HOG on top of OPP, then we train and test the part-based human classifer by Felzenszwalb et al. using PASCAL VOC challenge protocols and person database. Our experiments demonstrate that OPP outperforms RGB. We also investigate possible differences among types of scenarios: indoor, urban and countryside. Interestingly, our experiments suggest that the beneficts of OPP with respect to RGB mainly come for indoor and countryside scenarios, those in which the human visual system was designed by evolution.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Color
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David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, Daniel Ponsa, & Javier Marin. (2011). Virtual Worlds and Active Learning for Human Detection. In 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 393–400). New York, NY, USA, USA: ACM DL.
Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications in fields such as advanced driving assistance, surveillance and media analysis. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. The most promising human detectors rely on classifiers developed in the discriminative paradigm, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labeling is a manual intensive step, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, some authors have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of rendered images, i.e., using realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera, or similar ones. Accordingly, in this paper we address the challenge of using a virtual world for gathering (while playing a videogame) a large amount of automatically labelled samples (virtual humans and background) and then training a classifier that performs equal, in real-world images, than the one obtained by equally training from manually labelled real-world samples. For doing that, we cast the problem as one of domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labelled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labelled samples we propose a non-standard active learning technique. Therefore, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual and real world labelled samples (Fig. 1), which has not been done before. We present quantitative results showing that this approach is valid.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Human detection; Virtual; Domain Adaptation; Active Learning
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David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, Daniel Ponsa, & Javier Marin. (2011). Cool world: domain adaptation of virtual and real worlds for human detection using active learning. In NIPS Domain Adaptation Workshop: Theory and Application. Granada, Spain.
Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest for different applications. The most promising human detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labelling is a manual intensive task, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, in Marin et al. we have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera and the same type of scenario. Accordingly, in Vazquez et al. we cast the problem as one of supervised domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labelled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labelled samples we use an active learning technique. Thus, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual- and real-world labelled samples which, to the best of our knowledge, was not done before. Here, we term such combined space cool world. In this extended abstract we summarize our proposal, and include quantitative results from Vazquez et al. showing its validity.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Virtual; Domain Adaptation; Active Learning
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Ruth Aylett, Ginevra Castellano, Bogdan Raducanu, Ana Paiva, & Marc Hanheide. (2011). Long-term socially perceptive and interactive robot companions: challenges and future perspectives. In 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 323–326). ACM.
Abstract: This paper gives a brief overview of the challenges for multi-model perception and generation applied to robot companions located in human social environments. It reviews the current position in both perception and generation and the immediate technical challenges and goes on to consider the extra issues raised by embodiment and social context. Finally, it briefly discusses the impact of systems that must function continually over months rather than just for a few hours.
Keywords: human-robot interaction, multimodal interaction, social robotics
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Oscar Amoros, Sergio Escalera, & Anna Puig. (2011). Adaboost GPU-based Classifier for Direct Volume Rendering. In International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (pp. 215–219).
Abstract: In volume visualization, the voxel visibitity and materials are carried out through an interactive editing of Transfer Function. In this paper, we present a two-level GPU-based labeling method that computes in times of rendering a set of labeled structures using the Adaboost machine learning classifier. In a pre-processing step, Adaboost trains a binary classifier from a pre-labeled dataset and, in each sample, takes into account a set of features. This binary classifier is a weighted combination of weak classifiers, which can be expressed as simple decision functions estimated on a single feature values. Then, at the testing stage, each weak classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabeled samples. We propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allow a GPU-based parallelizated testing stage embedded into the visualization pipeline. The empirical results confirm the OpenCL-based classification of biomedical datasets as a tough problem where an opportunity for further research emerges.
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Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2011). A Non-Rigid Feature Extraction Method for Shape Recognition. In 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 987–991).
Abstract: This paper presents a methodology for shape recognition that focuses on dealing with the difficult problem of large deformations. The proposed methodology consists in a novel feature extraction technique, which uses a non-rigid representation adaptable to the shape. This technique employs a deformable grid based on the computation of geometrical centroids that follows a region partitioning algorithm. Then, a feature vector is extracted by computing pixel density measures around these geometrical centroids. The result is a shape descriptor that adapts its representation to the given shape and encodes the pixel density distribution. The validity of the method when dealing with large deformations has been experimentally shown over datasets composed of handwritten shapes. It has been applied to signature verification and shape recognition tasks demonstrating high accuracy and low computational cost.
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Murad Al Haj, Carles Fernandez, Zhanwu Xiong, Ivan Huerta, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2011). Beyond the Static Camera: Issues and Trends in Active Vision. In Th.B. Moeslund, A. Hilton, V. Krüger, & L. Sigal (Eds.), Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People (pp. 11–30). Springer London.
Abstract: Maximizing both the area coverage and the resolution per target is highly desirable in many applications of computer vision. However, with a limited number of cameras viewing a scene, the two objectives are contradictory. This chapter is dedicated to active vision systems, trying to achieve a trade-off between these two aims and examining the use of high-level reasoning in such scenarios. The chapter starts by introducing different approaches to active cameras configurations. Later, a single active camera system to track a moving object is developed, offering the reader first-hand understanding of the issues involved. Another section discusses practical considerations in building an active vision platform, taking as an example a multi-camera system developed for a European project. The last section of the chapter reflects upon the future trends of using semantic factors to drive smartly coordinated active systems.
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Marina Alberti, Carlo Gatta, Simone Balocco, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Joana Silva, et al. (2011). Automatic Branching Detection in IVUS Sequences. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Raposo, & Mario Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 126–133). LNCS. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Atherosclerosis is a vascular pathology affecting the arterial walls, generally located in specific vessel sites, such as bifurcations. In this paper, for the first time, a fully automatic approach for the detection of bifurcations in IVUS pullback sequences is presented. The method identifies the frames and the angular sectors in which a bifurcation is visible. This goal is achieved by applying a classifier to a set of textural features extracted from each image of an IVUS pullback. A comparison between two state-of-the-art classifiers is performed, AdaBoost and Random Forest. A cross-validation scheme is applied in order to evaluate the performances of the approaches. The obtained results are encouraging, showing a sensitivity of 75% and an accuracy of 94% by using the AdaBoost algorithm.
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Ariel Amato, Mikhail Mozerov, Andrew Bagdanov, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Accurate Moving Cast Shadow Suppression Based on Local Color Constancy detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(10), 2954–2966.
Abstract: This paper describes a novel framework for detection and suppression of properly shadowed regions for most possible scenarios occurring in real video sequences. Our approach requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene, the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. We show how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that our approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.
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Jon Almazan, Ernest Valveny, & Alicia Fornes. (2011). Deforming the Blurred Shape Model for Shape Description and Recognition. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Raposo, & Mario Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 1–8). LNCS. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the description and recognition of distorted shapes, where the image is represented by a pixel density distribution based on the Blurred Shape Model combined with a non-linear image deformation model. This leads to an adaptive structure able to capture elastic deformations in shapes. This method has been evaluated using thee different datasets where deformations are present, showing the robustness and good performance of the new model. Moreover, we show that incorporating deformation and flexibility, the new model outperforms the BSM approach when classifying shapes with high variability of appearance.
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Minimal Design of Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 33(6), 693–702.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the pattern recognition field. In literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers. In this scope, the Error-correcting output codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a minimal design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best minimal ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI datasets and different multi-class computer vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.
Keywords: Multi-class classification; Error-correcting output codes; Ensemble of classifiers
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Oriol Pujol, Jordi Vitria, & Petia Radeva. (2011). On the Design of Low Redundancy Error-Correcting Output Codes. In Ensembles in Machine Learning Applications (Vol. 373, pp. 21–38). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the Pattern Recognition field. In the literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers . In this scope, the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most of the state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a compact design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best compact ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI data sets and different multi-class Computer Vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than the state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.
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