Abstract: Psychological evidence has emphasized the importance of affective behaviour understanding due to its high impact in nowadays interaction humans and computers. All
type of affective and behavioural patterns such as gestures, emotions and mental
states are highly displayed through the face, head and body. Therefore, this thesis is
focused to analyse affective behaviours on head and face. To this end, head and facial
movements are encoded by using appearance based tracking methods. Specifically,
a wise combination of deformable models captures rigid and non-rigid movements of
different kinematics; 3D head pose, eyebrows, mouth, eyelids and irises are taken into
account as basis for extracting features from databases of video sequences. This approach combines the strengths of adaptive appearance models, optimization methods
and backtracking techniques.
For about thirty years, computer sciences have addressed the investigation on
human emotions to the automatic recognition of six prototypic emotions suggested
by Darwin and systematized by Paul Ekman in the seventies. The Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) which uses discrete movements of the face (called Action
units or AUs) to code the six facial emotions named anger, disgust, fear, happy-Joy,
sadness and surprise. However, human emotions are much complex patterns that
have not received the same attention from computer scientists.
Simon Baron-Cohen proposed a new taxonomy of emotions and mental states
without a system coding of the facial actions. These 426 affective behaviours are
more challenging for the understanding of human emotions. Beyond of classically
classifying the six basic facial expressions, more subtle gestures, facial actions and
spontaneous emotions are considered here. By assessing confidence on the recognition
results, exploring spatial and temporal relationships of the features, some methods are
combined and enhanced for developing new taxonomy of expressions and emotions.
The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computer vision system, including both facial feature extraction, expression recognition and emotion understanding
by building a bottom-up reasoning process. Building a detailed taxonomy of human
affective behaviours is an interesting challenge for head-face-based image analysis
methods. In this paper, we exploit the strengths of Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) to enhance an on-line head-face tracker. A relationship between head pose and
local facial movements is studied according to their cognitive interpretation on affective expressions and emotions. Active Shape Models are synthesized for AAMs based
on CCA-regression. Head pose and facial actions are fused into a maximally correlated space in order to assess expressiveness, confidence and classification in a CBR system. The CBR solutions are also correlated to the cognitive features, which allow
avoiding exhaustive search when recognizing new head-face features. Subsequently,
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayesian Networks are applied for learning the
spatial relationships of facial expressions. Similarly, the temporal evolution of facial
expressions, emotion and mental states are analysed based on Factorized Dynamic
Bayesian Networks (FaDBN).
As results, the bottom-up system recognizes six facial expressions, six basic emotions and six mental states, plus enhancing this categorization with confidence assessment at each level, intensity of expressions and a complete taxonomy

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task where given an image and a natural language question, the objective is to generate a natural language answer. At the intersection between computer vision and natural language processing, this task can be seen as a measure of image understanding capabilities, as it requires to reason about objects, actions, colors, positions, the relations between the different elements as well as commonsense reasoning, world knowledge, arithmetic skills and natural language understanding. However, even though the text present in the images conveys important semantically rich information that is explicit and not available in any other form, most VQA methods remained illiterate, largely
ignoring the text despite its potential significance. In this thesis, we set out on a journey to bring reading capabilities to computer vision models applied to the VQA task, creating new datasets and methods that can read, reason and integrate the text with other visual cues in natural scene images and documents.
In Chapter 3, we address the combination of scene text with visual information to fully understand all the nuances of natural scene images. To achieve this objective, we define a new sub-task of VQA that requires reading the text in the image, and highlight the limitations of the current methods. In addition, we propose a new architecture that integrates both modalities and jointly reasons about textual and visual features. In Chapter 5, we shift the domain of VQA with reading capabilities and apply it on scanned industry document images, providing a high-level end-purpose perspective to Document Understanding, which has been
primarily focused on digitizing the document’s contents and extracting key values without considering the ultimate purpose of the extracted information. For this, we create a dataset which requires methods to reason about the unique and challenging elements of documents, such as text, images, tables, graphs and complex layouts, to provide accurate answers in natural language. However, we observed that explicit visual features provide a slight contribution in the overall performance, since the main information is usually conveyed within the text and its position. In consequence, in Chapter 6, we propose VQA on infographic images, seeking for document images with more visually rich elements that require to fully exploit visual information in order to answer the questions. We show the performance gap of
different methods when used over industry scanned and infographic images, and propose a new method that integrates the visual features in early stages, which allows the transformer architecture to exploit the visual features during the self-attention operation. Instead, in Chapter 7, we apply VQA on a big collection of single-page documents, where the methods must find which documents are relevant to answer the question, and provide the answer itself. Finally, in Chapter 8, mimicking real-world application problems where systems must process documents with multiple pages, we address the multipage document visual question answering task. We demonstrate the limitations of existing methods, including models specifically designed to process long sequences. To overcome these limitations, we propose
a hierarchical architecture that can process long documents, answer questions, and provide the index of the page where the information to answer the question is located as an explainability measure.

Abstract: The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.

Abstract: Recognizing object categories in real world images is a challenging problem in computer vision. The deformable part based framework is currently the most successful approach for object detection. Generally, HOG are used for image representation within the part-based framework. For action recognition, the bag-of-word framework has shown to provide promising results. Within the bag-of-words framework, local image patches are described by SIFT descriptor. Contrary to object detection and action recognition, combining color and shape has shown to provide the best performance for object and scene recognition.
In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the problem of person detection in still images. Standard person detection approaches rely on intensity based features for image representation while ignoring the color. Channel based descriptors is one of the most commonly used approaches in object recognition. This inspires us to evaluate incorporating color information using the channel based fusion approach for the task of person detection.
In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of object detection in still images. Due to high dimensionality, channel based fusion increases the computational cost. Moreover, channel based fusion has been found to obtain inferior results for object category where one of the visual varies significantly. On the other hand, late fusion is known to provide improved results for a wide range of object categories. A consequence of late fusion strategy is the need of a pure color descriptor. Therefore, we propose to use Color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact and computationally efficient. Consequently color attributes are combined with traditional shape features providing excellent results for object detection task.
Finally, we focus on the problem of action detection and classification in still images. We investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in still images. We also evaluate different fusion approaches for combining color and shape information for action recognition. Additionally, an analysis is performed to validate the contribution of color for action recognition. Our results clearly demonstrate that combining color and shape information significantly improve the performance of both action classification and detection in still images.

Abstract: From the early stages of Computer Vision, scene reconstruction has been one of the most studied topics leading to a wide variety of new discoveries and applications. Object grasping and manipulation, localization and mapping, or even visual effect generation are different examples of applications in which scene reconstruction has taken an important role for industries such as robotics, factory automation, or audio visual production. However, scene reconstruction is an extensive topic that can be approached in many different ways with already existing solutions that effectively work in controlled environments. Formally, the problem of scene reconstruction can be formulated as a sequence of independent processes which compose a pipeline. In this thesis, we analyse some parts of the reconstruction pipeline from which we contribute with novel methods using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) proposing innovative solutions that consider the optimisation of the methods in an end-to-end fashion. First, we review the state of the art of classical local features detectors and descriptors and contribute with two novel methods that inherently improve pre-existing solutions in the scene reconstruction pipeline.
It is a fact that computer science and software engineering are two fields that usually go hand in hand and evolve according to mutual needs making easier the design of complex and efficient algorithms. For this reason, we contribute with Kornia, a library specifically designed to work with classical computer vision techniques along with deep neural networks. In essence, we created a framework that eases the design of complex pipelines for computer vision algorithms so that can be included within neural networks and be used to backpropagate gradients throw a common optimisation framework. Finally, in the last chapter of this thesis we develop the aforementioned concept of designing end-to-end systems with classical projective geometry. Thus, we contribute with a solution to the problem of synthetic view generation by hallucinating novel views from high deformable cloths objects using a geometry aware end-to-end system. To summarize, in this thesis we demonstrate that with a proper design that combine classical geometric computer vision methods with deep learning techniques can lead to improve pre-existing solutions for the problem of scene reconstruction.

Abstract: To recognise objects is perhaps the most important task an autonomous system, either biological or artificial needs to perform. In the context of human vision, this is partly achieved by recognizing the colour of surfaces despite changes in the wavelength distribution of the illumination, a property called colour constancy. Correct surface colour recognition may be adequately accomplished by colour category matching without the need to match colours precisely, therefore categorical colour constancy is likely to play an important role for object identification to be successful. The main aim of this work is to study the relationship between colour constancy and categorical colour perception. Previous studies of colour constancy have shown the influence of factors such the spatio-chromatic properties of the background, individual observer's performance, semantics, etc. However there is very little systematic study of these influences. To this end, we developed a new approach to colour constancy which includes both individual observers' categorical perception, the categorical structure of the background, and their interrelations resulting in a more comprehensive characterization of the phenomenon. In our study, we first developed a new method to analyse the categorical structure of 3D colour space, which allowed us to characterize individual categorical colour perception as well as quantify inter-individual variations in terms of shape and centroid location of 3D categorical regions. Second, we developed a new colour constancy paradigm, termed chromatic setting, which allows measuring the precise location of nine categorically-relevant points in colour space under immersive illumination. Additionally, we derived from these measurements a new colour constancy index which takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift, memory effects and the interrelations among colours and a model of colour naming tuned to each observer/adaptation state. Our results lead to the following conclusions: (1) There exists large inter-individual variations in the categorical structure of colour space, and thus colour naming ability varies significantly but this is not well predicted by low-level chromatic discrimination ability; (2) Analysis of the average colour naming space suggested the need for an additional three basic colour terms (turquoise, lilac and lime) for optimal colour communication; (3) Chromatic setting improved the precision of more complex linear colour constancy models and suggested that mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain colour constancy; (4) The categorical structure of colour space is broadly stable under illuminant changes for categorically balanced backgrounds; (5) Categorical inconstancy exists for categorically unbalanced backgrounds thus indicating that categorical information perceived in the initial stages of adaptation may constrain further categorical perception.

Abstract: Handwritten word-spotting (HWS) is the pattern analysis task that consists in finding keywords in handwritten document images. So far, HWS has been applied mostly to historical documents in order to build search engines for such image collections. This thesis addresses the problem of word-spotting for detecting important keywords in business documents. This is a first step towards the process of automatic routing of correspondence based on content.
However, the application of traditional HWS techniques fails for this type of documents. As opposed to historical documents, real business documents present a very high variability in terms of writing styles, spontaneous writing, crossed-out words, spelling mistakes, etc. The main goal of this thesis is the development of pattern recognition techniques that lead to a high-performance HWS system for this challenging type of data.
We develop a statistical framework in which word models are expressed in terms of hidden Markov models and the a priori information is encoded in a universal vocabulary of Gaussian codewords. This systems leads to a very robust performance in word-spotting task. We also find that by constraining the word models to the universal vocabulary, the a priori information of the problem of interest can be exploited for developing new contributions. These include a novel writer adaptation method, a system for searching handwritten words by generating typed text images, and a novel model-based similarity between feature vector sequences.