Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been
a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labeled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment results introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Abstract: In this chapter, we introduce the problem of identity inference as a generalization of person re-identification. It is most appropriate to distinguish identity inference from re-identification in situations where a large number of observations must be identified without knowing a priori that groups of test images represent the same individual. The standard single- and multishot person re-identification common in the literature are special cases of our formulation. We present an approach to solving identity inference by modeling it as a labeling problem in a Conditional Random Field (CRF). The CRF model ensures that the final labeling gives similar labels to detections that are similar in feature space. Experimental results are given on the ETHZ, i-LIDS and CAVIAR datasets. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance for multishot re-identification, and our results on the more general identity inference problem demonstrate that we are able to infer the identity of very many examples even with very few labeled images in the gallery.

Abstract: Pedestrian Protection Systems (PPSs) are on-board systems aimed at detecting and tracking people in the surroundings of a vehicle in order to avoid potentially dangerous situations. These systems, together with other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane departure warning or adaptive cruise control, are one of the most promising ways to improve traffic safety. By the use of computer vision, cameras working either in the visible or infra-red spectra have been demonstrated as a reliable sensor to perform this task. Nevertheless, the variability of human’s appearance, not only in terms of clothing and sizes but also as a result of their dynamic shape, makes pedestrians one of the most complex classes even for computer vision. Moreover, the unstructured changing and unpredictable environment in which such on-board systems must work makes detection a difficult task to be carried out with the demanded robustness. In this brief, the state of the art in PPSs is introduced through the review of the most relevant papers of the last decade. A common computational architecture is presented as a framework to organize each method according to its main contribution. More than 300 papers are referenced, most of them addressing pedestrian detection and others corresponding to the descriptors (features), pedestrian models, and learning machines used. In addition, an overview of topics such as real-time aspects, systems benchmarking and future challenges of this research area are presented.

Abstract: A generic method for floor plan analysis and interpretation is presented in this article. The method, which is mainly inspired by the way engineers draw and interpret floor plans, applies two recognition steps in a bottom-up manner. First, basic building blocks, i.e., walls, doors, and windows are detected using a statistical patch-based segmentation approach. Second, a graph is generated, and structural pattern recognition techniques are applied to further locate the main entities, i.e., rooms of the building. The proposed approach is able to analyze any type of floor plan regardless of the notation used. We have evaluated our method on different publicly available datasets of real architectural floor plans with different notations. The overall detection and recognition accuracy is about 95 %, which is significantly better than any other state-of-the-art method. Our approach is generic enough such that it could be easily adopted to the recognition and interpretation of any other printed machine-generated structured documents.

Abstract: Most advanced driving assistance systems already include pedestrian detection systems. Unfortunately, there is still a tradeoff between precision and real time. For a reliable detection, excellent precision-recall such a tradeoff is needed to detect as many pedestrians as possible while, at the same time, avoiding too many false alarms; in addition, a very fast computation is needed for fast reactions to dangerous situations. Recently, novel approaches based on deformable templates have been proposed since these show a reasonable detection performance although they are computationally too expensive for real-time performance. In this paper, we present a system for pedestrian detection based on a hierarchical multiresolution part-based model. The proposed system is able to achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy due to the local deformations of the parts while exhibiting a speedup of more than one order of magnitude due to a fast coarse-to-fine inference technique. Moreover, our system explicitly infers the level of resolution available so that the detection of small examples is feasible with a very reduced computational cost. We conclude this contribution by presenting how a graphics processing unit-optimized implementation of our proposed system is suitable for real-time pedestrian detection in terms of both accuracy and speed.

Abstract: Nowadays, classifiers play a core role in many computer vision tasks. The underlying assumption for learning classifiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classifiers. However, in practice, there are different reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classifiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain)
is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this paper we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for object detection. In particular, we focus on a relatively unexplored scenario, i.e. incremental domain adaptation for object detection assuming weak-labeling. Therefore, our algorithm is ready to improve existing source-oriented DPM-based detectors as soon as a little amount of labeled target-domain training data is available, and keeps improving as more of such data arrives in a continuous fashion. For achieving this, we follow a multiple
instance learning (MIL) paradigm that operates in an incremental per-image basis. As proof of concept, we address the challenging scenario of adapting a DPM-based pedestrian detector trained with synthetic pedestrians to operate in real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that our incremental adaptive models obtain equally good accuracy results as the batch learned models, while being more flexible for handling continuously arriving target-domain data.