Chenshen Wu, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). Density Map Distillation for Incremental Object Counting. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 2505–2514).
Abstract: We investigate the problem of incremental learning for object counting, where a method must learn to count a variety of object classes from a sequence of datasets. A naïve approach to incremental object counting would suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where it would suffer from a dramatic performance drop on previous tasks. In this paper, we propose a new exemplar-free functional regularization method, called Density Map Distillation (DMD). During training, we introduce a new counter head for each task and introduce a distillation loss to prevent forgetting of previous tasks. Additionally, we introduce a cross-task adaptor that projects the features of the current backbone to the previous backbone. This projector allows for the learning of new features while the backbone retains the relevant features for previous tasks. Finally, we set up experiments of incremental learning for counting new objects. Results confirm that our method greatly reduces catastrophic forgetting and outperforms existing methods.
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). Robust Head Gestures Recognition for Assistive Technology. In Pattern Recognition (Vol. 8495, pp. 152–161). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: This paper presents a system capable of recognizing six head gestures: nodding, shaking, turning right, turning left, looking up, and looking down. The main difference of our system compared to other methods is that the Hidden Markov Models presented in this paper, are fully connected and consider all possible states in any given order, providing the following advantages to the system: (1) allows unconstrained movement of the head and (2) it can be easily integrated into a wearable device (e.g. glasses, neck-hung devices), in which case it can robustly recognize gestures in the presence of ego-motion. Experimental results show that this approach outperforms common methods that use restricted HMMs for each gesture.
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). New Opportunities for Computer Vision-Based Assistive Technology Systems for the Visually Impaired. COMP - Computer, 47(4), 52–58.
Abstract: Computing advances and increased smartphone use gives technology system designers greater flexibility in exploiting computer vision to support visually impaired users. Understanding these users' needs will certainly provide insight for the development of improved usability of computing devices.
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Bogdan Raducanu, Maria Elena Meza-de-Luna, & Joaquin Salas. (2016). Head-gestures mirroring detection in dyadic social linteractions with computer vision-based wearable devices. NEUCOM - Neurocomputing, 175(B), 866–876.
Abstract: During face-to-face human interaction, nonverbal communication plays a fundamental role. A relevant aspect that takes part during social interactions is represented by mirroring, in which a person tends to mimic the non-verbal behavior (head and body gestures, vocal prosody, etc.) of the counterpart. In this paper, we introduce a computer vision-based system to detect mirroring in dyadic social interactions with the use of a wearable platform. In our context, mirroring is inferred as simultaneous head noddings displayed by the interlocutors. Our approach consists of the following steps: (1) facial features extraction; (2) facial features stabilization; (3) head nodding recognition; and (4) mirroring detection. Our system achieves a mirroring detection accuracy of 72% on a custom mirroring dataset.
Keywords: Head gestures recognition; Mirroring detection; Dyadic social interaction analysis; Wearable devices
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Bogdan Raducanu, Maria Elena Meza-de-Luna, & Joaquin Salas. (2015). Evaluating Real-Time Mirroring of Head Gestures using Smart Glasses. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 452–460).
Abstract: Mirroring occurs when one person tends to mimic the non-verbal communication of their counterparts. Even though mirroring is a complex phenomenon, in this study, we focus on the detection of head-nodding as a simple non-verbal communication cue due to its significance as a gesture displayed during social interactions. This paper introduces a computer vision-based method to detect mirroring through the analysis of head gestures using wearable cameras (smart glasses). In addition, we study how such a method can be used to explore perceived competence. The proposed method has been evaluated and the experiments demonstrate how static and wearable cameras seem to be equally effective to gather the information required for the analysis.
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Maria Salamo, & Sergio Escalera. (2011). Increasing Retrieval Quality in Conversational Recommenders. TKDE - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 99, 1.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 2.286 2009 24/103
JCR Impact Factor 2010: 1.851
A major task of research in conversational recommender systems is personalization. Critiquing is a common and powerful form of feedback, where a user can express her feature preferences by applying a series of directional critiques over the recommendations instead of providing specific preference values. Incremental Critiquing is a conversational recommender system that uses critiquing as a feedback to efficiently personalize products. The expectation is that in each cycle the system retrieves the products that best satisfy the user’s soft product preferences from a minimal information input. In this paper, we present a novel technique that increases retrieval quality based on a combination of compatibility and similarity scores. Under the hypothesis that a user learns Turing the recommendation process, we propose two novel exponential reinforcement learning approaches for compatibility that take into account both the instant at which the user makes a critique and the number of satisfied critiques. Moreover, we consider that the impact of features on the similarity differs according to the preferences manifested by the user. We propose a global weighting approach that uses a common weight for nearest cases in order to focus on groups of relevant products. We show that our methodology significantly improves recommendation efficiency in four data sets of different sizes in terms of session length in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our recommender shows higher robustness against noisy user data when compared to classical approaches
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Daniela Rato, Miguel Oliveira, Vitor Santos, Manuel Gomes, & Angel Sappa. (2022). A sensor-to-pattern calibration framework for multi-modal industrial collaborative cells. JMANUFSYST - Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 64, 497–507.
Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.
Keywords: Calibration; Collaborative cell; Multi-modal; Multi-sensor
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Gemma Rotger, Felipe Lumbreras, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, & Antonio Agudo. (2018). 2D-to-3D Facial Expression Transfer. In 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2008–2013).
Abstract: Automatically changing the expression and physical features of a face from an input image is a topic that has been traditionally tackled in a 2D domain. In this paper, we bring this problem to 3D and propose a framework that given an
input RGB video of a human face under a neutral expression, initially computes his/her 3D shape and then performs a transfer to a new and potentially non-observed expression. For this purpose, we parameterize the rest shape –obtained from standard factorization approaches over the input video– using a triangular
mesh which is further clustered into larger macro-segments. The expression transfer problem is then posed as a direct mapping between this shape and a source shape, such as the blend shapes of an off-the-shelf 3D dataset of human facial expressions. The mapping is resolved to be geometrically consistent between 3D models by requiring points in specific regions to map on semantic
equivalent regions. We validate the approach on several synthetic and real examples of input faces that largely differ from the source shapes, yielding very realistic expression transfers even in cases with topology changes, such as a synthetic video sequence of a single-eyed cyclops.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2015). Multi-observation Face Recognition in Videos based on Label Propagation. In 6th Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures AMFG2015 (pp. 10–17).
Abstract: In order to deal with the huge amount of content generated by social media, especially for indexing and retrieval purposes, the focus shifted from single object recognition to multi-observation object recognition. Of particular interest is the problem of face recognition (used as primary cue for persons’ identity assessment), since it is highly required by popular social media search engines like Facebook and Youtube. Recently, several approaches for graph-based label propagation were proposed. However, the associated graphs were constructed in an ad-hoc manner (e.g., using the KNN graph) that cannot cope properly with the rapid and frequent changes in data appearance, a phenomenon intrinsically related with video sequences. In this paper, we
propose a novel approach for efficient and adaptive graph construction, based on a two-phase scheme: (i) the first phase is used to adaptively find the neighbors of a sample and also to find the adequate weights for the minimization function of the second phase; (ii) in the second phase, the
selected neighbors along with their corresponding weights are used to locally and collaboratively estimate the sparse affinity matrix weights. Experimental results performed on Honda Video Database (HVDB) and a subset of video
sequences extracted from the popular TV-series ’Friends’ show a distinct advantage of the proposed method over the existing standard graph construction methods.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Facial Expression Recognition based on Multi-view Observations with Application to Social Robotics. In 1st Workshop on Computer Vision for Affective Computing (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: Human-robot interaction is a hot topic nowadays in the social robotics community. One crucial aspect is represented by the affective communication which comes encoded through the facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for facial expression recognition, which exploits an efficient and adaptive graph-based label propagation (semi-supervised mode) in a multi-observation framework. The facial features are extracted using an appearance-based 3D face tracker, view- and texture independent. Our method has been extensively tested on the CMU dataset, and has been conveniently compared with other methods for graph construction. With the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the recognized facial
expression.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Embedding new observations via sparse-coding for non-linear manifold learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(1), 480–492.
Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.
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Cristina Palmero, Javier Selva, Mohammad Ali Bagheri, & Sergio Escalera. (2018). Recurrent CNN for 3D Gaze Estimation using Appearance and Shape Cues. In 29th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Gaze behavior is an important non-verbal cue in social signal processing and humancomputer interaction. In this paper, we tackle the problem of person- and head poseindependent 3D gaze estimation from remote cameras, using a multi-modal recurrent convolutional neural network (CNN). We propose to combine face, eyes region, and face landmarks as individual streams in a CNN to estimate gaze in still images. Then, we exploit the dynamic nature of gaze by feeding the learned features of all the frames in a sequence to a many-to-one recurrent module that predicts the 3D gaze vector of the last frame. Our multi-modal static solution is evaluated on a wide range of head poses and gaze directions, achieving a significant improvement of 14.6% over the state of the art on
EYEDIAP dataset, further improved by 4% when the temporal modality is included.
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Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, A. wilkins, & J. Harris. (2015). Uncomfortable images prevent lateral interactions in the cortex from providing a sparse code. In European Conference on Visual Perception ECVP2015.
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Xavier Otazu, Olivier Penacchio, & Xim Cerda-Company. (2015). An excitatory-inhibitory firing rate model accounts for brightness induction, colour induction and visual discomfort. In Barcelona Computational, Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience.
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Xavier Otazu, Olivier Penacchio, & Xim Cerda-Company. (2015). Brightness and colour induction through contextual influences in V1. In Scottish Vision Group 2015 SGV2015 (Vol. 12, pp. 1208–2012).
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