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Author Dena Bazazian edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Fully Convolutional Networks for Text Understanding in Scene Images Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.
 
  Address November 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas;Andrew Bagdanov  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-1-1 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Baz2018 Serial 3220  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Parichehr Behjati Ardakani edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Towards Efficient and Robust Convolutional Neural Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution Type Book Whole
  Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing which aims to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has witnessed great strides with the rapid development of deep learning. Recent advances in SISR are mostly devoted to designing deeper and wider networks to enhance their representation learning capacity. However, as the depth of networks increases, deep learning-based methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. Moreover, most existing methods rarely leverage the intermediate features and also do not discriminate the computation of features by their frequencial components, thereby achieving relatively low performance. Aside from the aforementioned problems, another desired ability is to upsample images to arbitrary scales using a single model. Most current SISR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose solutions to them: i) We present a novel frequency-based enhancement block which treats different frequencies in a heterogeneous way and also models inter-channel dependencies, which consequently enrich the output feature. Thus it helps the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. ii) We introduce OverNet which contains two main parts: a lightweight feature extractor that follows a novel recursive framework of skip and dense connections to reduce low-level feature degradation, and an overscaling module that generates an accurate SR image by internally constructing an overscaled intermediate representation of the output features. Then, to solve the problem of reconstruction at arbitrary scale factors, we introduce a novel multi-scale loss, that allows the simultaneous training of all scale factors using a single model. iii) We propose a directional variance attention network which leverages a novel attention mechanism to enhance features in different channels and spatial regions. Moreover, we introduce a novel procedure for using attention mechanisms together with residual blocks to facilitate the preservation of finer details. Finally, we demonstrate that our approaches achieve considerably better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both quantitative and visual quality.  
  Address April, 2022  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca;Pau Rodriguez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-1-7 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ISE Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Beh2022 Serial 3713  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Shida Beigpour edit  openurl
  Title Illumination and object reflectance modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes CIC Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Bei2013 Serial 2267  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jorge Bernal edit  openurl
  Title Polyp Localization and Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images by Means of a Model of Appearance for Polyps Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer death worldwide and its survival rate depends on the stage in which it is detected on hence the necessity for an early colon screening. There are several screening techniques but colonoscopy is still nowadays the gold standard, although it has some drawbacks such as the miss rate. Our contribution, in the field of intelligent systems for colonoscopy, aims at providing a polyp localization and a polyp segmentation system based on a model of appearance for polyps. To develop both methods we define a model of appearance for polyps, which describes a polyp as enclosed by intensity valleys. The novelty of our contribution resides on the fact that we include in our model aspects of the image formation and we also consider the presence of other elements from the endoluminal scene such as specular highlights and blood vessels, which have an impact on the performance of our methods. In order to develop our polyp localization method we accumulate valley information in order to generate energy maps, which are also used to guide the polyp segmentation. Our methods achieve promising results in polyp localization and segmentation. As we want to explore the usability of our methods we present a comparative analysis between physicians fixations obtained via an eye tracking device and our polyp localization method. The results show that our method is indistinguishable to novice physicians although it is far from expert physicians.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor F. Javier Sanchez;Fernando Vilariño  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area 800 Expedition Conference  
  Notes MV Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Ber2012 Serial 2211  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author David Berga edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Understanding Eye Movements: Psychophysics and a Model of Primary Visual Cortex Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Humansmove their eyes in order to learn visual representations of the world. These eye movements depend on distinct factors, either by the scene that we perceive or by our own decisions. To select what is relevant to attend is part of our survival mechanisms and the way we build reality, as we constantly react both consciously and unconsciously to all the stimuli that is projected into our eyes. In this thesis we try to explain (1) how we move our eyes, (2) how to build machines that understand visual information and deploy eyemovements, and (3) how to make these machines understand tasks in order to decide for eye movements.
(1) We provided the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of 230 synthetically-generated image patterns. A total of 15 types of stimuli has been generated (e.g. orientation, brightness, color, size, etc.), with 7 feature contrasts for each feature category. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of the dataset, using Free-Viewing and Visual Search task instructions. Results showed that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. Temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. From such dataset (SID4VAM), we have computed a benchmark of saliency models by testing performance using psychophysical patterns. Model performance has been evaluated considering model inspiration and consistency with human psychophysics. Our study reveals that state-of-the-art Deep Learning saliency models do not performwell with synthetic pattern images, instead, modelswith Spectral/Fourier inspiration outperform others in saliency metrics and are more consistent with human psychophysical experimentation.
(2) Computations in the primary visual cortex (area V1 or striate cortex) have long been hypothesized to be responsible, among several visual processing mechanisms, of bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). In order to validate this hypothesis, images from eye tracking datasets have been processed with a biologically plausible model of V1 (named Neurodynamic SaliencyWaveletModel or NSWAM). Following Li’s neurodynamic model, we define V1’s lateral connections with a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation and scale. Early subcortical processes (i.e. retinal and thalamic) are functionally simulated. The resulting saliency maps are generated from the model output, representing the neuronal activity of V1 projections towards brain areas involved in eye movement control. We want to pinpoint that our unified computational architecture is able to reproduce several visual processes (i.e. brightness, chromatic induction and visual discomfort) without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parametrization. The model has been extended (NSWAM-CM) with an implementation of the cortical magnification function to define the retinotopical projections towards V1, processing neuronal activity for each distinct view during scene observation. Novel computational definitions of top-down inhibition (in terms of inhibition of return and selection mechanisms), are also proposed to predict attention in Free-Viewing and Visual Search conditions. Results show that our model outperforms other biologically-inpired models of saliency prediction as well as to predict visual saccade sequences, specifically for nature and synthetic images. We also show how temporal and spatial characteristics of inhibition of return can improve prediction of saccades, as well as how distinct search strategies (in terms of feature-selective or category-specific inhibition) predict attention at distinct image contexts.
(3) Although previous scanpath models have been able to efficiently predict saccades during Free-Viewing, it is well known that stimulus and task instructions can strongly affect eye movement patterns. In particular, task priming has been shown to be crucial to the deployment of eye movements, involving interactions between brain areas related to goal-directed behavior, working and long-termmemory in combination with stimulus-driven eyemovement neuronal correlates. In our latest study we proposed an extension of the Selective Tuning Attentive Reference Fixation ControllerModel based on task demands (STAR-FCT), describing novel computational definitions of Long-TermMemory, Visual Task Executive and Task Working Memory. With these modules we are able to use textual instructions in order to guide the model to attend to specific categories of objects and/or places in the scene. We have designed our memorymodel by processing a visual hierarchy of low- and high-level features. The relationship between the executive task instructions and the memory representations has been specified using a tree of semantic similarities between the learned features and the object category labels. Results reveal that by using this model, the resulting object localizationmaps and predicted saccades have a higher probability to fall inside the salient regions depending on the distinct task instructions compared to saliency.
 
  Address July 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-8-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes NEUROBIT Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Ber2019 Serial 3390  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Albert Berenguel edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Analysis of background textures in banknotes and identity documents for counterfeit detection Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Counterfeiting and piracy are a form of theft that has been steadily growing in recent years. A counterfeit is an unauthorized reproduction of an authentic/genuine object. Banknotes and identity documents are two common objects of counterfeiting. The former is used by organized criminal groups to finance a variety of illegal activities or even to destabilize entire countries due the inflation effect. Generally, in order to run their illicit businesses, counterfeiters establish companies and bank accounts using fraudulent identity documents. The illegal activities generated by counterfeit banknotes and identity documents has a damaging effect on business, the economy and the general population. To fight against counterfeiters, governments and authorities around the globe cooperate and develop security features to protect their security documents. Many of the security features in identity documents can also be found in banknotes. In this dissertation we focus our efforts in detecting the counterfeit banknotes and identity documents by analyzing the security features at the background printing. Background areas on secure documents contain fine-line patterns and designs that are difficult to reproduce without the manufacturers cutting-edge printing equipment. Our objective is to find the loose of resolution between the genuine security document and the printed counterfeit version with a publicly available commercial printer. We first present the most complete survey to date in identity and banknote security features. The compared algorithms and systems are based on computer vision and machine learning. Then we advance to present the banknote and identity counterfeit dataset we have built and use along all this thesis. Afterwards, we evaluate and adapt algorithms in the literature for the security background texture analysis. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness, computational efficiency and applicability into a real and non-controlled industrial scenario, proposing key insights to use these algorithms. Next, within the industrial environment of this thesis, we build a complete service oriented architecture to detect counterfeit documents. The mobile application and the server framework intends to be used even by non-expert document examiners to spot counterfeits. Later, we re-frame the problem of background texture counterfeit detection as a full-reference game of spotting the differences, by alternating glimpses between a counterfeit and a genuine background using recurrent neural networks. Finally, we deal with the lack of counterfeit samples, studying different approaches based on anomaly detection.  
  Address November 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Oriol Ramos Terrades;Josep Llados  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-2-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.140; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Ber2019 Serial 3395  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ali Furkan Biten edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title A Bitter-Sweet Symphony on Vision and Language: Bias and World Knowledge Type Book Whole
  Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas;Lluis Gomez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-5-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Bit2022 Serial 3755  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Manuel Carbonell edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Neural Information Extraction from Semi-structured Documents A Type Book Whole
  Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Sectors as fintech, legaltech or insurance process an inflow of millions of forms, invoices, id documents, claims or similar every day. Together with these, historical archives provide gigantic amounts of digitized documents containing useful information that needs to be stored in machine encoded text with a meaningful structure. This procedure, known as information extraction (IE) comprises the steps of localizing and recognizing text, identifying named entities contained in it and optionally finding relationships among its elements. In this work we explore multi-task neural models at image and graph level to solve all steps in a unified way. While doing so we find benefits and limitations of these end-to-end approaches in comparison with sequential separate methods. More specifically, we first propose a method to produce textual as well as semantic labels with a unified model from handwritten text line images. We do so with the use of a convolutional recurrent neural model trained with connectionist temporal classification to predict the textual as well as semantic information encoded in the images. Secondly, motivated by the success of this approach we investigate the unification of the localization and recognition tasks of handwritten text in full pages with an end-to-end model, observing benefits in doing so. Having two models that tackle information extraction subsequent task pairs in an end-to-end to end manner, we lastly contribute with a method to put them all together in a single neural network to solve the whole information extraction pipeline in a unified way. Doing so we observe some benefits and some limitations in the approach, suggesting that in certain cases it is beneficial to train specialized models that excel at a single challenging task of the information extraction process, as it can be the recognition of named entities or the extraction of relationships between them. For this reason we lastly study the use of the recently arrived graph neural network architectures for the semantic tasks of the information extraction process, which are recognition of named entities and relation extraction, achieving promising results on the relation extraction part.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Alicia Fornes;Mauricio Villegas;Josep Llados  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-1-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Car20 Serial 3483  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Xim Cerda-Company edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Understanding color vision: from psychophysics to computational modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this PhD we have approached the human color vision from two different points of view: psychophysics and computational modeling. First, we have evaluated 15 different tone-mapping operators (TMOs). We have conducted two experiments that
consider two different criteria: the first one evaluates the local relationships among intensity levels and the second one evaluates the global appearance of the tonemapped imagesw.r.t. the physical one (presented side by side). We conclude that the rankings depend on the criterion and they are not correlated. Considering both criteria, the best TMOs are KimKautz (Kim and Kautz, 2008) and Krawczyk (Krawczyk, Myszkowski, and Seidel, 2005). Another conclusion is that a more standardized evaluation criteria is needed to do a fair comparison among TMOs.
Secondly, we have conducted several psychophysical experiments to study the
color induction. We have studied two different properties of the visual stimuli: temporal frequency and luminance spatial distribution. To study the temporal frequency we defined equiluminant stimuli composed by both uniform and striped surrounds and we flashed them varying the flash duration. For uniform surrounds, the results show that color induction depends on both the flash duration and inducer’s chromaticity. As expected, in all chromatic conditions color contrast was induced. In contrast, for striped surrounds, we expected to induce color assimilation, but we observed color contrast or no induction. Since similar but not equiluminant striped stimuli induce color assimilation, we concluded that luminance differences could be a key factor to induce color assimilation. Thus, in a subsequent study, we have studied the luminance differences’ effect on color assimilation. We varied the luminance difference between the target region and its inducers and we observed that color assimilation depends on both this difference and the inducer’s chromaticity. For red-green condition (where the first inducer is red and the second one is green), color assimilation occurs in almost all luminance conditions.
Instead, for green-red condition, color assimilation never occurs. Purple-lime
and lime-purple chromatic conditions show that luminance difference is a key factor to induce color assimilation. When the target is darker than its surround, color assimilation is stronger in purple-lime, while when the target is brighter, color assimilation is stronger in lime-purple (’mirroring’ effect). Moreover, we evaluated whether color assimilation is due to luminance or brightness differences. Similarly to equiluminance condition, when the stimuli are equibrightness no color assimilation is induced. Our results support the hypothesis that mutual-inhibition plays a major role in color perception, or at least in color induction.
Finally, we have defined a new firing rate model of color processing in the V1
parvocellular pathway. We have modeled two different layers of this cortical area: layers 4Cb and 2/3. Our model is a recurrent dynamic computational model that considers both excitatory and inhibitory cells and their lateral connections. Moreover, it considers the existent laminar differences and the cells’ variety. Thus, we have modeled both single- and double-opponent simple cells and complex cells, which are a pool of double-opponent simple cells. A set of sinusoidal drifting gratings have been used to test the architecture. In these gratings we have varied several spatial properties such as temporal and spatial frequencies, grating’s area and orientation. To reproduce the electrophysiological observations, the architecture has to consider the existence of non-oriented double-opponent cells in layer 4Cb and the lack of lateral connections between single-opponent cells. Moreover, we have tested our lateral connections simulating the center-surround modulation and we have reproduced physiological measurements where for high contrast stimulus, the
result of the lateral connections is inhibitory, while it is facilitatory for low contrast stimulus.
 
  Address March 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-4-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes NEUROBIT Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Cer2019 Serial 3259  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Bhaskar Chakraborty edit  openurl
  Title Model free approach to human action recognition Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Automatic understanding of human activity and action is very important and challenging research area of Computer Vision with wide applications in video surveillance, motion analysis, virtual reality interfaces, video indexing, content based video retrieval, HCI and health care. This thesis presents a series of techniques to solve the problem of human action recognition in video. First approach towards this goal is based on a probabilistic optimization model of body parts using Hidden Markov Model. This strong model based approach is able to distinguish between similar actions by only considering the body parts having major contributions to the actions. In next approach, we apply a weak model based human detector and actions are represented by Bag-of-key poses model to capture the human pose changes during the actions. To tackle the problem of human action recognition in complex scenes, a selective spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) detector is proposed by using a mechanism similar to that of the non-classical receptive field inhibition that is exhibited by most oriented selective neuron in the primary visual cortex. An extension of the selective STIP detector is applied to multi-view action recognition system by introducing a novel 4D STIPs (3D space + time). Finally, we use our STIP detector on large scale continuous visual event recognition problem and propose a novel generalized max-margin Hough transformation framework for activity detection  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ISE Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Cha2012 Serial 2207  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Diego Alejandro Cheda edit  openurl
  Title Monocular Depth Cues in Computer Vision Applications Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.

In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.

In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Daniel Ponsa;Antonio Lopez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Che2012 Serial 2210  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Antonio Clavelli edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title A computational model of eye guidance, searching for text in real scene images Type Book Whole
  Year 2014 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Searching for text objects in real scene images is an open problem and a very active computer vision research area. A large number of methods have been proposed tackling the text search as extension of the ones from the document analysis field or inspired by general purpose object detection methods. However the general problem of object search in real scene images remains an extremely challenging problem due to the huge variability in object appearance. This thesis builds on top of the most recent findings in the visual attention literature presenting a novel computational model of eye guidance aiming to better describe text object search in real scene images.
First are presented the relevant state-of-the-art results from the visual attention literature regarding eye movements and visual search. Relevant models of attention are discussed and integrated with recent observations on the role of top-down constraints and the emerging need for a layered model of attention in which saliency is not the only factor guiding attention. Visual attention is then explained by the interaction of several modulating factors, such as objects, value, plans and saliency. Then we introduce our probabilistic formulation of attention deployment in real scene. The model is based on the rationale that oculomotor control depends on two interacting but distinct processes: an attentional process that assigns value to the sources of information and motor process that flexibly links information with action.
In such framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the reward of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects.
In the experimental section the model is tested in laboratory condition, comparing model simulations with data from eye tracking experiments. The comparison is qualitative in terms of observable scan paths and quantitative in terms of statistical similarity of gaze shift amplitude. Experiments are performed using eye tracking data from both a publicly available dataset of face and text and from newly performed eye-tracking experiments on a dataset of street view pictures containing text. The last part of this thesis is dedicated to study the extent to which the proposed model can account for human eye movements in a low constrained setting. We used a mobile eye tracking device and an ad-hoc developed methodology to compare model simulated eye data with the human eye data from mobile eye tracking recordings. Such setting allow to test the model in an incomplete visual information condition, reproducing a close to real-life search task.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas;Giuseppe Boccignone;Josep Llados  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-940902-6-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.077 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Cla2014 Serial 2571  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Felipe Codevilla edit  openurl
  Title On Building End-to-End Driving Models Through Imitation Learning Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.
 
  Address May 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Cod2019 Serial 3387  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Francisco Cruz edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Probabilistic Graphical Models for Document Analysis Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.

Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.

In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Oriol Ramos Terrades  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-2-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Cru2016 Serial 2861  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Sounak Dey edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Mapping between Images and Conceptual Spaces: Sketch-based Image Retrieval Type Book Whole
  Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract This thesis presents several contributions to the literature of sketch based image retrieval (SBIR). In SBIR the first challenge we face is how to map two different domains to common space for effective retrieval of images, while tackling the different levels of abstraction people use to express their notion of objects around while sketching. To this extent we first propose a cross-modal learning framework that maps both sketches and text into a joint embedding space invariant to depictive style, while preserving semantics. Then we have also investigated different query types possible to encompass people's dilema in sketching certain world objects. For this we propose an approach for multi-modal image retrieval in multi-labelled images. A multi-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model sketches and text as input query modalities into a common embedding space, which is then further aligned with the image feature space. This permits encoding the object-based features and its alignment with the query irrespective of the availability of the co-occurrence of different objects in the training set.

Finally, we explore the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognises two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended. We also in this dissertation pave the path to the future direction of research in this domain.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Josep Llados;Umapada Pal  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-8-8 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number (up) Admin @ si @ Dey20 Serial 3480  
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