Abstract: In order to provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability for restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions.
This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoids degenerated medial axis segments. Second, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to syn- thetic shapes of known medial geometry. We also show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume.

Abstract: Human body segmentation is a hard task because of the high variability in appearance produced by changes in the point of view, lighting conditions, and number of articulations of the human body. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach for the segmentation of the human body. In a first step, a set of human limbs are described, normalized to be rotation invariant, and trained using cascade of classifiers to be split in a tree structure way. Once the tree structure is trained, it is included in a ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. This first classification step is applied in a windowing way on a new test image, defining a body-like probability map, which is used as an initialization of a GMM color modelling and binary Graph Cuts optimization procedure. The proposed methodology is tested in a novel limb-labelled data set. Results show performance improvements of the novel approach in comparison to classical cascade of classifiers and human detector-based Graph Cuts segmentation approaches.

Abstract: Image based human detection remains as a challenging problem. Most promising detectors rely on classifiers trained with labelled samples. However, labelling is a manual labor intensive step. To overcome this problem we propose to collect images of pedestrians from a virtual city, i.e., with automatic labels, and train a pedestrian detector with them, which works fine when such virtual-world data are similar to testing one, i.e., real-world pedestrians in urban areas. When testing data is acquired in different conditions than training one, e.g., human detection in personal photo albums, dataset shift appears. In previous work, we cast this problem as one of domain adaptation and solve it with an active learning procedure. In this work, we focus on the same problem but evaluating a different set of faster to compute features, i.e., Haar, EOH and their combination. In particular, we train a classifier with virtual-world data, using such features and Real AdaBoost as learning machine. This classifier is applied to real-world training images. Then, a human oracle interactively corrects the wrong detections, i.e., few miss detections are manually annotated and some false ones are pointed out too. A low amount of manual annotation is fixed as restriction. Real- and virtual-world difficult samples are combined within what we call cool world and we retrain the classifier with this data. Our experiments show that this adapted classifier is equivalent to the one trained with only real-world data but requiring 90% less manual annotations.

Abstract: Training vision-based pedestrian detectors using synthetic datasets (virtual world) is a useful technique to collect automatically the training examples with their pixel-wise ground truth. However, as it is often the case, these detectors must operate in real-world images, experiencing a significant drop of their performance. In fact, this effect also occurs among different real-world datasets, i.e. detectors' accuracy drops when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, it is required to adapt the detector trained with synthetic data to operate in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation approach based on boosting LDA exemplar classifiers from both virtual and real worlds. We evaluate our proposal on multiple real-world pedestrian detection datasets. The results show that our method can efficiently adapt the exemplar classifiers from virtual to real world, avoiding drops in average precision over the 15%.