Abstract: Non-rigid object detection is a challenging an open research problem in computer vision. It is a critical part in many applications such as image search, surveillance, human-computer interaction or image auto-annotation. Most successful approaches to non-rigid object detection make use of part-based models. In particular, Conditional Random Fields (CRF) have been successfully embedded into a discriminative parts-based model framework due to its effectiveness for learning and inference (usually based on a tree structure). However, CRF-based approaches do not incorporate global constraints and only model pairwise interactions. This is especially important when modeling object classes that may have complex parts interactions (e.g. facial features or body articulations), because neglecting them yields an oversimplified model with suboptimal performance. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical CRF (HCRF). The main contribution is to build a hierarchy of part combinations by extending the label set to a hierarchy of product label spaces. In order to keep the inference computation tractable, we propose an effective method to reduce the new label set. We test our method on two applications: facial feature detection on the Multi-PIE database and human pose estimation on the Buffy dataset.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in the long-wave infrared spectral band. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are evaluated using a state of the art framework. Statistical results using an outdoor image data set are presented together with a discussion about the differences with respect to the results obtained when images from the visible spectrum are considered.

Abstract: Pain is an unpleasant feeling that has been shown to be an important factor for the recovery of patients. Since this is costly in human resources and difficult to do objectively, there is the need for automatic systems to measure it. In this paper, contrary to current state-of-the-art techniques in pain assessment, which are based on facial features only, we suggest that the performance can be enhanced by feeding the raw frames to deep learning models, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art results while also directly facing the problem of imbalanced data. As a baseline, our approach first uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn facial features from VGG_Faces, which are then linked to a long short-term memory to exploit the temporal relation between video frames. We further compare the performances of using the so popular schema based on the canonically normalized appearance versus taking into account the whole image. As a result, we outperform current state-of-the-art area under the curve performance in the UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain Expression Archive Database. In addition, to evaluate the generalization properties of our proposed methodology on facial motion recognition, we also report competitive results in the Cohn Kanade+ facial expression database.

Abstract: World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world population is affected of back pain during his life. Current practices to analyze back problems are expensive, subjective, and invasive. In this work, we propose a novel tool for posture and range of movement estimation based on the analysis of 3D information from depth maps. Given a set of keypoints defined by the user, RGB and depth data are aligned, depth surface is reconstructed, keypoints are matching using a novel point-to-point fitting procedure, and accurate measurements about posture, spinal curvature, and range of movement are computed. The system shows high precision and reliable measurements, being useful for posture reeducation purposes to prevent musculoskeletal disorders, such as back pain, as well as tracking the posture evolution of patients in rehabilitation treatments.

Abstract: Mobile document image acquisition integrates many distortions which must be corrected or detected on the device, before the document becomes unavailable or paying data transmission fees. In this paper, we propose a system to correct perspective and illumination issues, and estimate the sharpness of the image for OCR recognition. The correction step relies on fast and accurate border detection followed by illumination normalization. Its evaluation on a private dataset shows a clear improvement on OCR accuracy. The quality assessment
step relies on a combination of focus measures. Its evaluation on a public dataset shows that this simple method compares well to state of the art, learning-based methods which cannot be embedded on a mobile, and outperforms metric-based methods.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework.In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements.

Abstract: Best Poster Award.
Reducing the amount of keypoints used to index an image is particularly interesting to control processing time and memory usage in real-time document image matching applications, like augmented documents or smartphone applications. This paper benchmarks two keypoint selection methods on a task consisting of reducing keypoint sets extracted from document images, while preserving detection and segmentation accuracy. We first study the different forms of keypoint filtering, and we introduce the use of the CORE selection method on
keypoints extracted from document images. Then, we extend a previously published benchmark by including evaluations of the new method, by adding the SURF-BRISK detection/description scheme, and by reporting processing speeds. Evaluations are conducted on the publicly available dataset of ICDAR2015 SmartDOC challenge 1. Finally, we prove that reducing the original keypoint set is always feasible and can be beneficial
not only to processing speed but also to accuracy.

Abstract: We present a gesture recognition approach for depth video data based on a novel Feature Weighting approach within the Dynamic Time Warping framework. Depth features from human joints are compared through video sequences using Dynamic Time Warping, and weights are assigned to features based on inter-intra class gesture variability. Feature Weighting in Dynamic Time Warping is then applied for recognizing begin-end of gestures in data sequences. The obtained results recognizing several gestures in depth data show high performance compared with classical Dynamic Time Warping approach.