Abstract: This paper presents a novel method to increase the accuracy of linear fitting of implicit polynomials. The proposed method is based on the 3L algorithm philosophy. The novelty lies on the relaxation of the additional constraints, already imposed by the 3L algorithm. Hence, the accuracy of the final solution is increased due to the proper adjustment of the expected values in the aforementioned additional constraints. Although iterative, the proposed approach solves the fitting problem within a linear framework, which is independent of the threshold tuning. Experimental results, both in 2D and 3D, showing improvements in the accuracy of the fitting are presented. Comparisons with both state of the art algorithms and a geometric based one (non-linear fitting), which is used as a ground truth, are provided.

Abstract: Autonomous driving is a key factor for future mobility. Properly perceiving the environment of the vehicles is essential for a safe driving, which requires computing accurate geometric and semantic information in real-time. In this paper, we challenge state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for building a perception system for autonomous driving. An inherent drawback in the computation of visual semantics is the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. We propose to circumvent this problem by following an offline-online strategy. During the offline stage dense 3D semantic maps are created. In the online stage the current driving area is recognized in the maps via a re-localization process, which allows to retrieve the pre-computed accurate semantics and 3D geometry in realtime. Then, detecting the dynamic obstacles we obtain a rich understanding of the current scene. We evaluate quantitatively our proposal in the KITTI dataset and discuss the related open challenges for the computer vision community.

Abstract: TA7.4
Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.

Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. Recent revolutionary results of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) foreshadow the advent of reliable classifiers to perform such visual tasks. However, DCNNs require learning of many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diverse images with class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained via cumbersome, human labour which is particularly challenging for semantic segmentation since pixel-level annotations are required. In this chapter, we propose to use a combination of a virtual world to automatically generate realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations, and domain adaptation to transfer the models learnt to correctly operate in real scenarios. We address the question of how useful synthetic data can be for semantic segmentation – in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic collection of diverse urban images, named SYNTHIA, with automatically generated class annotations and object identifiers. We use SYNTHIA in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments with DCNNs that show that combining SYNTHIA with simple domain adaptation techniques in the training stage significantly improves performance on semantic segmentation.

Abstract: Camera-based person detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications. The task is diffcult because the great variety of backgrounds (scenarios, illumination) in which persons are present, as well as their intra-class variability (pose, clothe, occlusion). In fact, the class person is one of the included in the popular PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) challenge. A breakthrough for this challenge, regarding person detection, is due to Felzenszwalb et al. These authors proposed a part-based detector that relies on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and latent support vector machines (LatSVM) to learn a model of the whole human body and its constitutive parts, as well as their relative position. Since the approach of Felzenszwalb et al. appeared new variants have been proposed, usually giving rise to more complex models. In this paper, we focus on an issue that has not attracted suficient interest up to now. In particular, we refer to the fact that HOG is usually computed from RGB color space, but other possibilities exist and deserve the corresponding investigation. In this paper we challenge RGB space with the opponent color space (OPP), which is inspired in the human vision system.We will compute the HOG on top of OPP, then we train and test the part-based human classifer by Felzenszwalb et al. using PASCAL VOC challenge protocols and person database. Our experiments demonstrate that OPP outperforms RGB. We also investigate possible differences among types of scenarios: indoor, urban and countryside. Interestingly, our experiments suggest that the beneficts of OPP with respect to RGB mainly come for indoor and countryside scenarios, those in which the human visual system was designed by evolution.