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Olivier Penacchio, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2011). What is the best criterion for an efficient design of retinal photoreceptor mosaics? PER - Perception, 40, 197.
Abstract: The proportions of L, M and S photoreceptors in the primate retina are arguably determined by evolutionary pressure and the statistics of the visual environment. Two information theory-based approaches have been recently proposed for explaining the asymmetrical spatial densities of photoreceptors in humans. In the first approach Garrigan et al (2010 PLoS ONE 6 e1000677), a model for computing the information transmitted by cone arrays which considers the differential blurring produced by the long-wavelength accommodation of the eye’s lens is proposed. Their results explain the sparsity of S-cones but the optimum depends weakly on the L:M cone ratio. In the second approach (Penacchio et al, 2010 Perception 39 ECVP Supplement, 101), we show that human cone arrays make the visual representation scale-invariant, allowing the total entropy of the signal to be preserved while decreasing individual neurons’ entropy in further retinotopic representations. This criterion provides a thorough description of the distribution of L:M cone ratios and does not depend on differential blurring of the signal by the lens. Here, we investigate the similarities and differences of both approaches when applied to the same database. Our results support a 2-criteria optimization in the space of cone ratios whose components are arguably important and mostly unrelated.
[This work was partially funded by projects TIN2010-21771-C02-1 and Consolider-Ingenio 2010-CSD2007-00018 from the Spanish MICINN. CAP was funded by grant RYC-2007-00484]
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Olivier Penacchio, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Retinal Filtering Matches Natural Image Statistics at Low Luminance Levels. PER - Perception, 40, 96.
Abstract: The assumption that the retina’s main objective is to provide a minimum entropy representation to higher visual areas (ie efficient coding principle) allows to predict retinal filtering in space–time and colour (Atick, 1992 Network 3 213–251). This is achieved by considering the power spectra of natural images (which is proportional to 1/f2) and the suppression of retinal and image noise. However, most studies consider images within a limited range of lighting conditions (eg near noon) whereas the visual system’s spatial filtering depends on light intensity and the spatiochromatic properties of natural scenes depend of the time of the day. Here, we explore whether the dependence of visual spatial filtering on luminance match the changes in power spectrum of natural scenes at different times of the day. Using human cone-activation based naturalistic stimuli (from the Barcelona Calibrated Images Database), we show that for a range of luminance levels, the shape of the retinal CSF reflects the slope of the power spectrum at low spatial frequencies. Accordingly, the retina implements the filtering which best decorrelates the input signal at every luminance level. This result is in line with the body of work that places efficient coding as a guiding neural principle.
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Olivier Penacchio. (2011). Mixed Hodge Structures and Equivariant Sheaves on the Projective Plane. MN - Mathematische Nachrichten, 284(4), 526–542.
Abstract: We describe an equivalence of categories between the category of mixed Hodge structures and a category of equivariant vector bundles on a toric model of the complex projective plane which verify some semistability condition. We then apply this correspondence to define an invariant which generalizes the notion of R-split mixed Hodge structure and give calculations for the first group of cohomology of possibly non smooth or non-complete curves of genus 0 and 1. Finally, we describe some extension groups of mixed Hodge structures in terms of equivariant extensions of coherent sheaves. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
Keywords: Mixed Hodge structures, equivariant sheaves, MSC (2010) Primary: 14C30, Secondary: 14F05, 14M25
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Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Determining the Best Suited Semantic Events for Cognitive Surveillance. EXSY - Expert Systems with Applications, 38(4), 4068–4079.
Abstract: State-of-the-art systems on cognitive surveillance identify and describe complex events in selected domains, thus providing end-users with tools to easily access the contents of massive video footage. Nevertheless, as the complexity of events increases in semantics and the types of indoor/outdoor scenarios diversify, it becomes difficult to assess which events describe better the scene, and how to model them at a pixel level to fulfill natural language requests. We present an ontology-based methodology that guides the identification, step-by-step modeling, and generalization of the most relevant events to a specific domain. Our approach considers three steps: (1) end-users provide textual evidence from surveilled video sequences; (2) transcriptions are analyzed top-down to build the knowledge bases for event description; and (3) the obtained models are used to generalize event detection to different image sequences from the surveillance domain. This framework produces user-oriented knowledge that improves on existing advanced interfaces for video indexing and retrieval, by determining the best suited events for video understanding according to end-users. We have conducted experiments with outdoor and indoor scenes showing thefts, chases, and vandalism, demonstrating the feasibility and generalization of this proposal.
Keywords: Cognitive surveillance; Event modeling; Content-based video retrieval; Ontologies; Advanced user interfaces
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Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Augmenting Video Surveillance Footage with Virtual Agents for Incremental Event Evaluation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(6), 878–889.
Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.
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Arjan Gijsenij, & Theo Gevers. (2011). Color Constancy Using Natural Image Statistics and Scene Semantics. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(4), 687–698.
Abstract: Existing color constancy methods are all based on specific assumptions such as the spatial and spectral characteristics of images. As a consequence, no algorithm can be considered as universal. However, with the large variety of available methods, the question is how to select the method that performs best for a specific image. To achieve selection and combining of color constancy algorithms, in this paper natural image statistics are used to identify the most important characteristics of color images. Then, based on these image characteristics, the proper color constancy algorithm (or best combination of algorithms) is selected for a specific image. To capture the image characteristics, the Weibull parameterization (e.g., grain size and contrast) is used. It is shown that the Weibull parameterization is related to the image attributes to which the used color constancy methods are sensitive. An MoG-classifier is used to learn the correlation and weighting between the Weibull-parameters and the image attributes (number of edges, amount of texture, and SNR). The output of the classifier is the selection of the best performing color constancy method for a certain image. Experimental results show a large improvement over state-of-the-art single algorithms. On a data set consisting of more than 11,000 images, an increase in color constancy performance up to 20 percent (median angular error) can be obtained compared to the best-performing single algorithm. Further, it is shown that for certain scene categories, one specific color constancy algorithm can be used instead of the classifier considering several algorithms.
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Albert Ali Salah, Theo Gevers, Nicu Sebe, & Alessandro Vinciarelli. (2011). Computer Vision for Ambient Intelligence. JAISE - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, 3(3), 187–191.
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Arnau Ramisa, Alex Goldhoorn, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2011). Combining Invariant Features and the ALV Homing Method for Autonomous Robot Navigation Based on Panoramas. JIRC - Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 64(3-4), 625–649.
Abstract: Biologically inspired homing methods, such as the Average Landmark Vector, are an interesting solution for local navigation due to its simplicity. However, usually they require a modification of the environment by placing artificial landmarks in order to work reliably. In this paper we combine the Average Landmark Vector with invariant feature points automatically detected in panoramic images to overcome this limitation. The proposed approach has been evaluated first in simulation and, as promising results are found, also in two data sets of panoramas from real world environments.
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Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & Cees G.M. Snoek. (2011). Empowering Visual Categorization with the GPU. TMM - IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 13(1), 60–70.
Abstract: Visual categorization is important to manage large collections of digital images and video, where textual meta-data is often incomplete or simply unavailable. The bag-of-words model has become the most powerful method for visual categorization of images and video. Despite its high accuracy, a severe drawback of this model is its high computational cost. As the trend to increase computational power in newer CPU and GPU architectures is to increase their level of parallelism, exploiting this parallelism becomes an important direction to handle the computational cost of the bag-of-words approach. When optimizing a system based on the bag-of-words approach, the goal is to minimize the time it takes to process batches of images. Additionally, we also consider power usage as an evaluation metric. In this paper, we analyze the bag-of-words model for visual categorization in terms of computational cost and identify two major bottlenecks: the quantization step and the classification step. We address these two bottlenecks by proposing two efficient algorithms for quantization and classification by exploiting the GPU hardware and the CUDA parallel programming model. The algorithms are designed to (1) keep categorization accuracy intact, (2) decompose the problem and (3) give the same numerical results. In the experiments on large scale datasets it is shown that, by using a parallel implementation on the Geforce GTX260 GPU, classifying unseen images is 4.8 times faster than a quad-core CPU version on the Core i7 920, while giving the exact same numerical results. In addition, we show how the algorithms can be generalized to other applications, such as text retrieval and video retrieval. Moreover, when the obtained speedup is used to process extra video frames in a video retrieval benchmark, the accuracy of visual categorization is improved by 29%.
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Sergio Escalera, David M.J. Tax, Oriol Pujol, Petia Radeva, & Robert P.W. Duin. (2011). Multi-Class Classification in Image Analysis Via Error-Correcting Output Codes. In H. Kawasnicka, & L.Jain (Eds.), Innovations in Intelligent Image Analysis (Vol. 339, pp. 7–29). Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: A common way to model multi-class classification problems is by means of Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC). Given a multi-class problem, the ECOC technique designs a codeword for each class, where each position of the code identifies the membership of the class for a given binary problem.A classification decision is obtained by assigning the label of the class with the closest code. In this paper, we overview the state-of-the-art on ECOC designs and test them in real applications. Results on different multi-class data sets show the benefits of using the ensemble of classifiers when categorizing objects in images.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2011). Subtle Facial Expression Recognition in Still Images and Videos. In Yu-Jin Zhang (Ed.), Advances in Face Image Analysis: Techniques and Technologies (pp. 259–277). New York, USA: IGI-Global.
Abstract: This chapter addresses the recognition of basic facial expressions. It has three main contributions. First, the authors introduce a view- and texture independent schemes that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. they represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Two dynamic recognition schemes are proposed: (1) the first is based on conditional predictive models and on an analysis-synthesis scheme, and (2) the second is based on examples allowing straightforward use of machine learning approaches. Second, the authors propose an efficient recognition scheme based on the detection of keyframes in videos. Third, the authors compare the dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that in general the former performs better than the latter. The authors then provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM).
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Jordi Roca, A.Owen, G.Jordan, Y.Ling, C. Alejandro Parraga, & A.Hurlbert. (2011). Inter-individual Variations in Color Naming and the Structure of 3D Color Space. In Journal of Vision (Vol. 12, 166).
Abstract: 36.307
Many everyday behavioural uses of color vision depend on color naming ability, which is neither measured nor predicted by most standardized tests of color vision, for either normal or anomalous color vision. Here we demonstrate a new method to quantify color naming ability by deriving a compact computational description of individual 3D color spaces. Methods: Individual observers underwent standardized color vision diagnostic tests (including anomaloscope testing) and a series of custom-made color naming tasks using 500 distinct color samples, either CRT stimuli (“light”-based) or Munsell chips (“surface”-based), with both forced- and free-choice color naming paradigms. For each subject, we defined his/her color solid as the set of 3D convex hulls computed for each basic color category from the relevant collection of categorised points in perceptually uniform CIELAB space. From the parameters of the convex hulls, we derived several indices to characterise the 3D structure of the color solid and its inter-individual variations. Using a reference group of 25 normal trichromats (NT), we defined the degree of normality for the shape, location and overlap of each color region, and the extent of “light”-“surface” agreement. Results: Certain features of color perception emerge from analysis of the average NT color solid, e.g.: (1) the white category is slightly shifted towards blue; and (2) the variability in category border location across NT subjects is asymmetric across color space, with least variability in the blue/green region. Comparisons between individual and average NT indices reveal specific naming “deficits”, e.g.: (1) Category volumes for white, green, brown and grey are expanded for anomalous trichromats and dichromats; and (2) the focal structure of color space is disrupted more in protanopia than other forms of anomalous color vision. The indices both capture the structure of subjective color spaces and allow us to quantify inter-individual differences in color naming ability.
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Jordi Roca, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Do Basic Colors Influence Chromatic Adaptation? VSS - Journal of Vision, 11(11), 85.
Abstract: Color constancy (the ability to perceive colors relatively stable under different illuminants) is the result of several mechanisms spread across different neural levels and responding to several visual scene cues. It is usually measured by estimating the perceived color of a grey patch under an illuminant change. In this work, we hypothesize whether chromatic adaptation (without a reference white or grey) could be driven by certain colors, specifically those corresponding to the universal color terms proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969). To this end we have developed a new psychophysical paradigm in which subjects adjust the color of a test patch (in CIELab space) to match their memory of the best example of a given color chosen from the universal terms list (grey, red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, orange and brown). The test patch is embedded inside a Mondrian image and presented on a calibrated CRT screen inside a dark cabin. All subjects were trained to “recall” their most exemplary colors reliably from memory and asked to always produce the same basic colors when required under several adaptation conditions. These include achromatic and colored Mondrian backgrounds, under a simulated D65 illuminant and several colored illuminants. A set of basic colors were measured for each subject under neutral conditions (achromatic background and D65 illuminant) and used as “reference” for the rest of the experiment. The colors adjusted by the subjects in each adaptation condition were compared to the reference colors under the corresponding illuminant and a “constancy index” was obtained for each of them. Our results show that for some colors the constancy index was better than for grey. The set of best adapted colors in each condition were common to a majority of subjects and were dependent on the chromaticity of the illuminant and the chromatic background considered.
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Marçal Rusiñol, R.Roset, Josep Llados, & C.Montaner. (2011). Automatic Index Generation of Digitized Map Series by Coordinate Extraction and Interpretation. ePER - e-Perimetron, 219–229.
Abstract: By means of computer vision algorithms scanned images of maps are processed in order to extract relevant geographic information from printed coordinate pairs. The meaningful information is then transformed into georeferencing information for each single map sheet, and the complete set is compiled to produce a graphical index sheet for the map series along with relevant metadata. The whole process is fully automated and trained to attain maximum effectivity and throughput.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Selective Spatio-Temporal Interest Points. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 396–410.
Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.
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