Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.

Abstract: This paper describes a novel framework for detection and suppression of properly shadowed regions for most possible scenarios occurring in real video sequences. Our approach requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene, the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. We show how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that our approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.

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]

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

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.

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%.

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).