Abstract: In this article we provide an analysis of existing methods for the incorporation of color in bag-of-words based image representations. We propose a list of desired properties on which bases fusing methods can be compared. We discuss existing methods and indicate shortcomings of the two well-known fusing methods, namely early and late fusion. Several recent works have addressed these shortcomings by exploiting top-down information in the bag-of-words pipeline: color attention which is motivated from human vision, and Portmanteau vocabularies which are based on information theoretic compression of product vocabularies. We point out several remaining challenges in cue fusion and provide directions for future research.

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.

Abstract: Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an educational strategy to improve student’s learning capability that, in recent years, has had a progressive acceptance in undergraduate studies. This methodology is based on solving a problem or project in a student working group. In this way, PBL focuses on learning the necessary tools to correctly find a solution to given problems. Since the learning initiative is transferred to the student, the PBL method promotes students own abilities. This allows a better assessment of the true workload that carries out the student in the subject. It follows that the methodology conforms to the guidelines of the Bologna document, which quantifies the student workload in a subject by means of the European credit transfer system (ECTS). PBL is currently applied in undergraduate studies needing strong practical training such as medicine, nursing or law sciences. Although this is also the case in engineering studies, amazingly, few experiences have been reported. In this paper we propose to use PBL in the educational organization of the Computer Graphics subjects in the Computer Science degree. Our PBL project focuses in the development of a C++ graphical environment based on the OpenGL libraries for visualization and handling of different graphical objects. The starting point is a basic skeleton that already includes lighting functions, perspective projection with mouse interaction to change the point of view and three predefined objects. Students have to complete this skeleton by adding their own functions to solve the project. A total number of 10 projects have been proposed and successfully solved. The exercises range from human face rendering to articulated objects, such as robot arms or puppets. In the present paper we extensively report the statement and educational objectives for two of the projects: solar system visualization and a chess game. We report our earlier educational experience based on the standard classroom theoretical, problem and practice sessions and the reasons that motivated searching for other learning methods. We have mainly chosen PBL because it improves the student learning initiative. We have applied the PBL educational model since the beginning of the second semester. The student’s feedback increases in his interest for the subject. We present a comparative study of the teachers’ and students’ workload between PBL and the classic teaching approach, which suggests that the workload increase in PBL is not as high as it seems.

Abstract: State of the art methods for image matching, content-based retrieval and recognition use local features. Most of these still exploit only the luminance information for detection. The color saliency boosting algorithm has provided an efficient method to exploit the saliency of color edges based on information theory. However, during the design of this algorithm, some issues were not addressed in depth: (1) The method has ignored the underlying distribution of derivatives in natural images. (2) The dependence of information content in color-boosted edges on its spatial derivatives has not been quantitatively established. (3) To evaluate luminance and color contributions to saliency of edges, a parameter gradually balancing both contributions is required.
We introduce a novel algorithm, based on the principles of independent component analysis, which models the first order derivatives of color natural images by a generalized Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, using this probability model we show that for images with a Laplacian distribution, which is a particular case of generalized Gaussian distribution, the magnitudes of color-boosted edges reflect their corresponding information content. In order to evaluate the impact of color edge saliency in real world applications, we introduce an extension of the Laplacian-of-Gaussian detector to color, and the performance for image matching is evaluated. Our experiments show that our approach provides more discriminative regions in comparison with the original detector.

Abstract: The characterization of trichromatic cameras is usually done in terms of a device-independent color space, such as the CIE 1931 XYZ space. This is indeed convenient since it allows the testing of results against colorimetric measures. We have characterized our camera to represent human cone activation by mapping the camera sensor's (RGB) responses to human (LMS) through a polynomial transformation, which can be “customized” according to the types of scenes we want to represent. Here we present a method to test the accuracy of the camera measures and a study on how the choice of training reflectances for the polynomial may alter the results.