Abstract: In the next forty years, the number of people living with dementia is expected to triple. In the last stages, people affected by this disease become dependent. This hinders the autonomy of the patient and has a huge social impact in time, money and effort. Given this scenario, we propose an ubiquitous system capable of recognizing daily specific actions. The system fuses and synchronizes data obtained from two complementary modalities – ambient and egocentric. The ambient approach consists in a fixed RGB-Depth camera for user and object recognition and user-object interaction, whereas the egocentric point of view is given by a personal area network (PAN) formed by a few wearable sensors and a smartphone, used for gesture recognition. The system processes multi-modal data in real-time, performing paralleled task recognition and modality synchronization, showing high performance recognizing subjects, objects, and interactions, showing its reliability to be applied in real case scenarios.

Abstract: Cascading techniques are commonly used to speed-up the scan of an image for object detection. However, cascades of detectors are slow to train due to the high number of detectors and corresponding thresholds to learn. Furthermore, they do not use any prior knowledge about the scene structure to decide where to focus the search. To handle these problems, we propose a new way to scan an image, where we couple a recursive coarse-to-fine refinement together with spatial constraints of the object location. For doing that we split an image into a set of uniformly distributed neighborhood regions, and for each of these we apply a local greedy search over feature resolutions. The neighborhood is defined as a scanning region that only one object can occupy. Therefore the best hypothesis is obtained as the location with maximum score and no thresholds are needed. We present an implementation of our method using a pyramid of HOG features and we evaluate it on two standard databases, VOC2007 and INRIA dataset. Results show that the Recursive Coarse-to-Fine Localization (RCFL) achieves a 12x speed-up compared to standard sliding windows. Compared with a cascade of multiple resolutions approach our method has slightly better performance in speed and Average-Precision. Furthermore, in contrast to cascading approach, the speed-up is independent of image conditions, the number of detected objects and clutter.

Abstract: Road scene segmentation is important in computer vision for different applications such as autonomous driving and pedestrian detection. Recovering the 3D structure of road scenes provides relevant contextual information to improve their understanding.
In this paper, we use a convolutional neural network based algorithm to learn features from noisy labels to recover the 3D scene layout of a road image. The novelty of the algorithm relies on generating training labels by applying an algorithm trained on a general image dataset to classify on–board images. Further, we propose a novel texture descriptor based on a learned color plane fusion to obtain maximal uniformity in road areas. Finally, acquired (off–line) and current (on–line) information are combined to detect road areas in single images.
From quantitative and qualitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, it is concluded that convolutional neural networks are suitable for learning 3D scene layout from noisy labels and provides a relative improvement of 7% compared to the baseline. Furthermore, combining color planes provides a statistical description of road areas that exhibits maximal uniformity and provides a relative improvement of 8% compared to the baseline. Finally, the improvement is even bigger when acquired and current information from a single image are combined

Abstract: Smiling is an indispensable element of nonverbal social interaction. Besides, automatic distinction between spontaneous and posed expressions is important for visual analysis of social signals. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to distinguish between spontaneous and posed enjoyment smiles by using the dynamics of eyelid, cheek, and lip corner movements. The discriminative power of these movements, and the effect of different fusion levels are investigated on multiple databases. Our results improve the state-of-the-art. We also introduce the largest spontaneous/posed enjoyment smile database collected to date, and report new empirical and conceptual findings on smile dynamics. The collected database consists of 1240 samples of 400 subjects. Moreover, it has the unique property of having an age range from 8 to 76 years. Large scale experiments on the new database indicate that eyelid dynamics are highly relevant for smile classification, and there are age-related differences in smile dynamics.

Abstract: Action recognition in videos is a challenging task due to the complexity of the spatio-temporal patterns to model and the difficulty to acquire and learn on large quantities of video data. Deep learning, although a breakthrough for image classification and showing promise for videos, has still not clearly superseded action recognition methods using hand-crafted features, even when training on massive datasets. In this paper, we introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of hand-crafted spatio-temporal features classified by supervised deep networks. As we show in our experiments on five popular benchmarks for action recognition, our hybrid model combines the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10000 short clips) and yet improves significantly on the state of the art, including recent deep models trained on millions of manually labelled images and videos.

Abstract: We propose a novel attention mechanism to enhance Convolutional Neural Networks for fine-grained recognition. It learns to attend to lower-level feature activations without requiring part annotations and uses these activations to update and rectify the output likelihood distribution. In contrast to other approaches, the proposed mechanism is modular, architecture-independent and efficient both in terms of parameters and computation required. Experiments show that networks augmented with our approach systematically improve their classification accuracy and become more robust to clutter. As a result, Wide Residual Networks augmented with our proposal surpasses the state of the art classification accuracies in CIFAR-10, the Adience gender recognition task, Stanford dogs, and UEC Food-100.

Abstract: Autonomous driving models should ideally be evaluated by deploying
them on a fleet of physical vehicles in the real world. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for the vast majority of researchers. An attractive alternative is to evaluate models offline, on a pre-collected validation dataset with ground truth annotation. In this paper, we investigate the relation between various online and offline metrics for evaluation of autonomous driving models. We find that offline prediction error is not necessarily correlated with driving quality, and two models with identical prediction error can differ dramatically in their driving performance. We show that the correlation of offline evaluation with driving quality can be significantly improved by selecting an appropriate validation dataset and
suitable offline metrics.

Abstract: Facial expressions are combinations of basic components called Action Units (AU). Recognizing AUs is key for general facial expression analysis. Recently, efforts in automatic AU recognition have been dedicated to learning combinations of local features and to exploiting correlations between AUs. We propose a deep neural architecture that tackles both problems by combining learned local and global features in its initial stages and replicating a message passing algorithm between classes similar to a graphical model inference approach in later stages. We show that by training the model end-to-end with increased supervision we improve state-of-the-art by 5.3% and 8.2% performance on BP4D and DISFA datasets, respectively.