Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Bogdan Raducanu, Maria Elena Meza-de-Luna, & Joaquin Salas. (2016). Head-gestures mirroring detection in dyadic social linteractions with computer vision-based wearable devices. NEUCOM - Neurocomputing, 175(B), 866–876.
Abstract: During face-to-face human interaction, nonverbal communication plays a fundamental role. A relevant aspect that takes part during social interactions is represented by mirroring, in which a person tends to mimic the non-verbal behavior (head and body gestures, vocal prosody, etc.) of the counterpart. In this paper, we introduce a computer vision-based system to detect mirroring in dyadic social interactions with the use of a wearable platform. In our context, mirroring is inferred as simultaneous head noddings displayed by the interlocutors. Our approach consists of the following steps: (1) facial features extraction; (2) facial features stabilization; (3) head nodding recognition; and (4) mirroring detection. Our system achieves a mirroring detection accuracy of 72% on a custom mirroring dataset.
Keywords: Head gestures recognition; Mirroring detection; Dyadic social interaction analysis; Wearable devices
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Adriana Romero, Carlo Gatta, & Gustavo Camps-Valls. (2016). Unsupervised Deep Feature Extraction for Remote Sensing Image Classification. TGRS - IEEE Transaction on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 54(3), 1349–1362.
Abstract: This paper introduces the use of single-layer and deep convolutional networks for remote sensing data analysis. Direct application to multi- and hyperspectral imagery of supervised (shallow or deep) convolutional networks is very challenging given the high input data dimensionality and the relatively small amount of available labeled data. Therefore, we propose the use of greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining coupled with a highly efficient algorithm for unsupervised learning of sparse features. The algorithm is rooted on sparse representations and enforces both population and lifetime sparsity of the extracted features, simultaneously. We successfully illustrate the expressive power of the extracted representations in several scenarios: classification of aerial scenes, as well as land-use classification in very high resolution or land-cover classification from multi- and hyperspectral images. The proposed algorithm clearly outperforms standard principal component analysis (PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA), as well as current state-of-the-art algorithms of aerial classification, while being extremely computationally efficient at learning representations of data. Results show that single-layer convolutional networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels and are preferred when the classification requires high resolution and detailed results. However, deep architectures significantly outperform single-layer variants, capturing increasing levels of abstraction and complexity throughout the feature hierarchy.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Meritxell Joanpere, Nuria Gorgorio, & Lluis Albarracin. (2015). Mathematics learning opportunities when playing a Tower Defense Game. IJSG - International Journal of Serious Games, 57–71.
Abstract: A qualitative research study is presented herein with the purpose of identifying mathematics learning opportunities in students between 10 and 12 years old while playing a commercial version of a Tower Defense game. These learning opportunities are understood as mathematicisable moments of the game and involve the establishment of relationships between the game and mathematical problem solving. Based on the analysis of these mathematicisable moments, we conclude that the game can promote problem-solving processes and learning opportunities that can be associated with different mathematical contents that appears in mathematics curricula, thought it seems that teacher or new game elements might be needed to facilitate the processes.
Keywords: Tower Defense game; learning opportunities; mathematics; problem solving; game design
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Mariella Dimiccoli, Jean-Pascal Jacob, & Lionel Moisan. (2016). Particle detection and tracking in fluorescence time-lapse imaging: a contrario approach. MVAP - Journal of Machine Vision and Applications, 27, 511–527.
Abstract: In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection and the
tracking of particles on biological images. In presence of very noised and poor
quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a-contrario
model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest
in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual
perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads
to algorithms that do not require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious
parameter tuning and are very robust to noise. Comparative evaluations against
a well established baseline show that the proposed approach outperforms the
state of the art.
Keywords: particle detection; particle tracking; a-contrario approach; time-lapse fluorescence imaging
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2016). Multi-face tracking by extended bag-of-tracklets in egocentric photo-streams. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 146–156.
Abstract: Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
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Hugo Jair Escalante, Victor Ponce, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Alicia Morales-Reyes, & Jose Martinez-Carranza. (2017). Evolving weighting schemes for the Bag of Visual Words. Neural Computing and Applications - Neural Computing and Applications, 28(5), 925–939.
Abstract: The Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) is an established representation in computer vision. Taking inspiration from text mining, this representation has proved
to be very effective in many domains. However, in most cases, standard term-weighting schemes are adopted (e.g.,term-frequency or TF-IDF). It remains open the question of whether alternative weighting schemes could boost the
performance of methods based on BoVW. More importantly, it is unknown whether it is possible to automatically learn and determine effective weighting schemes from
scratch. This paper brings some light into both of these unknowns. On the one hand, we report an evaluation of the most common weighting schemes used in text mining, but rarely used in computer vision tasks. Besides, we propose an evolutionary algorithm capable of automatically learning weighting schemes for computer vision problems. We report empirical results of an extensive study in several computer vision problems. Results show the usefulness of the proposed method.
Keywords: Bag of Visual Words; Bag of features; Genetic programming; Term-weighting schemes; Computer vision
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Onur Ferhat, & Fernando Vilariño. (2016). Low Cost Eye Tracking: The Current Panorama. CIN - Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, , Article ID 8680541.
Abstract: Despite the availability of accurate, commercial gaze tracker devices working with infrared (IR) technology, visible light gaze tracking constitutes an interesting alternative by allowing scalability and removing hardware requirements. Over the last years, this field has seen examples of research showing performance comparable to the IR alternatives. In this work, we survey the previous work on remote, visible light gaze trackers and analyze the explored techniques from various perspectives such as calibration strategies, head pose invariance, and gaze estimation techniques. We also provide information on related aspects of research such as public datasets to test against, open source projects to build upon, and gaze tracking services to directly use in applications. With all this information, we aim to provide the contemporary and future researchers with a map detailing previously explored ideas and the required tools.
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Maria Oliver, G. Haro, Mariella Dimiccoli, B. Mazin, & C. Ballester. (2016). A Computational Model for Amodal Completion. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 56(3), 511–534.
Abstract: This paper presents a computational model to recover the most likely interpretation
of the 3D scene structure from a planar image, where some objects may occlude others. The estimated scene interpretation is obtained by integrating some global and local cues and provides both the complete disoccluded objects that form the scene and their ordering according to depth.
Our method first computes several distal scenes which are compatible with the proximal planar image. To compute these different hypothesized scenes, we propose a perceptually inspired object disocclusion method, which works by minimizing the Euler's elastica as well as by incorporating the relatability of partially occluded contours and the convexity of the disoccluded objects. Then, to estimate the preferred scene we rely on a Bayesian model and define probabilities taking into account the global complexity of the objects in the hypothesized scenes as well as the effort of bringing these objects in their relative position in the planar image, which is also measured by an Euler's elastica-based quantity. The model is illustrated with numerical experiments on, both, synthetic and real images showing the ability of our model to reconstruct the occluded objects and the preferred perceptual order among them. We also present results on images of the Berkeley dataset with provided figure-ground ground-truth labeling.
Keywords: Perception; visual completion; disocclusion; Bayesian model;relatability; Euler elastica
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David Sanchez-Mendoza, David Masip, & Agata Lapedriza. (2015). Emotion recognition from mid-level features. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 67(Part 1), 66–74.
Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.
Keywords: Facial expression; Emotion recognition; Action units; Computer vision
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C. Alejandro Parraga, & Arash Akbarinia. (2016). NICE: A Computational Solution to Close the Gap from Colour Perception to Colour Categorization. Plos - PLoS One, 11(3), e0149538.
Abstract: The segmentation of visible electromagnetic radiation into chromatic categories by the human visual system has been extensively studied from a perceptual point of view, resulting in several colour appearance models. However, there is currently a void when it comes to relate these results to the physiological mechanisms that are known to shape the pre-cortical and cortical visual pathway. This work intends to begin to fill this void by proposing a new physiologically plausible model of colour categorization based on Neural Isoresponsive Colour Ellipsoids (NICE) in the cone-contrast space defined by the main directions of the visual signals entering the visual cortex. The model was adjusted to fit psychophysical measures that concentrate on the categorical boundaries and are consistent with the ellipsoidal isoresponse surfaces of visual cortical neurons. By revealing the shape of such categorical colour regions, our measures allow for a more precise and parsimonious description, connecting well-known early visual processing mechanisms to the less understood phenomenon of colour categorization. To test the feasibility of our method we applied it to exemplary images and a popular ground-truth chart obtaining labelling results that are better than those of current state-of-the-art algorithms.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2016). On the completeness of feature-driven maximally stable extremal regions. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 74, 9–16.
Abstract: By definition, local image features provide a compact representation of the image in which most of the image information is preserved. This capability offered by local features has been overlooked, despite being relevant in many application scenarios. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the performance of feature-driven Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) in terms of the coverage of informative image parts (completeness). This type of features results from an MSER extraction on saliency maps in which features related to objects boundaries or even symmetry axes are highlighted. These maps are intended to be suitable domains for MSER detection, allowing this detector to provide a better coverage of informative image parts. Our experimental results, which were based on a large-scale evaluation, show that feature-driven MSER have relatively high completeness values and provide more complete sets than a traditional MSER detection even when sets of similar cardinality are considered.
Keywords: Local features; Completeness; Maximally Stable Extremal Regions
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Alejandro Gonzalez Alzate, Zhijie Fang, Yainuvis Socarras, Joan Serrat, David Vazquez, Jiaolong Xu, et al. (2016). Pedestrian Detection at Day/Night Time with Visible and FIR Cameras: A Comparison. SENS - Sensors, 16(6), 820.
Abstract: Despite all the significant advances in pedestrian detection brought by computer vision for driving assistance, it is still a challenging problem. One reason is the extremely varying lighting conditions under which such a detector should operate, namely day and night time. Recent research has shown that the combination of visible and non-visible imaging modalities may increase detection accuracy, where the infrared spectrum plays a critical role. The goal of this paper is to assess the accuracy gain of different pedestrian models (holistic, part-based, patch-based) when training with images in the far infrared spectrum. Specifically, we want to compare detection accuracy on test images recorded at day and nighttime if trained (and tested) using (a) plain color images, (b) just infrared images and (c) both of them. In order to obtain results for the last item we propose an early fusion approach to combine features from both modalities. We base the evaluation on a new dataset we have built for this purpose as well as on the publicly available KAIST multispectral dataset.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; FIR
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Egils Avots, M. Daneshmanda, Andres Traumann, Sergio Escalera, & G. Anbarjafaria. (2016). Automatic garment retexturing based on infrared information. CG - Computers & Graphics, 59, 28–38.
Abstract: This paper introduces a new automatic technique for garment retexturing using a single static image along with the depth and infrared information obtained using the Microsoft Kinect II as the RGB-D acquisition device. First, the garment is segmented out from the image using either the Breadth-First Search algorithm or the semi-automatic procedure provided by the GrabCut method. Then texture domain coordinates are computed for each pixel belonging to the garment using normalised 3D information. Afterwards, shading is applied to the new colours from the texture image. As the main contribution of the proposed method, the latter information is obtained based on extracting a linear map transforming the colour present on the infrared image to that of the RGB colour channels. One of the most important impacts of this strategy is that the resulting retexturing algorithm is colour-, pattern- and lighting-invariant. The experimental results show that it can be used to produce realistic representations, which is substantiated through implementing it under various experimentation scenarios, involving varying lighting intensities and directions. Successful results are accomplished also on video sequences, as well as on images of subjects taking different poses. Based on the Mean Opinion Score analysis conducted on many randomly chosen users, it has been shown to produce more realistic-looking results compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods suggested in the literature. From a wide perspective, the proposed method can be used for retexturing all sorts of segmented surfaces, although the focus of this study is on garment retexturing, and the investigation of the configurations is steered accordingly, since the experiments target an application in the context of virtual fitting rooms.
Keywords: Garment Retexturing; Texture Mapping; Infrared Images; RGB-D Acquisition Devices; Shading
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Katerine Diaz, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). A reduced feature set for driver head pose estimation. ASOC - Applied Soft Computing, 45, 98–107.
Abstract: Evaluation of driving performance is of utmost importance in order to reduce road accident rate. Since driving ability includes visual-spatial and operational attention, among others, head pose estimation of the driver is a crucial indicator of driving performance. This paper proposes a new automatic method for coarse and fine head's yaw angle estimation of the driver. We rely on a set of geometric features computed from just three representative facial keypoints, namely the center of the eyes and the nose tip. With these geometric features, our method combines two manifold embedding methods and a linear regression one. In addition, the method has a confidence mechanism to decide if the classification of a sample is not reliable. The approach has been tested using the CMU-PIE dataset and our own driver dataset. Despite the very few facial keypoints required, the results are comparable to the state-of-the-art techniques. The low computational cost of the method and its robustness makes feasible to integrate it in massive consume devices as a real time application.
Keywords: Head pose estimation; driving performance evaluation; subspace based methods; linear regression
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Sergio Escalera, Vassilis Athitsos, & Isabelle Guyon. (2016). Challenges in multimodal gesture recognition. JMLR - Journal of Machine Learning Research, 17, 1–54.
Abstract: This paper surveys the state of the art on multimodal gesture recognition and introduces the JMLR special topic on gesture recognition 2011-2015. We began right at the start of the KinectTMrevolution when inexpensive infrared cameras providing image depth recordings became available. We published papers using this technology and other more conventional methods, including regular video cameras, to record data, thus providing a good overview of uses of machine learning and computer vision using multimodal data in this area of application. Notably, we organized a series of challenges and made available several datasets we recorded for that purpose, including tens of thousands
of videos, which are available to conduct further research. We also overview recent state of the art works on gesture recognition based on a proposed taxonomy for gesture recognition, discussing challenges and future lines of research.
Keywords: Gesture Recognition; Time Series Analysis; Multimodal Data Analysis; Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition; Wearable sensors; Infrared Cameras; KinectTM
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