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Author German Ros edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Visual Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding Where and What Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Making Ground Autonomous Vehicles (GAVs) a reality as a service for the society is one of the major scientific and technological challenges of this century. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles include reducing accidents, improving traffic congestion and better usage of road infrastructures, among others. These vehicles must operate in our cities, towns and highways, dealing with many different types of situations while respecting traffic rules and protecting human lives. GAVs are expected to deal with all types of scenarios and situations, coping with an uncertain and chaotic world.
Therefore, in order to fulfill these demanding requirements GAVs need to be endowed with the capability of understanding their surrounding at many different levels, by means of affordable sensors and artificial intelligence. This capacity to understand the surroundings and the current situation that the vehicle is involved in is called scene understanding. In this work we investigate novel techniques to bring scene understanding to autonomous vehicles by combining the use of cameras as the main source of information—due to their versatility and affordability—and algorithms based on computer vision and machine learning. We investigate different degrees of understanding of the scene, starting from basic geometric knowledge about where is the vehicle within the scene. A robust and efficient estimation of the vehicle location and pose with respect to a map is one of the most fundamental steps towards autonomous driving. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness and computational efficiency, proposing key insights to improve current solutions. Then we advance to higher levels of abstraction to discover what is in the scene, by recognizing and parsing all the elements present on a driving scene, such as roads, sidewalks, pedestrians, etc. We investigate this problem known as semantic segmentation, proposing new approaches to improve recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. We cover these points by focusing on key aspects such as: (i) how to leverage computation moving semantics to an offline process, (ii) how to train compact architectures based on deconvolutional networks to achieve their maximum potential, (iii) how to use virtual worlds in combination with domain adaptation to produce accurate models in a cost-effective fashion, and (iv) how to use transfer learning techniques to prepare models to new situations. We finally extend the previous level of knowledge enabling systems to reasoning about what has change in a scene with respect to a previous visit, which in return allows for efficient and cost-effective map updating.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Angel Sappa;Julio Guerrero;Antonio Lopez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-1-8 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Ros2016 Serial 2860  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Lluis Gomez edit  openurl
  Title Exploiting Similarity Hierarchies for Multi-script Scene Text Understanding Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract This thesis addresses the problem of automatic scene text understanding in unconstrained conditions. In particular, we tackle the tasks of multi-language and arbitrary-oriented text detection, tracking, and script identification in natural scenes.
For this we have developed a set of generic methods that build on top of the basic observation that text has always certain key visual and structural characteristics that are independent of the language or script in which it is written. Text instances in any
language or script are always formed as groups of similar atomic parts, being them either individual characters, small stroke parts, or even whole words in the case of cursive text. This holistic (sumof-parts) and recursive perspective has lead us to explore different variants of the “segmentation and grouping” paradigm of computer vision.
Scene text detection methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priory knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organization through which
text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects.
In this thesis, we argue that the text detection problem must be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We address the problem of text detection in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective, making explicit use of the recursive nature of text, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypothese with high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Within this generic framework, we design a text-specific object proposals algorithm that, contrary to existing generic object proposals methods, aims directly to the detection of text regions groupings. For this, we abandon the rigid definition of “what is text” of traditional specialized text detectors, and move towards more fuzzy perspective of grouping-based object proposals methods.
Then, we present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of scene text where the notion of region groupings plays also a central role. By leveraging the structural arrangement of text group components between consecutive frames we can improve
the overall tracking performance of the system.
Finally, since our generic detection framework is inherently designed for multi-language environments, we focus on the problem of script identification in order to build a multi-language end-toend reading system. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key
characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed size as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined networks to jointly learn discriminative stroke-parts representations and their relative importance in a patch-based classification scheme.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Dimosthenis Karatzas  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gom2016 Serial 2891  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora; Alicia Fornes; Josep Llados; Anna Cabre edit   pdf
isbn  openurl
  Title Bridging the gap between historical demography and computing: tools for computer-assisted transcription and the analysis of demographic sources Type Book Chapter
  Year 2016 Publication The future of historical demography. Upside down and inside out Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages 127-131  
  Keywords  
  Abstract  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Acco Publishers Place of Publication Editor (up) K.Matthijs; S.Hin; H.Matsuo; J.Kok  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-94-6292-722-3 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.097 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ PFL2016 Serial 2907  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Francisco Cruz edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Probabilistic Graphical Models for Document Analysis Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.

Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.

In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Oriol Ramos Terrades  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-2-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Cru2016 Serial 2861  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Victor Ponce edit  url
openurl 
  Title Evolutionary Bags of Space-Time Features for Human Analysis Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis Universitat de Barcelona, UOC and CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords Computer algorithms; Digital image processing; Digital video; Analysis of variance; Dynamic programming; Evolutionary computation; Gesture  
  Abstract The representation (or feature) learning has been an emerging concept in the last years, since it collects a set of techniques that are present in any theoretical or practical methodology referring to artificial intelligence. In computer vision, a very common representation has adopted the form of the well-known Bag of Visual Words. This representation appears implicitly in most approaches where images are described, and is also present in a huge number of areas and domains: image content retrieval, pedestrian detection, human-computer interaction, surveillance, e-health, and social computing, amongst others. The early stages of this dissertation provide an approach for learning visual representations inside evolutionary algorithms, which consists of evolving weighting schemes to improve the BoVW representations for the task of recognizing categories of videos and images. Thus, we demonstrate the applicability of the most common weighting schemes, which are often used in text mining but are less frequently found in computer vision tasks. Beyond learning these visual representations, we provide an approach based on fusion strategies for learning spatiotemporal representations, from multimodal data obtained by depth sensors. Besides, we specially aim at the evolutionary and dynamic modelling, where the temporal factor is present in the nature of the data, such as video sequences of gestures and actions. Indeed, we explore the effects of probabilistic modelling for those approaches based on dynamic programming, so as to handle the temporal deformation and variance amongst video sequences of different categories. Finally, we integrate dynamic programming and generative models into an evolutionary computation framework, with the aim of learning Bags of SubGestures (BoSG) representations and hence to improve the generalization capability of standard gesture recognition approaches. The results obtained in the experimentation demonstrate, first, that evolutionary algorithms are useful for improving the representation of BoVW approaches in several datasets for recognizing categories in still images and video sequences. On the other hand, our experimentation reveals that both, the use of dynamic programming and generative models to align video sequences, and the representations obtained from applying fusion strategies in multimodal data, entail an enhancement on the performance when recognizing some gesture categories. Furthermore, the combination of evolutionary algorithms with models based on dynamic programming and generative approaches results, when aiming at the classification of video categories on large video datasets, in a considerable improvement over standard gesture and action recognition approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the applications of these representations in several domains for human analysis: classification of images where humans may be present, action and gesture recognition for general applications, and in particular for conversational settings within the field of restorative justice  
  Address June 2016  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Sergio Escalera;Xavier Baro;Hugo Jair Escalante  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes HuPBA Approved no  
  Call Number Pon2016 Serial 2814  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Sergio Escalera; Vassilis Athitsos; Isabelle Guyon edit  url
openurl 
  Title Challenges in multimodal gesture recognition Type Journal Article
  Year 2016 Publication Journal of Machine Learning Research Abbreviated Journal JMLR  
  Volume 17 Issue Pages 1-54  
  Keywords Gesture Recognition; Time Series Analysis; Multimodal Data Analysis; Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition; Wearable sensors; Infrared Cameras; KinectTM  
  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.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Zhuowen Tu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes HuPBA;MILAB; Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ EAG2016 Serial 2764  
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