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Author Shida Beigpour
Title Illumination and object reflectance modeling Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.
Address Barcelona
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Joost Van de Weijer;Ernest Valveny
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Bei2013 Serial 2267
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Author Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Title Coloring bag-of-words based image representations Type Book Whole
Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Put succinctly, the bag-of-words based image representation is the most successful approach for object and scene recognition. Within the bag-of-words framework the optimal fusion of multiple cues, such as shape, texture and color, still remains an active research domain. There exist two main approaches to combine color and shape information within the bag-of-words framework. The first approach called, early fusion, fuses color and shape at the feature level as a result of which a joint colorshape vocabulary is produced. The second approach, called late fusion, concatenates histogram representation of both color and shape, obtained independently. In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the theoretical implications of both early and late feature fusion. We demonstrate that both these approaches are suboptimal for a subset of object categories. Consequently, we propose a novel method for recognizing object categories when using multiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom-up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, the color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. Shape features are given more weight in regions with higher attention and vice versa. The approach is tested on several benchmark object recognition data sets and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of obtaining compact spatial pyramid representations for object and scene recognition. Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback of spatial pyramids is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. We present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. The approach reduces the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation upto an order of magnitude without any significant reduction in accuracy. Moreover, we also investigate the optimal combination of multiple features such as color and shape within the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, we describe a novel technique to build discriminative visual words from multiple cues learned independently from training images. To this end, we use an information theoretic vocabulary compression technique to find discriminative combinations of visual cues and the resulting visual vocabulary is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. The approach is tested on standard object recognition data sets. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Joost Van de Weijer;Maria Vanrell
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Kha2011 Serial 1838
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Author Lu Yu
Title Semantic Representation: From Color to Deep Embeddings Type Book Whole
Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract One of the fundamental problems of computer vision is to represent images with compact semantically relevant embeddings. These embeddings could then be used in a wide variety of applications, such as image retrieval, object detection, and video search. The main objective of this thesis is to study image embeddings from two aspects: color embeddings and deep embeddings.
In the first part of the thesis we start from hand-crafted color embeddings. We propose a method to order the additional color names according to their complementary nature with the basic eleven color names. This allows us to compute color name representations with high discriminative power of arbitrary length. Psychophysical experiments confirm that our proposed method outperforms baseline approaches. Secondly, we learn deep color embeddings from weakly labeled data by adding an attention strategy. The attention branch is able to correctly identify the relevant regions for each class. The advantage of our approach is that it can learn color names for specific domains for which no pixel-wise labels exists.
In the second part of the thesis, we focus on deep embeddings. Firstly, we address the problem of compressing large embedding networks into small networks, while maintaining similar performance. We propose to distillate the metrics from a teacher network to a student network. Two new losses are introduced to model the communication of a deep teacher network to a small student network: one based on an absolute teacher, where the student aims to produce the same embeddings as the teacher, and one based on a relative teacher, where the distances between pairs of data points is communicated from the teacher to the student. In addition, various aspects of distillation have been investigated for embeddings, including hint and attention layers, semi-supervised learning and cross quality distillation. Finally, another aspect of deep metric learning, namely lifelong learning, is studied. We observed some drift occurs during training of new tasks for metric learning. A method to estimate the semantic drift based on the drift which is experienced by data of the current task during its training is introduced. Having this estimation, previous tasks can be compensated for this drift, thereby improving their performance. Furthermore, we show that embedding networks suffer significantly less from catastrophic forgetting compared to classification networks when learning new tasks.
Address November 2019
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Joost Van de Weijer;Yongmei Cheng
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-3-3 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes LAMP; 600.120 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Yu2019 Serial 3394
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Author Diego Velazquez
Title Towards Robustness in Computer-based Image Understanding Type Book Whole
Year 2023 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract This thesis embarks on an exploratory journey into robustness in deep learning,
with a keen focus on the intertwining facets of generalization, explainability, and
edge cases within the realm of computer vision. In deep learning, robustness
epitomizes a model’s resilience and flexibility, grounded on its capacity to generalize across diverse data distributions, explain its predictions transparently, and navigate the intricacies of edge cases effectively. The challenges associated with robust generalization are multifaceted, encompassing the model’s performance on unseen data and its defense against out-of-distribution data and adversarial attacks. Bridging this gap, the potential of Embedding Propagation (EP) for improving out-of-distribution generalization is explored. EP is depicted as a powerful tool facilitating manifold smoothing, which in turn fortifies the model’s robustness against adversarial onslaughts and bolsters performance in few-shot and self-/semi-supervised learning scenarios. In the labyrinth of deep learning models, the path to robustness often intersects with explainability. As model complexity increases, so does the urgency to decipher their decision-making
processes. Acknowledging this, the thesis introduces a robust framework for
evaluating and comparing various counterfactual explanation methods, echoing
the imperative of explanation quality over quantity and spotlighting the intricacies of diversifying explanations. Simultaneously, the deep learning landscape is fraught with edge cases – anomalies in the form of small objects or rare instances in object detection tasks that defy the norm. Confronting this, the
thesis presents an extension of the DETR (DEtection TRansformer) model to enhance small object detection. The devised DETR-FP, embedding the Feature Pyramid technique, demonstrating improvement in small objects detection accuracy, albeit facing challenges like high computational costs. With emergence of foundation models in mind, the thesis unveils EarthView, the largest scale remote sensing dataset to date, built for the self-supervised learning of a robust foundational model for remote sensing. Collectively, these studies contribute to the grand narrative of robustness in deep learning, weaving together the strands of generalization, explainability, and edge case performance. Through these methodological advancements and novel datasets, the thesis calls for continued exploration, innovation, and refinement to fortify the bastion of robust computer vision.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Josep M. Gonfaus;Pau Rodriguez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-81-126409-5-3 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Vel2023 Serial 3965
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Author Pau Rodriguez
Title Towards Robust Neural Models for Fine-Grained Image Recognition Type Book Whole
Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Fine-grained recognition, i.e. identifying similar subcategories of the same superclass, is central to human activity. Recognizing a friend, finding bacteria in microscopic imagery, or discovering a new kind of galaxy, are just but few examples. However, fine-grained image recognition is still a challenging computer vision task since the differences between two images of the same category can overwhelm the differences between two images of different fine-grained categories. In this regime, where the difference between two categories resides on subtle input changes, excessively invariant CNNs discard those details that help to discriminate between categories and focus on more obvious changes, yielding poor classification performance.
On the other hand, CNNs with too much capacity tend to memorize instance-specific details, thus causing overfitting. In this thesis,motivated by the
potential impact of automatic fine-grained image recognition, we tackle the previous challenges and demonstrate that proper alignment of the inputs, multiple levels of attention, regularization, and explicitmodeling of the output space, results inmore accurate fine-grained recognitionmodels, that generalize better, and are more robust to intra-class variation. Concretely, we study the different stages of the neural network pipeline: input pre-processing, attention to regions, feature activations, and the label space. In each stage, we address different issues that hinder the recognition performance on various fine-grained tasks, and devise solutions in each chapter: i)We deal with the sensitivity to input alignment on fine-grained human facial motion such as pain. ii) We introduce an attention mechanism to allow CNNs to choose and process in detail the most discriminate regions of the image. iii)We further extend attention mechanisms to act on the network activations,
thus allowing them to correct their predictions by looking back at certain
regions, at different levels of abstraction. iv) We propose a regularization loss to prevent high-capacity neural networks to memorize instance details by means of almost-identical feature detectors. v)We finally study the advantages of explicitly modeling the output space within the error-correcting framework. As a result, in this thesis we demonstrate that attention and regularization seem promising directions to overcome the problems of fine-grained image recognition, as well as proper treatment of the input and the output space.
Address March 2019
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Josep M. Gonfaus;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-3-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE; 600.119 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Rod2019 Serial 3258
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Author Bonifaz Stuhr
Title Towards Unsupervised Representation Learning: Learning, Evaluating and Transferring Visual Representations Type Book Whole
Year 2023 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Unsupervised representation learning aims at finding methods that learn representations from data without annotation-based signals. Abstaining from annotations not only leads to economic benefits but may – and to some extent already does – result in advantages regarding the representation’s structure, robustness, and generalizability to different tasks. In the long run, unsupervised methods are expected to surpass their supervised counterparts due to the reduction of human intervention and the inherently more general setup that does not bias the optimization towards an objective originating from specific annotation-based signals. While major advantages of unsupervised representation learning have been recently observed in natural language processing, supervised methods still dominate in vision domains for most tasks. In this dissertation, we contribute to the field of unsupervised (visual) representation learning from three perspectives: (i) Learning representations: We design unsupervised, backpropagation-free Convolutional Self-Organizing Neural Networks (CSNNs) that utilize self-organization- and Hebbian-based learning rules to learn convolutional kernels and masks to achieve deeper backpropagation-free models. Thereby, we observe that backpropagation-based and -free methods can suffer from an objective function mismatch between the unsupervised pretext task and the target task. This mismatch can lead to performance decreases for the target task. (ii) Evaluating representations: We build upon the widely used (non-)linear evaluation protocol to define pretext- and target-objective-independent metrics for measuring the objective function mismatch. With these metrics, we evaluate various pretext and target tasks and disclose dependencies of the objective function mismatch concerning different parts of the training and model setup. (iii) Transferring representations: We contribute CARLANE, the first 3-way sim-to-real domain adaptation benchmark for 2D lane detection. We adopt several well-known unsupervised domain adaptation methods as baselines and propose a method based on prototypical cross-domain self-supervised learning. Finally, we focus on pixel-based unsupervised domain adaptation and contribute a content-consistent unpaired image-to-image translation method that utilizes masks, global and local discriminators, and similarity sampling to mitigate content inconsistencies, as well as feature-attentive denormalization to fuse content-based statistics into the generator stream. In addition, we propose the cKVD metric to incorporate class-specific content inconsistencies into perceptual metrics for measuring translation quality.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher IMPRIA Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Jurgen Brauer
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-126409-6-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Stu2023 Serial 3966
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Josep M. Gonfaus
Title Towards Deep Image Understanding: From pixels to semantics Type Book Whole
Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Understanding the content of the images is one of the greatest challenges of computer vision. Recognition of objects appearing in images, identifying and interpreting their actions are the main purposes of Image Understanding. This thesis seeks to identify what is present in a picture by categorizing and locating all the objects in the scene.
Images are composed by pixels, and one possibility consists of assigning to each pixel an object category, which is commonly known as semantic segmentation. By incorporating information as a contextual cue, we are able to resolve the ambiguity within categories at the pixel-level. We propose three levels of scale in order to resolve such ambiguity.
Another possibility to represent the objects is the object detection task. In this case, the aim is to recognize and localize the whole object by accurately placing a bounding box around it. We present two new approaches. The first one is focused on improving the object representation of deformable part models with the concept of factorized appearances. The second approach addresses the issue of reducing the computational cost for multi-class recognition. The results given have been validated on several commonly used datasets, reaching international recognition and state-of-the-art within the field
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Theo Gevers
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gon2012 Serial 2208
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Author Pau Baiget
Title Modeling Human Behavior for Image Sequence Understanding and Generation Type Book Whole
Year 2009 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The comprehension of animal behavior, especially human behavior, is one of the most ancient and studied problems since the beginning of civilization. The big list of factors that interact to determine a person action require the collaboration of different disciplines, such as psichology, biology, or sociology. In the last years the analysis of human behavior has received great attention also from the computer vision community, given the latest advances in the acquisition of human motion data from image sequences.

Despite the increasing availability of that data, there still exists a gap towards obtaining a conceptual representation of the obtained observations. Human behavior analysis is based on a qualitative interpretation of the results, and therefore the assignment of concepts to quantitative data is linked to a certain ambiguity.

This Thesis tackles the problem of obtaining a proper representation of human behavior in the contexts of computer vision and animation. On the one hand, a good behavior model should permit the recognition and explanation the observed activity in image sequences. On the other hand, such a model must allow the generation of new synthetic instances, which model the behavior of virtual agents.

First, we propose methods to automatically learn the models from observations. Given a set of quantitative results output by a vision system, a normal behavior model is learnt. This results provides a tool to determine the normality or abnormality of future observations. However, machine learning methods are unable to provide a richer description of the observations. We confront this problem by means of a new method that incorporates prior knowledge about the enviornment and about the expected behaviors. This framework, formed by the reasoning engine FMTL and the modeling tool SGT allows the generation of conceptual descriptions of activity in new image sequences. Finally, we demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework to simulate behavior of virtual agents, which are introduced into real image sequences and interact with observed real agents, thereby easing the generation of augmented reality sequences.

The set of approaches presented in this Thesis has a growing set of potential applications. The analysis and description of behavior in image sequences has its principal application in the domain of smart video--surveillance, in order to detect suspicious or dangerous behaviors. Other applications include automatic sport commentaries, elderly monitoring, road traffic analysis, and the development of semantic video search engines. Alternatively, behavioral virtual agents allow to simulate accurate real situations, such as fires or crowds. Moreover, the inclusion of virtual agents into real image sequences has been widely deployed in the games and cinema industries.
Address Bellaterra (Spain)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Bai2009 Serial 1210
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Author Ignasi Rius
Title Motion Priors for Efficient Bayesian Tracking in Human Sequence Evaluation Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Recovering human motion by visual analysis is a challenging computer vision research
area with a lot of potential applications. Model-based tracking approaches, and in
particular particle lters, formulate the problem as a Bayesian inference task whose
aim is to sequentially estimate the distribution of the parameters of a human body
model over time. These approaches strongly rely on good dynamical and observation
models to predict and update congurations of the human body according to measurements from the image data. However, it is very dicult to design observation
models which extract useful and reliable information from image sequences robustly.
This results specially challenging in monocular tracking given that only one viewpoint
from the scene is available. Therefore, to overcome these limitations strong motion
priors are needed to guide the exploration of the state space.
The work presented in this Thesis is aimed to retrieve the 3D motion parameters
of a human body model from incomplete and noisy measurements of a monocular
image sequence. These measurements consist of the 2D positions of a reduced set of
joints in the image plane. Towards this end, we present a novel action-specic model
of human motion which is trained from several databases of real motion-captured
performances of an action, and is used as a priori knowledge within a particle ltering
scheme.
Body postures are represented by means of a simple and compact stick gure
model which uses direction cosines to represent the direction of body limbs in the 3D
Cartesian space. Then, for a given action, Principal Component Analysis is applied to
the training data to perform dimensionality reduction over the highly correlated input
data. Before the learning stage of the action model, the input motion performances
are synchronized by means of a novel dense matching algorithm based on Dynamic
Programming. The algorithm synchronizes all the motion sequences of the same
action class, nding an optimal solution in real-time.
Then, a probabilistic action model is learnt, based on the synchronized motion
examples, which captures the variability and temporal evolution of full-body motion
within a specic action. In particular, for each action, the parameters learnt are: a
representative manifold for the action consisting of its mean performance, the standard deviation from the mean performance, the mean observed direction vectors from
each motion subsequence of a given length and the expected error at a given time
instant.
Subsequently, the action-specic model is used as a priori knowledge on human
motion which improves the eciency and robustness of the overall particle filtering tracking framework. First, the dynamic model guides the particles according to similar
situations previously learnt. Then, the state space is constrained so only feasible
human postures are accepted as valid solutions at each time step. As a result, the
state space is explored more eciently as the particle set covers the most probable
body postures.
Finally, experiments are carried out using test sequences from several motion
databases. Results point out that our tracker scheme is able to estimate the rough
3D conguration of a full-body model providing only the 2D positions of a reduced
set of joints. Separate tests on the sequence synchronization method and the subsequence probabilistic matching technique are also provided.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-9-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Riu2010 Serial 1331
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ivan Huerta
Title Foreground Object Segmentation and Shadow Detection for Video Sequences in Uncontrolled Environments Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract This Thesis is mainly divided in two parts. The first one presents a study of motion
segmentation problems. Based on this study, a novel algorithm for mobile-object
segmentation from a static background scene is also presented. This approach is
demonstrated robust and accurate under most of the common problems in motion
segmentation. The second one tackles the problem of shadows in depth. Firstly, a
bottom-up approach based on a chromatic shadow detector is presented to deal with
umbra shadows. Secondly, a top-down approach based on a tracking system has been
developed in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection.
In our first contribution, a case analysis of motion segmentation problems is presented by taking into account the problems associated with different cues, namely
colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is a hybrid architecture which
handles the main problems observed in such a case analysis, by fusing (i) the knowledge from these three cues and (ii) a temporal difference algorithm. On the one hand,
we enhance the colour and edge models to solve both global/local illumination changes
(shadows and highlights) and camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is
exploited to cope with a very challenging problem such as the camouflage in chroma.
On the other hand, the intensity cue is also applied when colour and edge cues are not
available, such as when beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference
is included to segment motion when these three cues are not available, such as that
background not visible during the training period. Lastly, the approach is enhanced
for allowing ghost detection. As a result, our approach obtains very accurate and robust motion segmentation in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, as quantitatively and
qualitatively demonstrated in the experimental results, by comparing our approach
with most best-known state-of-the-art approaches.
Motion Segmentation has to deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting
moving objects. Most segmentation approaches dealing with shadow detection are
typically restricted to penumbra shadows. Therefore, such techniques cannot cope
well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadows are usually detected as part
of moving objects.
Firstly, a bottom-up approach for detection and removal of chromatic moving
shadows in surveillance scenarios is proposed. Secondly, a top-down approach based
on kalman filters to detect and track shadows has been developed in order to enhance
the chromatic shadow detection. In the Bottom-up part, the shadow detection approach applies a novel technique based on gradient and colour models for separating
chromatic moving shadows from moving objects.
Well-known colour and gradient models are extended and improved into an invariant colour cone model and an invariant gradient model, respectively, to perform
automatic segmentation while detecting potential shadows. Hereafter, the regions corresponding to potential shadows are grouped by considering ”a bluish effect” and an
edge partitioning. Lastly, (i) temporal similarities between local gradient structures
and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are
analysed for all potential shadow regions in order to finally identify umbra shadows.
In the top-down process, after detection of objects and shadows both are tracked
using Kalman filters, in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection, when it
fails to detect a shadow. Firstly, this implies a data association between the blobs
(foreground and shadow) and Kalman filters. Secondly, an event analysis of the different data association cases is performed, and occlusion handling is managed by a
Probabilistic Appearance Model (PAM). Based on this association, temporal consistency is looked for the association between foregrounds and shadows and their
respective Kalman Filters. From this association several cases are studied, as a result
lost chromatic shadows are correctly detected. Finally, the tracking results are used
as feedback to improve the shadow and object detection.
Unlike other approaches, our method does not make any a-priori assumptions
about camera location, surface geometries, surface textures, shapes and types of
shadows, objects, and background. Experimental results show the performance and
accuracy of our approach in different shadowed materials and illumination conditions.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-3-3 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number ISE @ ise @ Hue2010 Serial 1332
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Carles Fernandez
Title Understanding Image Sequences: the Role of Ontologies in Cognitive Vision Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The increasing ubiquitousness of digital information in our daily lives has positioned
video as a favored information vehicle, and given rise to an astonishing generation of
social media and surveillance footage. This raises a series of technological demands
for automatic video understanding and management, which together with the compromising attentional limitations of human operators, have motivated the research
community to guide its steps towards a better attainment of such capabilities. As
a result, current trends on cognitive vision promise to recognize complex events and
self-adapt to different environments, while managing and integrating several types of
knowledge. Future directions suggest to reinforce the multi-modal fusion of information sources and the communication with end-users.
In this thesis we tackle the problem of recognizing and describing meaningful
events in video sequences from different domains, and communicating the resulting
knowledge to end-users by means of advanced interfaces for human–computer interaction. This problem is addressed by designing the high-level modules of a cognitive
vision framework exploiting ontological knowledge. Ontologies allow us to define the
relevant concepts in a domain and the relationships among them; we prove that the
use of ontologies to organize, centralize, link, and reuse different types of knowledge
is a key factor in the materialization of our objectives.
The proposed framework contributes to: (i) automatically learn the characteristics
of different scenarios in a domain; (ii) reason about uncertain, incomplete, or vague
information from visual –camera’s– or linguistic –end-user’s– inputs; (iii) derive plausible interpretations of complex events from basic spatiotemporal developments; (iv)
facilitate natural interfaces that adapt to the needs of end-users, and allow them to
communicate efficiently with the system at different levels of interaction; and finally,
(v) find mechanisms to guide modeling processes, maintain and extend the resulting
models, and to exploit multimodal resources synergically to enhance the former tasks.
We describe a holistic methodology to achieve these goals. First, the use of prior
taxonomical knowledge is proved useful to guide MAP-MRF inference processes in
the automatic identification of semantic regions, with independence of a particular scenario. Towards the recognition of complex video events, we combine fuzzy
metric-temporal reasoning with SGTs, thus assessing high-level interpretations from
spatiotemporal data. Here, ontological resources like T–Boxes, onomasticons, or factual databases become useful to derive video indexing and retrieval capabilities, and
also to forward highlighted content to smart user interfaces. There, we explore the
application of ontologies to discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic principles, or scene augmentation techniques towards advanced communication by means of natural language dialogs and synthetic visualizations. Ontologies become fundamental to
coordinate, adapt, and reuse the different modules in the system.
The suitability of our ontological framework is demonstrated by a series of applications that especially benefit the field of smart video surveillance, viz. automatic generation of linguistic reports about the content of video sequences in multiple natural
languages; content-based filtering and summarization of these reports; dialogue-based
interfaces to query and browse video contents; automatic learning of semantic regions
in a scenario; and tools to evaluate the performance of components and models in the
system, via simulation and augmented reality.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-2-6 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Fer2010a Serial 1333
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Francisco Javier Orozco
Title Human Emotion Evaluation on Facial Image Sequences Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Psychological evidence has emphasized the importance of affective behaviour understanding due to its high impact in nowadays interaction humans and computers. All
type of affective and behavioural patterns such as gestures, emotions and mental
states are highly displayed through the face, head and body. Therefore, this thesis is
focused to analyse affective behaviours on head and face. To this end, head and facial
movements are encoded by using appearance based tracking methods. Specifically,
a wise combination of deformable models captures rigid and non-rigid movements of
different kinematics; 3D head pose, eyebrows, mouth, eyelids and irises are taken into
account as basis for extracting features from databases of video sequences. This approach combines the strengths of adaptive appearance models, optimization methods
and backtracking techniques.
For about thirty years, computer sciences have addressed the investigation on
human emotions to the automatic recognition of six prototypic emotions suggested
by Darwin and systematized by Paul Ekman in the seventies. The Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) which uses discrete movements of the face (called Action
units or AUs) to code the six facial emotions named anger, disgust, fear, happy-Joy,
sadness and surprise. However, human emotions are much complex patterns that
have not received the same attention from computer scientists.
Simon Baron-Cohen proposed a new taxonomy of emotions and mental states
without a system coding of the facial actions. These 426 affective behaviours are
more challenging for the understanding of human emotions. Beyond of classically
classifying the six basic facial expressions, more subtle gestures, facial actions and
spontaneous emotions are considered here. By assessing confidence on the recognition
results, exploring spatial and temporal relationships of the features, some methods are
combined and enhanced for developing new taxonomy of expressions and emotions.
The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computer vision system, including both facial feature extraction, expression recognition and emotion understanding
by building a bottom-up reasoning process. Building a detailed taxonomy of human
affective behaviours is an interesting challenge for head-face-based image analysis
methods. In this paper, we exploit the strengths of Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) to enhance an on-line head-face tracker. A relationship between head pose and
local facial movements is studied according to their cognitive interpretation on affective expressions and emotions. Active Shape Models are synthesized for AAMs based
on CCA-regression. Head pose and facial actions are fused into a maximally correlated space in order to assess expressiveness, confidence and classification in a CBR system. The CBR solutions are also correlated to the cognitive features, which allow
avoiding exhaustive search when recognizing new head-face features. Subsequently,
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayesian Networks are applied for learning the
spatial relationships of facial expressions. Similarly, the temporal evolution of facial
expressions, emotion and mental states are analysed based on Factorized Dynamic
Bayesian Networks (FaDBN).
As results, the bottom-up system recognizes six facial expressions, six basic emotions and six mental states, plus enhancing this categorization with confidence assessment at each level, intensity of expressions and a complete taxonomy
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-936529-3-7 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Oro2010 Serial 1335
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Author Wenjuan Gong
Title 3D Motion Data aided Human Action Recognition and Pose Estimation Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract In this work, we explore human action recognition and pose estimation prob-
lems. Different from traditional works of learning from 2D images or video
sequences and their annotated output, we seek to solve the problems with ad-
ditional 3D motion capture information, which helps to fill the gap between 2D
image features and human interpretations.
We first compare two different schools of approaches commonly used for 3D
pose estimation from 2D pose configuration: modeling and learning methods.
By looking into experiments results and considering our problems, we fixed a
learning method as the following approaches to do pose estimation. We then
establish a framework by adding a module of detecting 2D pose configuration
from images with varied background, which widely extend the application of
the approach. We also seek to directly estimate 3D poses from image features,
instead of estimating 2D poses as a intermediate module. We explore a robust
input feature, which combined with the proposed distance measure, provides
a solution for noisy or corrupted inputs. We further utilize the above method
to estimate weak poses,which is a concise representation of the original poses
by using dimension deduction technologies, from image features. Weak pose
space is where we calculate vocabulary and label action types using a bog of
words pipeline. Temporal information of an action is taken into consideration by
considering several consecutive frames as a single unit for computing vocabulary
and histogram assignments.
Address Barcelona
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gon2013 Serial 2279
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Author Murad Al Haj
Title Looking at Faces: Detection, Tracking and Pose Estimation Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Humans can effortlessly perceive faces, follow them over space and time, and decode their rich content, such as pose, identity and expression. However, despite many decades of research on automatic facial perception in areas like face detection, expression recognition, pose estimation and face recognition, and despite many successes, a complete solution remains elusive. This thesis is dedicated to three problems in automatic face perception, namely face detection, face tracking and pose estimation.

In face detection, an initial simple model is presented that uses pixel-based heuristics to segment skin locations and hand-crafted rules to determine the locations of the faces present in an image. Different colorspaces are studied to judge whether a colorspace transformation can aid skin color detection. The output of this study is used in the design of a more complex face detector that is able to successfully generalize to different scenarios.

In face tracking, a framework that combines estimation and control in a joint scheme is presented to track a face with a single pan-tilt-zoom camera. While this work is mainly motivated by tracking faces, it can be easily applied atop of any detector to track different objects. The applicability of this method is demonstrated on simulated as well as real-life scenarios.

The last and most important part of this thesis is dedicate to monocular head pose estimation. In this part, a method based on partial least squares (PLS) regression is proposed to estimate pose and solve the alignment problem simultaneously. The contributions of this work are two-fold: 1) demonstrating that the proposed method achieves better than state-of-the-art results on the estimation problem and 2) developing a technique to reduce misalignment based on the learned PLS factors that outperform multiple instance learning (MIL) without the need for any re-training or the inclusion of misaligned samples in the training process, as normally done in MIL.
Address Barcelona
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Haj2013 Serial 2278
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Author Noha Elfiky
Title Compact, Adaptive and Discriminative Spatial Pyramids for Improved Object and Scene Classification Type Book Whole
Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The release of challenging datasets with a vast number of images, requires the development of efficient image representations and algorithms which are able to manipulate these large-scale datasets efficiently. Nowadays the Bag-of-Words (BoW) is the most successful approach in the context of object and scene classification tasks. However, its main drawback is the absence of the important spatial information. Spatial pyramids (SP) have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into BoW-based image representation. Observing the remarkable performance of spatial pyramids, their growing number of applications to a broad range of vision problems, and finally its geometry inclusion, a question can be asked what are the limits of spatial pyramids. Within the SP framework, the optimal way for obtaining an image spatial representation, which is able to cope with it’s most foremost shortcomings, concretely, it’s high dimensionality and the rigidity of the resulting image representation, still remains an active research domain. In summary, the main concern of this thesis is to search for the limits of spatial pyramids and try to figure out solutions for them.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Elf2012 Serial 2202
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