Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Generic Subclass Ensemble: A Novel Approach to Ensemble Classification. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1254–1259).
Abstract: Multiple classifier systems, also known as classifier ensembles, have received great attention in recent years because of their improved classification accuracy in different applications. In this paper, we propose a new general approach to ensemble classification, named generic subclass ensemble, in which each base classifier is trained with data belonging to a subset of classes, and thus discriminates among a subset of target categories. The ensemble classifiers are then fused using a combination rule. The proposed approach differs from existing methods that manipulate the target attribute, since in our approach individual classification problems are not restricted to two-class problems. We perform a series of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the generic subclass approach on a set of benchmark datasets. Experimental results with multilayer perceptrons show that the proposed approach presents a viable alternative to the most commonly used ensemble classification approaches.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Gang Hu, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). A Framework of Multi-Classifier Fusion for Human Action Recognition. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1260–1265).
Abstract: The performance of different action-recognition methods using skeleton joint locations have been recently studied by several computer vision researchers. However, the potential improvement in classification through classifier fusion by ensemble-based methods has remained unattended. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an ensemble of five action learning techniques, each performing the recognition task from a different perspective. The underlying rationale of the fusion approach is that different learners employ varying structures of input descriptors/features to be trained. These varying structures cannot be attached and used by a single learner. In addition, combining the outputs of several learners can reduce the risk of an unfortunate selection of a poorly performing learner. This leads to having a more robust and general-applicable framework. Also, we propose two simple, yet effective, action description techniques. In order to improve the recognition performance, a powerful combination strategy is utilized based on the Dempster-Shafer theory, which can effectively make use of diversity of base learners trained on different sources of information. The recognition results of the individual classifiers are compared with those obtained from fusing the classifiers' output, showing advanced performance of the proposed methodology.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Shida Beigpour, Joost Van de Weijer, & Michael Felsberg. (2014). Painting-91: A Large Scale Database for Computational Painting Categorization. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, 25(6), 1385–1397.
Abstract: Computer analysis of visual art, especially paintings, is an interesting cross-disciplinary research domain. Most of the research in the analysis of paintings involve medium to small range datasets with own specific settings. Interestingly, significant progress has been made in the field of object and scene recognition lately. A key factor in this success is the introduction and availability of benchmark datasets for evaluation. Surprisingly, such a benchmark setup is still missing in the area of computational painting categorization. In this work, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The dataset consists of paintings from 91 different painters. We further show three applications of our dataset namely: artist categorization, style classification and saliency detection. We investigate how local and global features popular in image classification perform for the tasks of artist and style categorization. For both categorization tasks, our experimental results suggest that combining multiple features significantly improves the final performance. We show that state-of-the-art computer vision methods can correctly classify 50 % of unseen paintings to its painter in a large dataset and correctly attribute its artistic style in over 60 % of the cases. Additionally, we explore the task of saliency detection on paintings and show experimental findings using state-of-the-art saliency estimation algorithms.
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Marc Serra, Olivier Penacchio, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2014). The Photometry of Intrinsic Images. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1494–1501).
Abstract: Intrinsic characterization of scenes is often the best way to overcome the illumination variability artifacts that complicate most computer vision problems, from 3D reconstruction to object or material recognition. This paper examines the deficiency of existing intrinsic image models to accurately account for the effects of illuminant color and sensor characteristics in the estimation of intrinsic images and presents a generic framework which incorporates insights from color constancy research to the intrinsic image decomposition problem. The proposed mathematical formulation includes information about the color of the illuminant and the effects of the camera sensors, both of which modify the observed color of the reflectance of the objects in the scene during the acquisition process. By modeling these effects, we get a “truly intrinsic” reflectance image, which we call absolute reflectance, which is invariant to changes of illuminant or camera sensors. This model allows us to represent a wide range of intrinsic image decompositions depending on the specific assumptions on the geometric properties of the scene configuration and the spectral properties of the light source and the acquisition system, thus unifying previous models in a single general framework. We demonstrate that even partial information about sensors improves significantly the estimated reflectance images, thus making our method applicable for a wide range of sensors. We validate our general intrinsic image framework experimentally with both synthetic data and natural images.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Michael Felsberg. (2014). Scale Coding Bag-of-Words for Action Recognition. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1514–1519).
Abstract: Recognizing human actions in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision due to significant amount of scale, illumination and pose variation. Given the bounding box of a person both at training and test time, the task is to classify the action associated with each bounding box in an image.
Most state-of-the-art methods use the bag-of-words paradigm for action recognition. The bag-of-words framework employing a dense multi-scale grid sampling strategy is the de facto standard for feature detection. This results in a scale invariant image representation where all the features at multiple-scales are binned in a single histogram. We argue that such a scale invariant
strategy is sub-optimal since it ignores the multi-scale information
available with each bounding box of a person.
This paper investigates alternative approaches to scale coding for action recognition in still images. We encode multi-scale information explicitly in three different histograms for small, medium and large scale visual-words. Our first approach exploits multi-scale information with respect to the image size. In our second approach, we encode multi-scale information relative to the size of the bounding box of a person instance. In each approach, the multi-scale histograms are then concatenated into a single representation for action classification. We validate our approaches on the Willow dataset which contains seven action categories: interacting with computer, photography, playing music,
riding bike, riding horse, running and walking. Our results clearly suggest that the proposed scale coding approaches outperform the conventional scale invariant technique. Moreover, we show that our approach obtains promising results compared to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
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Carlo Gatta, & Francesco Ciompi. (2014). Stacked Sequential Scale-Space Taylor Context. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(8), 1694–1700.
Abstract: We analyze sequential image labeling methods that sample the posterior label field in order to gather contextual information. We propose an effective method that extracts local Taylor coefficients from the posterior at different scales. Results show that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MSRC-21, CAMVID, eTRIMS8 and KAIST2 data sets.
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Santiago Segui, Michal Drozdzal, Ekaterina Zaytseva, Fernando Azpiroz, Petia Radeva, & Jordi Vitria. (2014). Detection of wrinkle frames in endoluminal videos using betweenness centrality measures for images. TITB - IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 18(6), 1831–1838.
Abstract: Intestinal contractions are one of the most important events to diagnose motility pathologies of the small intestine. When visualized by wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE), the sequence of frames that represents a contraction is characterized by a clear wrinkle structure in the central frames that corresponds to the folding of the intestinal wall. In this paper we present a new method to robustly detect wrinkle frames in full WCE videos by using a new mid-level image descriptor that is based on a centrality measure proposed for graphs. We present an extended validation, carried out in a very large database, that shows that the proposed method achieves state of the art performance for this task.
Keywords: Wireless Capsule Endoscopy; Small Bowel Motility Dysfunction; Contraction Detection; Structured Prediction; Betweenness Centrality
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Jiaolong Xu, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, Javier Marin, & Daniel Ponsa. (2014). Learning a Part-based Pedestrian Detector in Virtual World. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(5), 2121–2131.
Abstract: Detecting pedestrians with on-board vision systems is of paramount interest for assisting drivers to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. The core of a pedestrian detector is its classification module, which aims at deciding if a given image window contains a pedestrian. Given the difficulty of this task, many classifiers have been proposed during the last fifteen years. Among them, the so-called (deformable) part-based classifiers including multi-view modeling are usually top ranked in accuracy. Training such classifiers is not trivial since a proper aspect clustering and spatial part alignment of the pedestrian training samples are crucial for obtaining an accurate classifier. In this paper, first we perform automatic aspect clustering and part alignment by using virtual-world pedestrians, i.e., human annotations are not required. Second, we use a mixture-of-parts approach that allows part sharing among different aspects. Third, these proposals are integrated in a learning framework which also allows to incorporate real-world training data to perform domain adaptation between virtual- and real-world cameras. Overall, the obtained results on four popular on-board datasets show that our proposal clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art deformable part-based detector known as latent SVM.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection; Virtual Worlds
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2014). ECOC-DRF: Discriminative random fields based on error correcting output codes. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(6), 2193–2204.
Abstract: We present ECOC-DRF, a framework where potential functions for Discriminative Random Fields are formulated as an ensemble of classifiers. We introduce the label trick, a technique to express transitions in the pairwise potential as meta-classes. This allows to independently learn any possible transition between labels without assuming any pre-defined model. The Error Correcting Output Codes matrix is used as ensemble framework for the combination of margin classifiers. We apply ECOC-DRF to a large set of classification problems, covering synthetic, natural and medical images for binary and multi-class cases, outperforming state-of-the art in almost all the experiments.
Keywords: Discriminative random fields; Error-correcting output codes; Multi-class classification; Graphical models
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Domain Adaptation of Deformable Part-Based Models. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2367–2380.
Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Oscar Lopes, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Spherical Blurred Shape Model for 3-D Object and Pose Recognition: Quantitative Analysis and HCI Applications in Smart Environments. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(12), 2379–2390.
Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.
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Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2014). Word Spotting and Recognition with Embedded Attributes. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2552–2566.
Abstract: This article addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Embedding Document Structure to Bag-of-Words through Pair-wise Stable Key-regions. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2903–2908).
Abstract: Since the document structure carries valuable discriminative information, plenty of efforts have been made for extracting and understanding document structure among which layout analysis approaches are the most commonly used. In this paper, Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) is employed to efficiently extract the document structure as a dendrogram of key-regions which roughly correspond to structural elements such as characters, words and paragraphs. Inspired by the Bag
of Words (BoW) framework, we propose an efficient method for structural document matching by representing the document image as a histogram of key-region pairs encoding structural relationships.
Applied to the scenario of document image retrieval, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement when comparing the proposed method with typical BoW and pyramidal BoW methods.
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P. Wang, V. Eglin, C. Garcia, C. Largeron, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A Coarse-to-Fine Word Spotting Approach for Historical Handwritten Documents Based on Graph Embedding and Graph Edit Distance. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 3074–3079).
Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task, especially historical ones. In the paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both the topological and morphological signatures of the handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. Aiming at developing a practical and efficient word spotting approach for large-scale historical handwritten documents, a fast and coarse comparison is first applied to prune the regions that are not similar to the query based on the graph embedding methodology. Afterwards, the query and regions of interest are compared by graph edit distance based on the Dynamic Time Warping alignment. The proposed approach is evaluated on a public dataset containing 50 pages of historical marriage license records. The results show that the proposed approach achieves a compromise between efficiency and accuracy.
Keywords: word spotting; coarse-to-fine mechamism; graphbased representation; graph embedding; graph edit distance
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2014). MSER-based Real-Time Text Detection and Tracking. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 3110–3115).
Abstract: We present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of text in natural scenes that goes beyond the fulldetection approaches in terms of time performance optimization.
A state-of-the-art scene text detection module based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) is used to detect text asynchronously, while on a separate thread detected text objects are tracked by MSER propagation. The cooperation of these two modules yields real time video processing at high frame rates even on low-resource devices.
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