Abstract: Book Series Intelligent Systems Reference Library

Abstract: Los métodos basados en subespacios son una herramienta muy utilizada en aplicaciones de visión por computador. Aquí se presentan y validan algunos algoritmos que hemos propuesto en este campo de investigación. El primer algoritmo está relacionado con una extensión del método de vectores comunes discriminantes con kernel, que reinterpreta el espacio nulo de la matriz de dispersión intra-clase del conjunto de entrenamiento para obtener las características discriminantes. Dentro de los métodos basados en subespacios existen diferentes tipos de entrenamiento. Uno de los más populares, pero no por ello uno de los más eficientes, es el aprendizaje por lotes. En este tipo de aprendizaje, todas las muestras del conjunto de entrenamiento tienen que estar disponibles desde el inicio. De este modo, cuando nuevas muestras se ponen a disposición del algoritmo, el sistema tiene que ser reentrenado de nuevo desde cero. Una alternativa a este tipo de entrenamiento es el aprendizaje incremental. Aquí­ se proponen diferentes algoritmos incrementales del método de vectores comunes discriminantes.

Abstract: This study presents an efficient super-pixel extraction algorithm with major contributions to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. Segmentation accuracy is improved through convexity constrained geodesic distance utilization; while computational efficiency is achieved by replacing complete region processing with boundary adaptation idea. Starting from the uniformly distributed rectangular equal-sized super-pixels, region boundaries are adapted to intensity edges iteratively by assigning boundary pixels to the most similar neighboring super-pixels. At each iteration, super-pixel regions are updated and hence progressively converging to compact pixel groups. Experimental results with state-of-the-art comparisons, validate the performance of the proposed technique in terms of both accuracy and speed.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications, e.g. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Intelligent Video Surveillance and Multimedia systems. Most promising pedestrian detectors rely on appearance-based classifiers trained with annotated data. However, the required annotation step represents an intensive and subjective task for humans, what makes worth to minimize their intervention in this process by using computational tools like realistic virtual worlds. The reason to use these kind of tools relies in the fact that they allow the automatic generation of precise and rich annotations of visual information. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of data comes with the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt with virtual-world data work successfully for pedestrian detection in real-world scenarios?. To answer this question, we conduct different experiments that suggest a positive answer. However, the pedestrian classifiers trained with virtual-world data can suffer the so called dataset shift problem as real-world based classifiers does. Accordingly, we have designed different domain adaptation techniques to face this problem, all of them integrated in a same framework (V-AYLA). We have explored different methods to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifiers by collecting a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combining them with many samples of the source domain (virtual world). The extensive experiments we present show that pedestrian detectors developed within the V-AYLA framework do achieve domain adaptation. Ideally, we would like to adapt our system without any human intervention. Therefore, as a first proof of concept we also propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that avoids human intervention during the adaptation process. To the best of our knowledge, this Thesis work is the first demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector. Last but not least, we also assessed a different strategy to avoid the dataset shift that consists in collecting real-world samples and retrain with them in such a way that no bounding boxes of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. We show that the generated classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating pedestrian bounding boxes. The results presented on this Thesis not only end with a proposal for adapting a virtual-world pedestrian detector to the real world, but also it goes further by pointing out a new methodology that would allow the system to adapt to different situations, which we hope will provide the foundations for future research in this unexplored area.