Abstract: Pedestrian detection is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, and has received a lot of attention in the last years. Recently, some authors have shown the advantages of using combinations of part/patch-based detectors in order to cope with the large variability of poses and the existence of partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian detection method that efficiently combines multiple local experts by means of a Random Forest ensemble. The proposed method works with rich block-based representations such as HOG and LBP, in such a way that the same features are reused by the multiple local experts, so that no extra computational cost is needed with respect to a holistic method. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to integrate the proposed approach with a cascaded architecture in order to achieve not only high accuracy but also an acceptable efficiency. In particular, the resulting detector operates at five frames per second using a laptop machine. We tested the proposed method with well-known challenging datasets such as Caltech, ETH, Daimler, and INRIA. The method proposed in this work consistently ranks among the top performers in all the datasets, being either the best method or having a small difference with the best one.

Abstract: We investigate the problem of incremental learning for object counting, where a method must learn to count a variety of object classes from a sequence of datasets. A naïve approach to incremental object counting would suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where it would suffer from a dramatic performance drop on previous tasks. In this paper, we propose a new exemplar-free functional regularization method, called Density Map Distillation (DMD). During training, we introduce a new counter head for each task and introduce a distillation loss to prevent forgetting of previous tasks. Additionally, we introduce a cross-task adaptor that projects the features of the current backbone to the previous backbone. This projector allows for the learning of new features while the backbone retains the relevant features for previous tasks. Finally, we set up experiments of incremental learning for counting new objects. Results confirm that our method greatly reduces catastrophic forgetting and outperforms existing methods.

Abstract: Automatic 3D reconstruction of human poses from monocular images is a challenging and popular topic in the computer vision community, which provides a wide range of applications in multiple areas. Solutions for 3D pose estimation involve various learning approaches, such as support vector machines and Gaussian processes, but many encounter difficulties in cluttered scenarios and require additional input data, such as silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. We present a framework that is capable of estimating the 3D pose of a person from single images or monocular image sequences without requiring background information and which is robust to camera variations. The framework models the non-linearity present in human pose estimation as it benefits from flexible learning approaches, including a highly customizable 2D detector. Results on the HumanEva benchmark show how they perform and influence the quality of the 3D pose estimates.

Abstract: Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet-and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.

Abstract: Most MAP inference algorithms for CRFs optimize an energy function knowing all the potentials. In this paper, we focus on CRFs where the computational cost of instantiating the potentials is orders of magnitude higher than MAP inference. This is often the case in semantic image segmentation, where most potentials are instantiated by slow classifiers fed with costly features. We introduce Active MAP inference 1) to on-the-fly select a subset of potentials to be instantiated in the energy function, leaving the rest of the parameters of the potentials unknown, and 2) to estimate the MAP labeling from such incomplete energy function. Results for semantic segmentation benchmarks, namely PASCAL VOC 2010 [5] and MSRC-21 [19], show that Active MAP inference achieves similar levels of accuracy but with major efficiency gains.

Abstract: We propose an end-to-end tracking framework for fusing the RGB and TIR modalities in RGB-T tracking. Our baseline tracker is DiMP (Discriminative Model Prediction), which employs a carefully designed target prediction network trained end-to-end using a discriminative loss. We analyze the effectiveness of modality fusion in each of the main components in DiMP, i.e. feature extractor, target estimation network, and classifier. We consider several fusion mechanisms acting at different levels of the framework, including pixel-level, feature-level and response-level. Our tracker is trained in an end-to-end manner, enabling the components to learn how to fuse the information from both modalities. As data to train our model, we generate a large-scale RGB-T dataset by considering an annotated RGB tracking dataset (GOT-10k) and synthesizing paired TIR images using an image-to-image translation approach. We perform extensive experiments on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset and RGBT210 dataset, evaluating each type of modality fusing on each model component. The results show that the proposed fusion mechanisms improve the performance of the single modality counterparts. We obtain our best results when fusing at the feature-level on both the IoU-Net and the model predictor, obtaining an EAO score of 0.391 on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset. With this fusion mechanism we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on RGBT210 dataset.

Abstract: This paper proposes a stacked conditional Generative Adversarial Network-based method for Near InfraRed (NIR) imagery colorization. We propose a variant architecture of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that uses multiple
loss functions over a conditional probabilistic generative model. We show that this new architecture/loss-function yields better generalization and representation of the generated colored IR images. The proposed approach is evaluated on a large test dataset and compared to recent state of the art methods using standard metrics.