Gemma Rotger, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Felipe Lumbreras, & Antonio Agudo. (2019). Detailed 3D face reconstruction from a single RGB image. JWSCG - Journal of WSCG, 103–112.
Abstract: This paper introduces a method to obtain a detailed 3D reconstruction of facial skin from a single RGB image.
To this end, we propose the exclusive use of an input image without requiring any information about the observed material nor training data to model the wrinkle properties. They are detected and characterized directly from the image via a simple and effective parametric model, determining several features such as location, orientation, width, and height. With these ingredients, we propose to minimize a photometric error to retrieve the final detailed 3D map, which is initialized by current techniques based on deep learning. In contrast with other approaches, we only require estimating a depth parameter, making our approach fast and intuitive. Extensive experimental evaluation is presented in a wide variety of synthetic and real images, including different skin properties and facial
expressions. In all cases, our method outperforms the current approaches regarding 3D reconstruction accuracy, providing striking results for both large and fine wrinkles.
Keywords: 3D Wrinkle Reconstruction; Face Analysis, Optimization.
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Carola Figueroa Flores, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2019). Saliency for fine-grained object recognition in domains with scarce training data. PR - Pattern Recognition, 94, 62–73.
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). New Opportunities for Computer Vision-Based Assistive Technology Systems for the Visually Impaired. COMP - Computer, 47(4), 52–58.
Abstract: Computing advances and increased smartphone use gives technology system designers greater flexibility in exploiting computer vision to support visually impaired users. Understanding these users' needs will certainly provide insight for the development of improved usability of computing devices.
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Oscar Argudo, Marc Comino, Antonio Chica, Carlos Andujar, & Felipe Lumbreras. (2018). Segmentation of aerial images for plausible detail synthesis. CG - Computers & Graphics, 71, 23–34.
Abstract: The visual enrichment of digital terrain models with plausible synthetic detail requires the segmentation of aerial images into a suitable collection of categories. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for segmenting high-resolution aerial images into a user-defined set of categories distinguishing e.g. terrain, sand, snow, water, and different types of vegetation. This segmentation-for-synthesis problem implies that per-pixel categories must be established according to the algorithms chosen for rendering the synthetic detail. This precludes the definition of a universal set of labels and hinders the construction of large training sets. Since artists might choose to add new categories on the fly, the whole pipeline must be robust against unbalanced datasets, and fast on both training and inference. Under these constraints, we analyze the contribution of common per-pixel descriptors, and compare the performance of state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms. We report the findings of two user studies. The first one was conducted to analyze human accuracy when manually labeling aerial images. The second user study compares detailed terrains built using different segmentation strategies, including official land cover maps. These studies demonstrate that our approach can be used to turn digital elevation models into fully-featured, detailed terrains with minimal authoring efforts.
Keywords: Terrain editing; Detail synthesis; Vegetation synthesis; Terrain rendering; Image segmentation
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2015). Multi-observation Face Recognition in Videos based on Label Propagation. In 6th Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures AMFG2015 (pp. 10–17).
Abstract: In order to deal with the huge amount of content generated by social media, especially for indexing and retrieval purposes, the focus shifted from single object recognition to multi-observation object recognition. Of particular interest is the problem of face recognition (used as primary cue for persons’ identity assessment), since it is highly required by popular social media search engines like Facebook and Youtube. Recently, several approaches for graph-based label propagation were proposed. However, the associated graphs were constructed in an ad-hoc manner (e.g., using the KNN graph) that cannot cope properly with the rapid and frequent changes in data appearance, a phenomenon intrinsically related with video sequences. In this paper, we
propose a novel approach for efficient and adaptive graph construction, based on a two-phase scheme: (i) the first phase is used to adaptively find the neighbors of a sample and also to find the adequate weights for the minimization function of the second phase; (ii) in the second phase, the
selected neighbors along with their corresponding weights are used to locally and collaboratively estimate the sparse affinity matrix weights. Experimental results performed on Honda Video Database (HVDB) and a subset of video
sequences extracted from the popular TV-series ’Friends’ show a distinct advantage of the proposed method over the existing standard graph construction methods.
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Manuel Graña, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2015). Special Issue on Bioinspired and knowledge based techniques and applications. NEUCOM - Neurocomputing, , 1–3.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Facial Expression Recognition based on Multi-view Observations with Application to Social Robotics. In 1st Workshop on Computer Vision for Affective Computing (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: Human-robot interaction is a hot topic nowadays in the social robotics community. One crucial aspect is represented by the affective communication which comes encoded through the facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for facial expression recognition, which exploits an efficient and adaptive graph-based label propagation (semi-supervised mode) in a multi-observation framework. The facial features are extracted using an appearance-based 3D face tracker, view- and texture independent. Our method has been extensively tested on the CMU dataset, and has been conveniently compared with other methods for graph construction. With the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the recognized facial
expression.
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Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, A. wilkins, & J. Harris. (2015). Uncomfortable images prevent lateral interactions in the cortex from providing a sparse code. In European Conference on Visual Perception ECVP2015.
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Xavier Otazu, Olivier Penacchio, & Xim Cerda-Company. (2015). An excitatory-inhibitory firing rate model accounts for brightness induction, colour induction and visual discomfort. In Barcelona Computational, Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience.
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