Abstract: In stereo matching cost filtering methods and energy minimization algorithms are considered as two different techniques. Due to their global extend energy minimization methods obtain good stereo matching results. However, they tend to fail in occluded regions, in which cost filtering approaches obtain better results. In this paper we intend to combine both approaches with the aim to improve overall stereo matching results. We show that a global optimization with a fully connected model can be solved by cost fil tering methods. Based on this observation we propose to perform stereo matching as a two-step energy minimization algorithm. We consider two MRF models: a fully connected model defined on the complete set of pixels in an image and a conventional locally connected model. We solve the energy minimization problem for the fully connected model, after which the marginal function of the solution is used as the unary potential in the locally connected MRF model. Experiments on the Middlebury stereo datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts results.

Abstract: Driver assistance and safety systems are getting attention nowadays towards automatic navigation and safety. Optical flow as a motion estimation technique has got major roll in making these systems a reality. Towards this, in the current paper, the suitability of polar representation for optical flow estimation in such systems is demonstrated. Furthermore, the influence of individual regularization terms on the accuracy of optical flow on image sequences of different speeds is empirically evaluated. Also a new synthetic dataset of image sequences with different speeds is generated along with the ground-truth optical flow.

Abstract: TB6.2
Road segmentation is an essential functionality for supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as road following and vehicle and pedestrian detection. Significant efforts have been made in order to solve this task using vision-based techniques. The major challenge is to deal with lighting variations and the presence of objects on the road surface. In this paper, we propose a new road detection method to infer the areas of the image depicting road surfaces without performing any image segmentation. The idea is to previously segment manually or semi-automatically the road region in a traffic-free reference video record on a first drive. And then to transfer these regions to the frames of a second video sequence acquired later in a second drive through the same road, in an on-line manner. This is possible because we are able to automatically align the two videos in time and space, that is, to synchronize them and warp each frame of the first video to its corresponding frame in the second one. The geometric transform can thus transfer the road region to the present frame on-line. In order to reduce the different lighting conditions which are present in outdoor scenarios, our approach incorporates a shadowless feature space which represents an image in an illuminant-invariant feature space. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic background subtraction algorithm which removes the regions containing vehicles in the observed frames which are within the transferred road region.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study between two road approximation techniques—planar surfaces—from stereo vision data. The first approach is carried out in the v-disparity space and is based on a voting scheme, the Hough transform. The second one consists in computing the best fitting plane for the whole 3D road data points, directly in the Euclidean space, by using least squares fitting. The comparative study is initially performed over a set of different synthetic surfaces
(e.g., plane, quadratic surface, cubic surface) digitized by a virtual stereo head; then real data obtained with a commercial stereo head are used. The comparative study is intended to be used as a criterion for fining the best technique according to the road geometry. Additionally, it highlights common problems driven from a wrong assumption about the scene’s prior knowledge.

Abstract: Although background modeling and foreground detection are not mandatory steps for computer vision applications, they may prove useful as they separate the primal objects usually called “foreground” from the remaining part of the scene called “background”, and permits different algorithmic treatment in the video processing field such as video surveillance, optical motion capture, multimedia applications, teleconferencing and human–computer interfaces. Conventional background modeling methods exploit the temporal variation of each pixel to model the background, and the foreground detection is made using change detection. The last decade witnessed very significant publications on background modeling but recently new applications in which background is not static, such as recordings taken from mobile devices or Internet videos, need new developments to detect robustly moving objects in challenging environments. Thus, effective methods for robustness to deal both with dynamic backgrounds, i

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of recipe-oriented image-ingredient correlation learning with multi-attributes for recipe retrieval and exploration. Existing methods mainly focus on food visual information for recognition while we model visual information, textual content (e.g., ingredients), and attributes (e.g., cuisine and course) together to solve extended recipe-oriented problems, such as multimodal cuisine classification and attribute-enhanced food image retrieval. As a solution, we propose a multimodal multitask deep belief network (M3TDBN) to learn joint image-ingredient representation regularized by different attributes. By grouping ingredients into visible ingredients (which are visible in the food image, e.g., “chicken” and “mushroom”) and nonvisible ingredients (e.g., “salt” and “oil”), M3TDBN is capable of learning both midlevel visual representation between images and visible ingredients and nonvisual representation. Furthermore, in order to utilize different attributes to improve the intermodality correlation, M3TDBN incorporates multitask learning to make different attributes collaborate each other. Based on the proposed M3TDBN, we exploit the derived deep features and the discovered correlations for three extended novel applications: 1) multimodal cuisine classification; 2) attribute-augmented cross-modal recipe image retrieval; and 3) ingredient and attribute inference from food images. The proposed approach is evaluated on the constructed Yummly dataset and the evaluation results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.