Carlo Gatta, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Bilateral Enhancers. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 3161–3165).
Abstract: Ten years ago the concept of bilateral filtering (BF) became popular in the image processing community. The core of the idea is to blend the effect of a spatial filter, as e.g. the Gaussian filter, with the effect of a filter that acts on image values. The two filters acts on orthogonal domains of a picture: the 2D lattice of the image support and the intensity (or color) domain. The BF approach is an intuitive way to blend these two filters giving rise to algorithms that perform difficult tasks requiring a relatively simple design. In this paper we extend the concept of BF, proposing the bilateral enhancers (BE). We show how to design proper functions to obtain an edge-preserving smoothing and a selective sharpening. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm can perform edge-preserving smoothing and selective sharpening simultaneously in a single filtering.
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Mario Rojas, David Masip, A. Todorov, & Jordi Vitria. (2010). Automatic Point-based Facial Trait Judgments Evaluation. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2715–2720).
Abstract: Humans constantly evaluate the personalities of other people using their faces. Facial trait judgments have been studied in the psychological field, and have been determined to influence important social outcomes of our lives, such as elections outcomes and social relationships. Recent work on textual descriptions of faces has shown that trait judgments are highly correlated. Further, behavioral studies suggest that two orthogonal dimensions, valence and dominance, can describe the basis of the human judgments from faces. In this paper, we used a corpus of behavioral data of judgments on different trait dimensions to automatically learn a trait predictor from facial pixel images. We study whether trait evaluations performed by humans can be learned using machine learning classifiers, and used later in automatic evaluations of new facial images. The experiments performed using local point-based descriptors show promising results in the evaluation of the main traits.
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Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Boix, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Harmony Potentials for Joint Classification and Segmentation. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (3280–3287).
Abstract: Hierarchical conditional random fields have been successfully applied to object segmentation. One reason is their ability to incorporate contextual information at different scales. However, these models do not allow multiple labels to be assigned to a single node. At higher scales in the image, this yields an oversimplified model, since multiple classes can be reasonable expected to appear within one region. This simplified model especially limits the impact that observations at larger scales may have on the CRF model. Neglecting the information at larger scales is undesirable since class-label estimates based on these scales are more reliable than at smaller, noisier scales. To address this problem, we propose a new potential, called harmony potential, which can encode any possible combination of class labels. We propose an effective sampling strategy that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Results show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging datasets: Pascal VOC 2009 and MSRC-21.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). 3D Scene Priors for Road Detection. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (57–64).
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important in different areas of computer vision such as autonomous driving, car collision warning and pedestrian crossing detection. However, current vision-based road detection methods are usually based on low-level features and they assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions. Therefore, in this paper, contextual 3D information is used in addition to low-level cues. Low-level photometric invariant cues are derived from the appearance of roads. Contextual cues used include horizon lines, vanishing points, 3D scene layout and 3D road stages. Moreover, temporal road cues are included. All these cues are sensitive to different imaging conditions and hence are considered as weak cues. Therefore, they are combined to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. To this end, the low-level, contextual and temporal cues are combined in a Bayesian framework to classify road sequences. Large scale experiments on road sequences show that the road detection method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios (tunnels, urban and highway). Further, using the combined cues outperforms all other individual cues. Finally, the proposed method provides highest road detection accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: road detection
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Mohammad Rouhani, & Angel Sappa. (2010). Relaxing the 3L Algorithm for an Accurate Implicit Polynomial Fitting. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 3066–3072).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel method to increase the accuracy of linear fitting of implicit polynomials. The proposed method is based on the 3L algorithm philosophy. The novelty lies on the relaxation of the additional constraints, already imposed by the 3L algorithm. Hence, the accuracy of the final solution is increased due to the proper adjustment of the expected values in the aforementioned additional constraints. Although iterative, the proposed approach solves the fitting problem within a linear framework, which is independent of the threshold tuning. Experimental results, both in 2D and 3D, showing improvements in the accuracy of the fitting are presented. Comparisons with both state of the art algorithms and a geometric based one (non-linear fitting), which is used as a ground truth, are provided.
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Javier Marin, David Vazquez, David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Learning Appearance in Virtual Scenarios for Pedestrian Detection. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (137–144).
Abstract: Detecting pedestrians in images is a key functionality to avoid vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions. The most promising detectors rely on appearance-based pedestrian classifiers trained with labelled samples. This paper addresses the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in virtual scenarios work successfully for pedestrian detection in real images? (Fig. 1). Our experiments suggest a positive answer, which is a new and relevant conclusion for research in pedestrian detection. More specifically, we record training sequences in virtual scenarios and then appearance-based pedestrian classifiers are learnt using HOG and linear SVM. We test such classifiers in a publicly available dataset provided by Daimler AG for pedestrian detection benchmarking. This dataset contains real world images acquired from a moving car. The obtained result is compared with the one given by a classifier learnt using samples coming from real images. The comparison reveals that, although virtual samples were not specially selected, both virtual and real based training give rise to classifiers of similar performance.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Domain Adaptation
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David Aldavert, Arnau Ramisa, Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, & Ricardo Toledo. (2010). Fast and Robust Object Segmentation with the Integral Linear Classifier. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (1046–1053).
Abstract: We propose an efficient method, built on the popular Bag of Features approach, that obtains robust multiclass pixel-level object segmentation of an image in less than 500ms, with results comparable or better than most state of the art methods. We introduce the Integral Linear Classifier (ILC), that can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 6 additions and 1 product by fusing the accumulation and classification steps in a single operation. In order to design a method as efficient as possible, our building blocks are carefully selected from the quickest in the state of the art. More precisely, we evaluate the performance of three popular local descriptors, that can be very efficiently computed using integral images, and two fast quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means, and the Extremely Randomized Forest. Finally, we explore the utility of adding spatial bins to the Bag of Features histograms and that of cascade classifiers to improve the obtained segmentation. Our method is compared to the state of the art in the difficult Graz-02 and PASCAL 2007 Segmentation Challenge datasets.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2010). Single Snapshot 3D Head Pose Initialization for Tracking in Human Robot Interaction Scenario. In 1st International Workshop on Computer Vision for Human-Robot Interaction (32–39).
Abstract: This paper presents an automatic 3D head pose initialization scheme for a real-time face tracker with application to human-robot interaction. It has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3D head pose and person specific face shape estimation, based on a 3D deformable model. The proposed approach serves to initialize our realtime 3D face tracker. What makes this contribution very attractive is that the initialization step can cope with faces
under arbitrary pose, so it is not limited only to near-frontal views. Second, the previous framework is used to develop an application in which the orientation of an AIBO’s camera can be controlled through the imitation of user’s head pose.
In our scenario, this application is used to build panoramic images from overlapping snapshots. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.
Keywords: 1st International Workshop on Computer Vision for Human-Robot Interaction, in conjunction with IEEE CVPR 2010
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Michal Drozdzal, Laura Igual, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, C. Malagelada, & Fernando Azpiroz. (2010). Aligning Endoluminal Scene Sequences in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy. In IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis (117–124).
Abstract: Intestinal motility analysis is an important examination in detection of various intestinal malfunctions. One of the big challenges of automatic motility analysis is how to compare sequence of images and extract dynamic paterns taking into account the high deformability of the intestine wall as well as the capsule motion. From clinical point of view the ability to align endoluminal scene sequences will help to find regions of similar intestinal activity and in this way will provide a valuable information on intestinal motility problems. This work, for first time, addresses the problem of aligning endoluminal sequences taking into account motion and structure of the intestine. To describe motility in the sequence, we propose different descriptors based on the Sift Flow algorithm, namely: (1) Histograms of Sift Flow Directions to describe the flow course, (2) Sift Descriptors to represent image intestine structure and (3) Sift Flow Magnitude to quantify intestine deformation. We show that the merge of all three descriptors provides robust information on sequence description in terms of motility. Moreover, we develop a novel methodology to rank the intestinal sequences based on the expert feedback about relevance of the results. The experimental results show that the selected descriptors are useful in the alignment and similarity description and the proposed method allows the analysis of the WCE.
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Antonio Hernandez, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Spatio-Temporal GrabCut human segmentation for face and pose recovery. In IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (33–40).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a full-automatic Spatio-Temporal GrabCut human segmentation methodology. GrabCut initialization is performed by a HOG-based subject detection, face detection, and skin color model for seed initialization. Spatial information is included by means of Mean Shift clustering whereas temporal coherence is considered by the historical of Gaussian Mixture Models. Moreover, human segmentation is combined with Shape and Active Appearance Models to perform full face and pose recovery. Results over public data sets as well as proper human action base show a robust segmentation and recovery of both face and pose using the presented methodology.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Monica Mitiko, Sergio Shiguemi, & Debora Gil. (2010). A validation protocol for assessing cardiac phase retrieval in IntraVascular UltraSound. In Computing in Cardiology (Vol. 37, pp. 899–902). IEEE.
Abstract: A good reliable approach to cardiac triggering is of utmost importance in obtaining accurate quantitative results of atherosclerotic plaque burden from the analysis of IntraVascular UltraSound. Although, in the last years, there has been an increase in research of methods for retrospective gating, there is no general consensus in a validation protocol. Many methods are based on quality assessment of longitudinal cuts appearance and those reporting quantitative numbers do not follow a standard protocol. Such heterogeneity in validation protocols makes faithful comparison across methods a difficult task. We propose a validation protocol based on the variability of the retrieved cardiac phase and explore the capability of several quality measures for quantifying such variability. An ideal detector, suitable for its application in clinical practice, should produce stable phases. That is, it should always sample the same cardiac cycle fraction. In this context, one should measure the variability (variance) of a candidate sampling with respect a ground truth (reference) sampling, since the variance would indicate how spread we are aiming a target. In order to quantify the deviation between the sampling and the ground truth, we have considered two quality scores reported in the literature: signed distance to the closest reference sample and distance to the right of each reference sample. We have also considered the residuals of the regression line of reference against candidate sampling. The performance of the measures has been explored on a set of synthetic samplings covering different cardiac cycle fractions and variabilities. From our simulations, we conclude that the metrics related to distances are sensitive to the shift considered while the residuals are robust against fraction and variabilities as far as one can establish a pair-wise correspondence between candidate and reference. We will further investigate the impact of false positive and negative detections in experimental data.
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Jaume Amores. (2010). Vocabulary-based Approaches for Multiple-Instance Data: a Comparative Study. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (4246–4250).
Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has become a hot topic and many different algorithms have been proposed in the last years. Despite this fact, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light into the characteristics of the different methods and their behavior in different scenarios. In this paper we provide such an analysis. We include methods from different families, and pay special attention to vocabulary-based approaches, a new family of methods that has not received much attention in the MIL literature. The empirical comparison includes seven databases from four heterogeneous domains, implementations of eight popular MIL methods, and a study of the behavior under synthetic conditions. Based on this analysis, we show that, with an appropriate implementation, vocabulary-based approaches outperform other MIL methods in most of the cases, showing in general a more consistent performance.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2010). Person-specific face shape estimation under varying head pose from single snapshots. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (3496–3499).
Abstract: This paper presents a new method for person-specific face shape estimation under varying head pose of a previously unseen person from a single image. We describe a featureless approach based on a deformable 3D model and a learned face subspace. The proposed approach is based on maximizing a likelihood measure associated with a learned face subspace, which is carried out by a stochastic and genetic optimizer. We conducted the experiments on a subset of Honda Video Database showing the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach. For this reason, our approach could lend itself nicely to complex frameworks involving 3D face tracking and face gesture recognition in monocular videos.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). A meta-learning approach to Conditional Random Fields using Error-Correcting Output Codes. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (710–713).
Abstract: We present a meta-learning framework for the design of potential functions for Conditional Random Fields. The design of both node potential and edge potential is formulated as a classification problem where margin classifiers are used. The set of state transitions for the edge potential is treated as a set of different classes, thus defining a multi-class learning problem. The Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) technique is used to deal with the multi-class problem. Furthermore, the point defined by the combination of margin classifiers in the ECOC space is interpreted in a probabilistic manner, and the obtained distance values are then converted into potential values. The proposed model exhibits very promising results when applied to two real detection problems.
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David Augusto Rojas, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2010). The Impact of Color on Bag-of-Words based Object Recognition. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (1549–1553).
Abstract: In recent years several works have aimed at exploiting color information in order to improve the bag-of-words based image representation. There are two stages in which color information can be applied in the bag-of-words framework. Firstly, feature detection can be improved by choosing highly informative color-based regions. Secondly, feature description, typically focusing on shape, can be improved with a color description of the local patches. Although both approaches have been shown to improve results the combined merits have not yet been analyzed. Therefore, in this paper we investigate the combined contribution of color to both the feature detection and extraction stages. Experiments performed on two challenging data sets, namely Flower and Pascal VOC 2009; clearly demonstrate that incorporating color in both feature detection and extraction significantly improves the overall performance.
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