Abstract: Most advanced driving assistance systems already include pedestrian detection systems. Unfortunately, there is still a tradeoff between precision and real time. For a reliable detection, excellent precision-recall such a tradeoff is needed to detect as many pedestrians as possible while, at the same time, avoiding too many false alarms; in addition, a very fast computation is needed for fast reactions to dangerous situations. Recently, novel approaches based on deformable templates have been proposed since these show a reasonable detection performance although they are computationally too expensive for real-time performance. In this paper, we present a system for pedestrian detection based on a hierarchical multiresolution part-based model. The proposed system is able to achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy due to the local deformations of the parts while exhibiting a speedup of more than one order of magnitude due to a fast coarse-to-fine inference technique. Moreover, our system explicitly infers the level of resolution available so that the detection of small examples is feasible with a very reduced computational cost. We conclude this contribution by presenting how a graphics processing unit-optimized implementation of our proposed system is suitable for real-time pedestrian detection in terms of both accuracy and speed.

Abstract: Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.

Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 1.14 / 3rd (Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence)
We introduce a model of attentional eye guidance based on the rationale that the deployment of gaze is to be considered in the context of a general action-perception loop relying on two strictly intertwined processes: sensory processing, depending on current gaze position, identifies sources of information that are most valuable under the given task; motor processing links such information with the oculomotor act by sampling the next gaze position and thus performing the gaze shift. In such a framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the payoff of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects. The different levels of the action-perception loop are represented in probabilistic form and eventually give rise to a stochastic process that generates the gaze sequence. This way the model also accounts for statistical properties of gaze shifts such as individual scan path variability. Results of the simulations are compared either with experimental data derived from publicly available datasets and from our own experiments.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.

Abstract: This paper describes a general method to address partial occlusions for human detection in still images. The Random Subspace Method (RSM) is chosen for building a classifier ensemble robust against partial occlusions. The component classifiers are chosen on the basis of their individual and combined performance. The main contribution of this work lies in our approach’s capability to improve the detection rate when partial occlusions are present without compromising the detection performance on non occluded data. In contrast to many recent approaches, we propose a method which does not require manual labelling of body parts, defining any semantic spatial components, or using additional data coming from motion or stereo. Moreover, the method can be easily extended to other object classes. The experiments are performed on three large datasets: the INRIA person dataset, the Daimler Multicue dataset, and a new challenging dataset, called PobleSec, in which a considerable number of targets are partially occluded. The different approaches are evaluated at the classification and detection levels for both partially occluded and non-occluded data. The experimental results show that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the presence of partial occlusions, while offering performance and reliability similar to those of the holistic approach on non-occluded data. The datasets used in our experiments have been made publicly available for benchmarking purposes

Abstract: Moving cast shadows are a major concern in today’s performance from broad range of many vision-based surveillance applications because they highly difficult the object classification task. Several shadow detection methods have been reported in the literature during the last years. They are mainly divided into two domains. One usually works with static images, whereas the second one uses image sequences, namely video content. In spite of the fact that both cases can be analogously analyzed, there is a difference in the application field. The first case, shadow detection methods can be exploited in order to obtain additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object (‘shape from shadows’) as well as the localization of the light source. While in the second one, the main purpose is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance (usually in a background subtraction context). Shadows can in fact modify in a negative way the shape and color of the target object and therefore affect the performance of scene analysis and interpretation in many applications. This chapter wills mainly reviews shadow detection methods as well as their taxonomies related with the second case, thus aiming at those shadows which are associated with moving objects (moving shadows).