Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.

Abstract: Although graph embedding has recently been used to extend statistical pattern recognition techniques to the graph domain, some existing embeddings are usually computationally expensive as they rely on classical graph-based operations. In this paper we present a new way to embed graphs into vector spaces by first encapsulating the information stored in the original graph under another graph representation by clustering the attributes of the graphs to be processed. This new representation makes the association of graphs to vectors an easy step by just arranging both node attributes and the adjacency matrix in the form of vectors. To test our method, we use two different databases of graphs whose nodes attributes are of different nature. A comparison with a reference method permits to show that this new embedding is better in terms of classification rates, while being much more faster.

Abstract: Advanced surveillance systems for behavior recognition in outdoor traffic scenes depend strongly on the particular configuration of the scenario. Scene-independent trajectory analysis techniques statistically infer semantics in locations where motion occurs, and such inferences are typically limited to abnormality. Thus, it is interesting to design contributions that automatically categorize more specific semantic regions. State-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised scene labeling exploit trajectory data to segment areas like sources, sinks, or waiting zones. Our method, in addition, incorporates scene-independent knowledge to assign more meaningful labels like crosswalks, sidewalks, or parking spaces. First, a spatiotemporal scene model is obtained from trajectory analysis. Subsequently, a so-called GI-MRF inference process reinforces spatial coherence, and incorporates taxonomy-guided smoothness constraints. Our method achieves automatic and effective labeling of conceptual regions in urban scenarios, and is robust to tracking errors. Experimental validation on 5 surveillance databases has been conducted to assess the generality and accuracy of the segmentations. The resulting scene models are used for model-based behavior analysis.

Abstract: We present a new method for explicit graph embedding. Our algorithm extracts a feature vector for an undirected attributed graph. The proposed feature vector encodes details about the number of nodes, number of edges, node degrees, the attributes of nodes and the attributes of edges in the graph. The first two features are for the number of nodes and the number of edges. These are followed by w features for node degrees, m features for k node attributes and n features for l edge attributes — which represent the distribution of node degrees, node attribute values and edge attribute values, and are obtained by defining (in an unsupervised fashion), fuzzy-intervals over the list of node degrees, node attributes and edge attributes. Experimental results are provided for sample data of ICPR2010 contest GEPR.

Abstract: Camera-based person detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications. The task is diffcult because the great variety of backgrounds (scenarios, illumination) in which persons are present, as well as their intra-class variability (pose, clothe, occlusion). In fact, the class person is one of the included in the popular PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) challenge. A breakthrough for this challenge, regarding person detection, is due to Felzenszwalb et al. These authors proposed a part-based detector that relies on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and latent support vector machines (LatSVM) to learn a model of the whole human body and its constitutive parts, as well as their relative position. Since the approach of Felzenszwalb et al. appeared new variants have been proposed, usually giving rise to more complex models. In this paper, we focus on an issue that has not attracted suficient interest up to now. In particular, we refer to the fact that HOG is usually computed from RGB color space, but other possibilities exist and deserve the corresponding investigation. In this paper we challenge RGB space with the opponent color space (OPP), which is inspired in the human vision system.We will compute the HOG on top of OPP, then we train and test the part-based human classifer by Felzenszwalb et al. using PASCAL VOC challenge protocols and person database. Our experiments demonstrate that OPP outperforms RGB. We also investigate possible differences among types of scenarios: indoor, urban and countryside. Interestingly, our experiments suggest that the beneficts of OPP with respect to RGB mainly come for indoor and countryside scenarios, those in which the human visual system was designed by evolution.

Abstract: Poor convergence to concave shapes is a main limitation of snakes as a standard segmentation and shape modelling technique. The gradient of the external energy of the snake represents a force that pushes the snake into concave regions, as its internal energy increases when new inexion points are created. In spite of the improvement of the external energy by the gradient vector ow technique, highly non convex shapes can not be obtained, yet. In the present paper, we develop a new external energy based on the geometry of the curve to be modelled. By tracking back the deformation of a curve that evolves by minimum curvature ow, we construct a distance map that encapsulates the natural way of adapting to non convex shapes. The gradient of this map, which we call curvature vector ow (CVF), is capable of attracting a snake towards any contour, whatever its geometry. Our experiments show that, any initial snake condition converges to the curve to be modelled in optimal time.

Abstract: Most applications dealing with problems involving the face require a robust estimation of the facial salient points. Nevertheless, this estimation is not usually an automated preprocessing step in applications dealing with facial expression recognition. In this paper we present a simple method to detect facial salient points in the face. It is based on a prior Point Distribution Model and a robust object descriptor. The model learns the distribution of the points from the training data, as well as the amount of variation in location each point exhibits. Using this model, we reduce the search areas to look for each point. In addition, we also exploit the global consistency of the points constellation, increasing the detection accuracy. The method was tested on two separate data sets and the results, in some cases, outperform the state of the art.