Jorge Bernal, F. Javier Sanchez, Gloria Fernandez Esparrach, Debora Gil, Cristina Rodriguez de Miguel, & Fernando Vilariño. (2015). WM-DOVA Maps for Accurate Polyp Highlighting in Colonoscopy: Validation vs. Saliency Maps from Physicians. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 43, 99–111.
Abstract: We introduce in this paper a novel polyp localization method for colonoscopy videos. Our method is based on a model of appearance for polyps which defines polyp boundaries in terms of valley information. We propose the integration of valley information in a robust way fostering complete, concave and continuous boundaries typically associated to polyps. This integration is done by using a window of radial sectors which accumulate valley information to create WMDOVA1 energy maps related with the likelihood of polyp presence. We perform a double validation of our maps, which include the introduction of two new databases, including the first, up to our knowledge, fully annotated database with clinical metadata associated. First we assess that the highest value corresponds with the location of the polyp in the image. Second, we show that WM-DOVA energy maps can be comparable with saliency maps obtained from physicians' fixations obtained via an eye-tracker. Finally, we prove that our method outperforms state-of-the-art computational saliency results. Our method shows good performance, particularly for small polyps which are reported to be the main sources of polyp miss-rate, which indicates the potential applicability of our method in clinical practice.
Keywords: Polyp localization; Energy Maps; Colonoscopy; Saliency; Valley detection
|
Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2010). Generalized Gamut Mapping using Image Derivative Structures for Color Constancy. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 86(2-3), 127–139.
Abstract: The gamut mapping algorithm is one of the most promising methods to achieve computational color constancy. However, so far, gamut mapping algorithms are restricted to the use of pixel values to estimate the illuminant. Therefore, in this paper, gamut mapping is extended to incorporate the statistical nature of images. It is analytically shown that the proposed gamut mapping framework is able to include any linear filter output. The main focus is on the local n-jet describing the derivative structure of an image. It is shown that derivatives have the advantage over pixel values to be invariant to disturbing effects (i.e. deviations of the diagonal model) such as saturated colors and diffuse light. Further, as the n-jet based gamut mapping has the ability to use more information than pixel values alone, the combination of these algorithms are more stable than the regular gamut mapping algorithm. Different methods of combining are proposed. Based on theoretical and experimental results conducted on large scale data sets of hyperspectral, laboratory and realworld scenes, it can be derived that (1) in case of deviations of the diagonal model, the derivative-based approach outperforms the pixel-based gamut mapping, (2) state-of-the-art algorithms are outperformed by the n-jet based gamut mapping, (3) the combination of the different n-jet based gamut
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Learning photometric invariance for object detection. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 90(1), 45–61.
Abstract: Impact factor: 3.508 (the last available from JCR2009SCI). Position 4/103 in the category Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Quartile
Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.
Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is computed composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, our fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the proposed method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Further, the proposed method is extended to deal with temporal data by predicting the evolution of observations over time.
Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning, and outperforms state-of-the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition. Considering sequential data, the proposed method (extended to deal with future observations) outperforms the other methods
Keywords: road detection
|
Jasper Uilings, Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & Arnold Smeulders. (2013). Selective Search for Object Recognition. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 104(2), 154–171.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of generating possible object locations for use in object recognition. We introduce selective search which combines the strength of both an exhaustive search and segmentation. Like segmentation, we use the image structure to guide our sampling process. Like exhaustive search, we aim to capture all possible object locations. Instead of a single technique to generate possible object locations, we diversify our search and use a variety of complementary image partitionings to deal with as many image conditions as possible. Our selective search results in a small set of data-driven, class-independent, high quality locations, yielding 99 % recall and a Mean Average Best Overlap of 0.879 at 10,097 locations. The reduced number of locations compared to an exhaustive search enables the use of stronger machine learning techniques and stronger appearance models for object recognition. In this paper we show that our selective search enables the use of the powerful Bag-of-Words model for recognition. The selective search software is made publicly available (Software: http://disi.unitn.it/~uijlings/SelectiveSearch.html).
|
Xavier Boix, Josep M. Gonfaus, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Harmony Potentials: Fusing Global and Local Scale for Semantic Image Segmentation. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 96(1), 83–102.
Abstract: The Hierarchical Conditional Random Field(HCRF) model have been successfully applied to a number of image labeling problems, including image segmentation. However, existing HCRF models of image segmentation do not allow multiple classes to be assigned to a single region, which limits their ability to incorporate contextual information across multiple scales.
At higher scales in the image, this representation yields an oversimplied model since multiple classes can be reasonably expected to appear within large regions. This simplied model particularly limits the impact of information at higher scales. Since class-label information at these scales is usually more reliable than at lower, noisier scales, neglecting this information is undesirable. To
address these issues, we propose a new consistency potential for image labeling problems, which we call the harmony potential. It can encode any possible combi-
nation of labels, penalizing only unlikely combinations of classes. We also propose an eective sampling strategy over this expanded label set that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging, standard benchmark datasets for semantic image segmentation: PASCAL VOC 2010, and MSRC-21.
|
R. Valenti, N. Sebe, & Theo Gevers. (2012). What are you looking at? Improving Visual gaze Estimation by Saliency. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(3), 324–334.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 5.15
Impact factor 2011/12?: 5.36
In this paper we present a novel mechanism to obtain enhanced gaze estimation for subjects looking at a scene or an image. The system makes use of prior knowledge about the scene (e.g. an image on a computer screen), to define a probability map of the scene the subject is gazing at, in order to find the most probable location. The proposed system helps in correcting the fixations which are erroneously estimated by the gaze estimation device by employing a saliency framework to adjust the resulting gaze point vector. The system is tested on three scenarios: using eye tracking data, enhancing a low accuracy webcam based eye tracker, and using a head pose tracker. The correlation between the subjects in the commercial eye tracking data is improved by an average of 13.91%. The correlation on the low accuracy eye gaze tracker is improved by 59.85%, and for the head pose tracker we obtain an improvement of 10.23%. These results show the potential of the system as a way to enhance and self-calibrate different visual gaze estimation systems.
|
Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Modulating Shape Features by Color Attention for Object Recognition. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1), 49–64.
Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.
|
Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Antonio Lopez, & Michael Felsberg. (2013). Coloring Action Recognition in Still Images. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 105(3), 205–221.
Abstract: In this article we investigate the problem of human action recognition in static images. By action recognition we intend a class of problems which includes both action classification and action detection (i.e. simultaneous localization and classification). Bag-of-words image representations yield promising results for action classification, and deformable part models perform very well object detection. The representations for action recognition typically use only shape cues and ignore color information. Inspired by the recent success of color in image classification and object detection, we investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in static images. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of color descriptors and fusion approaches for action recognition. Experiments were conducted on the three datasets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010 and Stanford-40. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating color information considerably improves recognition performance, and that a descriptor based on color names outperforms pure color descriptors. Our experiments demonstrate that late fusion of color and shape information outperforms other approaches on action recognition. Finally, we show that the different color–shape fusion approaches result in complementary information and combining them yields state-of-the-art performance for action classification.
|
Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). Hierarchical Adaptive Structural SVM for Domain Adaptation. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 119(2), 159–178.
Abstract: A key topic in classification is the accuracy loss produced when the data distribution in the training (source) domain differs from that in the testing (target) domain. This is being recognized as a very relevant problem for many
computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and object category recognition. In this paper, we present a novel domain adaptation method that leverages multiple target domains (or sub-domains) in a hierarchical adaptation tree. The core idea is to exploit the commonalities and differences of the jointly considered target domains.
Given the relevance of structural SVM (SSVM) classifiers, we apply our idea to the adaptive SSVM (A-SSVM), which only requires the target domain samples together with the existing source-domain classifier for performing the desired adaptation. Altogether, we term our proposal as hierarchical A-SSVM (HA-SSVM).
As proof of concept we use HA-SSVM for pedestrian detection, object category recognition and face recognition. In the former we apply HA-SSVM to the deformable partbased model (DPM) while in the rest HA-SSVM is applied to multi-category classifiers. We will show how HA-SSVM is effective in increasing the detection/recognition accuracy with respect to adaptation strategies that ignore the structure of the target data. Since, the sub-domains of the target data are not always known a priori, we shown how HA-SSVM can incorporate sub-domain discovery for object category recognition.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
|
Antonio Hernandez, Sergio Escalera, & Stan Sclaroff. (2016). Poselet-basedContextual Rescoring for Human Pose Estimation via Pictorial Structures. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 118(1), 49–64.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a contextual rescoring method for predicting the position of body parts in a human pose estimation framework. A set of poselets is incorporated in the model, and their detections are used to extract spatial and score-related features relative to other body part hypotheses. A method is proposed for the automatic discovery of a compact subset of poselets that covers the different poses in a set of validation images while maximizing precision. A rescoring mechanism is defined as a set-based boosting classifier that computes a new score for each body joint detection, given its relationship to detections of other body joints and mid-level parts in the image. This new score is incorporated in the pictorial structure model as an additional unary potential, following the recent work of Pishchulin et al. Experiments on two benchmarks show comparable results to Pishchulin et al. while reducing the size of the mid-level representation by an order of magnitude, reducing the execution time by 68 % accordingly.
Keywords: Contextual rescoring; Poselets; Human pose estimation
|
Arnau Ramisa, Alex Goldhoorn, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2011). Combining Invariant Features and the ALV Homing Method for Autonomous Robot Navigation Based on Panoramas. JIRC - Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 64(3-4), 625–649.
Abstract: Biologically inspired homing methods, such as the Average Landmark Vector, are an interesting solution for local navigation due to its simplicity. However, usually they require a modification of the environment by placing artificial landmarks in order to work reliably. In this paper we combine the Average Landmark Vector with invariant feature points automatically detected in panoramic images to overcome this limitation. The proposed approach has been evaluated first in simulation and, as promising results are found, also in two data sets of panoramas from real world environments.
|
Arnau Ramisa, David Aldavert, Shrihari Vasudevan, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2012). Evaluation of Three Vision Based Object Perception Methods for a Mobile Robot. JIRC - Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 68(2), 185–208.
Abstract: This paper addresses visual object perception applied to mobile robotics. Being able to perceive household objects in unstructured environments is a key capability in order to make robots suitable to perform complex tasks in home environments. However, finding a solution for this task is daunting: it requires the ability to handle the variability in image formation in a moving camera with tight time constraints. The paper brings to attention some of the issues with applying three state of the art object recognition and detection methods in a mobile robotics scenario, and proposes methods to deal with windowing/segmentation. Thus, this work aims at evaluating the state-of-the-art in object perception in an attempt to develop a lightweight solution for mobile robotics use/research in typical indoor settings.
|
Alvaro Cepero, Albert Clapes, & Sergio Escalera. (2015). Automatic non-verbal communication skills analysis: a quantitative evaluation. AIC - AI Communications, 28(1), 87–101.
Abstract: The oral communication competence is defined on the top of the most relevant skills for one's professional and personal life. Because of the importance of communication in our activities of daily living, it is crucial to study methods to evaluate and provide the necessary feedback that can be used in order to improve these communication capabilities and, therefore, learn how to express ourselves better. In this work, we propose a system capable of evaluating quantitatively the quality of oral presentations in an automatic fashion. The system is based on a multi-modal RGB, depth, and audio data description and a fusion approach in order to recognize behavioral cues and train classifiers able to eventually predict communication quality levels. The performance of the proposed system is tested on a novel dataset containing Bachelor thesis' real defenses, presentations from an 8th semester Bachelor courses, and Master courses' presentations at Universitat de Barcelona. Using as groundtruth the marks assigned by actual instructors, our system achieves high performance categorizing and ranking presentations by their quality, and also making real-valued mark predictions.
Keywords: Social signal processing; human behavior analysis; multi-modal data description; multi-modal data fusion; non-verbal communication analysis; e-Learning
|
Arnau Ramisa, Shrihari Vasudevan, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Evaluation of the SIFT Object Recognition Method in Mobile Robots: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. In 12th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 202, pp. 9–18).
Abstract: General object recognition in mobile robots is of primary importance in order to enhance the representation of the environment that robots will use for their reasoning processes. Therefore, we contribute reduce this gap by evaluating the SIFT Object Recognition method in a challenging dataset, focusing on issues relevant to mobile robotics. Resistance of the method to the robotics working conditions was found, but it was limited mainly to well-textured objects.
|
Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Rank Estimation in Missing Data Matrix Problems. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 39(2), 140–160.
Abstract: A novel technique for missing data matrix rank estimation is presented. It is focused on matrices of trajectories, where every element of the matrix corresponds to an image coordinate from a feature point of a rigid moving object at a given frame; missing data are represented as empty entries. The objective of the proposed approach is to estimate the rank of a missing data matrix in order to fill in empty entries with some matrix completion method, without using or assuming neither the number of objects contained in the scene nor the kind of their motion. The key point of the proposed technique consists in studying the frequency behaviour of the individual trajectories, which are seen as 1D signals. The main assumption is that due to the rigidity of the moving objects, the frequency content of the trajectories will be similar after filling in their missing entries. The proposed rank estimation approach can be used in different computer vision problems, where the rank of a missing data matrix needs to be estimated. Experimental results with synthetic and real data are provided in order to empirically show the good performance of the proposed approach.
|