David Aldavert, Arnau Ramisa, Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, & Ricardo Toledo. (2010). Real-time Object Segmentation using a Bag of Features Approach. In J.Aguilar. A. M. In R.Alquezar (Ed.), 13th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 220, 321–329). IOS Press Amsterdam,.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an object segmentation framework, based on the popular bag of features (BoF), which can process several images per second while achieving a good segmentation accuracy assigning an object category to every pixel of the image. We propose an efficient color descriptor to complement the information obtained by a typical gradient-based local descriptor. Results show that color proves to be a useful cue to increase the segmentation accuracy, specially in large homogeneous regions. Then, we extend the Hierarchical K-Means codebook using the recently proposed Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors method. Finally, we show that the BoF method can be easily parallelized since it is applied locally, thus the time necessary to process an image is further reduced. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in the standard PASCAL 2007 Segmentation Challenge object segmentation dataset.
Keywords: Object Segmentation; Bag Of Features; Feature Quantization; Densely sampled descriptors
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Murad Al Haj, Andrew Bagdanov, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2010). Reactive object tracking with a single PTZ camera. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (1690–1693).
Abstract: In this paper we describe a novel approach to reactive tracking of moving targets with a pan-tilt-zoom camera. The approach uses an extended Kalman filter to jointly track the object position in the real world, its velocity in 3D and the camera intrinsics, in addition to the rate of change of these parameters. The filter outputs are used as inputs to PID controllers which continuously adjust the camera motion in order to reactively track the object at a constant image velocity while simultaneously maintaining a desirable target scale in the image plane. We provide experimental results on simulated and real tracking sequences to show how our tracker is able to accurately estimate both 3D object position and camera intrinsics with very high precision over a wide range of focal lengths.
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Anjan Dutta, Umapada Pal, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2010). An Efficient Staff Removal Technique from Printed Musical Documents. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (1965–1968).
Abstract: Staff removal is an important preprocessing step of the Optical Music Recognition (OMR). The process aims to remove the stafflines from a musical document and retain only the musical symbols, later these symbols are used effectively to identify the music information. This paper proposes a simple but robust method to remove stafflines from printed musical scores. In the proposed methodology we have considered a staffline segment as a horizontal linkage of vertical black runs with uniform height. We have used the neighbouring properties of a staffline segment to validate it as a true segment. We have considered the dataset along with the deformations described in for evaluation purpose. From experimentation we have got encouraging results.
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Alicia Fornes, Sergio Escalera, Josep Llados, & Ernest Valveny. (2010). Symbol Classification using Dynamic Aligned Shape Descriptor. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (1957–1960).
Abstract: Shape representation is a difficult task because of several symbol distortions, such as occlusions, elastic deformations, gaps or noise. In this paper, we propose a new descriptor and distance computation for coping with the problem of symbol recognition in the domain of Graphical Document Image Analysis. The proposed D-Shape descriptor encodes the arrangement information of object parts in a circular structure, allowing different levels of distortion. The classification is performed using a cyclic Dynamic Time Warping based method, allowing distortions and rotation. The methodology has been validated on different data sets, showing very high recognition rates.
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Jose Carlos Rubio, Joan Serrat, Antonio Lopez, & Daniel Ponsa. (2010). Multiple-target tracking for the intelligent headlights control. In 13th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (903–910).
Abstract: TA7.4
Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.
Keywords: Intelligent Headlights
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Ferran Diego, Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Vehicle geolocalization based on video synchronization. In 13th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (1511–1516).
Abstract: TC8.6
This paper proposes a novel method for estimating the geospatial localization of a vehicle. I uses as input a georeferenced video sequence recorded by a forward-facing camera attached to the windscreen. The core of the proposed method is an on-line video synchronization which finds out the corresponding frame in the georeferenced video sequence to the one recorded at each time by the camera on a second drive through the same track. Once found the corresponding frame in the georeferenced video sequence, we transfer its geospatial information of this frame. The key advantages of this method are: 1) the increase of the update rate and the geospatial accuracy with regard to a standard low-cost GPS and 2) the ability to localize a vehicle even when a GPS is not available or is not reliable enough, like in certain urban areas. Experimental results for an urban environments are presented, showing an average of relative accuracy of 1.5 meters.
Keywords: video alignment
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Ferran Diego, Jose Manuel Alvarez, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Vision-based road detection via on-line video registration. In 13th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (1135–1140).
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.
Keywords: video alignment; road detection
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Diego Alejandro Cheda, Daniel Ponsa, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Camera Egomotion Estimation in the ADAS Context. In 13th International IEEE Annual Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (1415–1420).
Abstract: Camera-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have concentrated many research efforts in the last decades. Proposals based on monocular cameras require the knowledge of the camera pose with respect to the environment, in order to reach an efficient and robust performance. A common assumption in such systems is considering the road as planar, and the camera pose with respect to it as approximately known. However, in real situations, the camera pose varies along time due to the vehicle movement, the road slope, and irregularities on the road surface. Thus, the changes in the camera position and orientation (i.e., the egomotion) are critical information that must be estimated at every frame to avoid poor performances. This work focuses on egomotion estimation from a monocular camera under the ADAS context. We review and compare egomotion methods with simulated and real ADAS-like sequences. Basing on the results of our experiments, we show which of the considered nonlinear and linear algorithms have the best performance in this domain.
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Susana Alvarez, Anna Salvatella, Maria Vanrell, & Xavier Otazu. (2010). Perceptual color texture codebooks for retrieving in highly diverse texture datasets. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (866–869).
Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in a useful visual descriptor is not an obvious step. One way to combine both features is to compute texture descriptors independently on each color channel. A second way is integrate the features at a descriptor level, in this case arises the problem of normalizing both cues. A significant progress in the last years in object recognition has provided the bag-of-words framework that again deals with the problem of feature combination through the definition of vocabularies of visual words. Inspired in this framework, here we present perceptual textons that will allow to fuse color and texture at the level of p-blobs, which is our feature detection step. Feature representation is based on two uniform spaces representing the attributes of the p-blobs. The low-dimensionality of these text on spaces will allow to bypass the usual problems of previous approaches. Firstly, no need for normalization between cues; and secondly, vocabularies are directly obtained from the perceptual properties of text on spaces without any learning step. Our proposal improve current state-of-art of color-texture descriptors in an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.
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Sergio Escalera, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, Xavier Baro, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2010). Modelling and Analyzing Multimodal Dyadic Interactions Using Social Networks. In 12th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and 7th Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction..
Abstract: Social network analysis became a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from
multimodal dyadic interactions. First, speech detection is performed through an audio/visual fusion scheme based on stacked sequential learning. In the audio domain, speech is detected through clusterization of audio features. Clusters
are modelled by means of an One-state Hidden Markov Model containing a diagonal covariance Gaussian Mixture Model. In the visual domain, speech detection is performed through differential-based feature extraction from the segmented
mouth region, and a dynamic programming matching procedure. Second, in order to model the dyadic interactions, we employed the Influence Model whose states
encode the previous integrated audio/visual data. Third, the social network is extracted based on the estimated influences. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Times’ Blogging Heads opinion blog. The results
are reported both in terms of accuracy of the audio/visual data fusion and centrality measures used to characterize the social network.
Keywords: Social interaction; Multimodal fusion, Influence model; Social network analysis
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Geographic Information for vision-based Road Detection. In IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (621–626).
Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.
Keywords: road detection
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Jaume Amores, David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Multiple instance and active learning for weakly-supervised object-class segmentation. In 3rd IEEE International Conference on Machine Vision.
Abstract: In object-class segmentation, one of the most tedious tasks is to manually segment many object examples in order to learn a model of the object category. Yet, there has been little research on reducing the degree of manual annotation for
object-class segmentation. In this work we explore alternative strategies which do not require full manual segmentation of the object in the training set. In particular, we study the use of bounding boxes as a coarser and much cheaper form of segmentation and we perform a comparative study of several Multiple-Instance Learning techniques that allow to obtain a model with this type of weak annotation. We show that some of these methods can be competitive, when used with coarse
segmentations, with methods that require full manual segmentation of the objects. Furthermore, we show how to use active learning combined with this weakly supervised strategy.
As we see, this strategy permits to reduce the amount of annotation and optimize the number of examples that require full manual segmentation in the training set.
Keywords: Multiple Instance Learning; Active Learning; Object-class segmentation.
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Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Deteccion automatica de lineas de carril para la asistencia a la conduccion.
Abstract: La detección por cámara de las líneas de carril en las carreteras puede ser una solución asequible a los riesgos de conducción generados por los adelantamientos o las salidas de carril. Este trabajo propone un sistema que funciona en tiempo real y que obtiene muy buenos resultados. El sistema está preparado para identificar las líneas en condiciones de visibilidad poco favorables, como puede ser la conducción nocturna o con otros vehículos que dificulten la visión.
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Albert Gordo, Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2010). A Kernel-based Approach to Document Retrieval. In 9th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (377–384).
Abstract: In this paper we tackle the problem of document image retrieval by combining a similarity measure between documents and the probability that a given document belongs to a certain class. The membership probability to a specific class is computed using Support Vector Machines in conjunction with similarity measure based kernel applied to structural document representations. In the presented experiments, we use different document representations, both visual and structural, and we apply them to a database of historical documents. We show how our method based on similarity kernels outperforms the usual distance-based retrieval.
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Antonio Clavelli, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2010). A framework for the assessment of text extraction algorithms on complex colour images. In 9th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (19–26).
Abstract: The availability of open, ground-truthed datasets and clear performance metrics is a crucial factor in the development of an application domain. The domain of colour text image analysis (real scenes, Web and spam images, scanned colour documents) has traditionally suffered from a lack of a comprehensive performance evaluation framework. Such a framework is extremely difficult to specify, and corresponding pixel-level accurate information tedious to define. In this paper we discuss the challenges and technical issues associated with developing such a framework. Then, we describe a complete framework for the evaluation of text extraction methods at multiple levels, provide a detailed ground-truth specification and present a case study on how this framework can be used in a real-life situation.
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