Abstract: Color description is a challenging task because of large variations in RGB values which occur due to scene accidental events, such as shadows, shading, specularities, illuminant color changes, and changes in viewing geometry. Traditionally, this challenge has been addressed by capturing the variations in physics-based models, and deriving invariants for the undesired variations. The drawback of this approach is that sets of distinguishable colors in the original color space are mapped to the same value in the photometric invariant space. This results in a drop of discriminative power of the color description. In this paper we take an information theoretic approach to color description. We cluster color values together based on their discriminative power in a classification problem. The clustering has the explicit objective to minimize the drop of mutual information of the final representation. We show that such a color description automatically learns a certain degree of photometric invariance. We also show that a universal color representation, which is based on other data sets than the one at hand, can obtain competing performance. Experiments show that the proposed descriptor outperforms existing photometric invariants. Furthermore, we show that combined with shape description these color descriptors obtain excellent results on four challenging datasets, namely, PASCAL VOC 2007, Flowers-102, Stanford dogs-120 and Birds-200.

Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent document understanding enable direct content-based search as opposed to metadata only search (e.g. album title or author name). Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for the automatic text localization in scanned comics book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comics book understanding. We focus on speech text as it is semantically important and represents the majority of the text present in comics. The approach is compared with existing methods of text localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Abstract: Detecting hands in multi-modal RGB-Depth visual data has become a challenging Computer Vision problem with several applications of interest. This task involves dealing with changes in illumination, viewpoint variations, the articulated nature of the human body, the high flexibility of the wrist articulation, and the deformability of the hand itself. In this work, we propose an accurate and efficient automatic hand detection scheme to be applied in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications in which the user is seated at the desk and, thus, only the upper body is visible. Our main hypothesis is that hand landmarks remain at a nearly constant geodesic distance from an automatically located anatomical reference point.
In a given frame, the human body is segmented first in the depth image. Then, a
graph representation of the body is built in which the geodesic paths are computed from the reference point. The dense optical flow vectors on the corresponding RGB image are used to reduce ambiguities of the geodesic paths’ connectivity, allowing to eliminate false edges interconnecting different body parts. Finally, we are able to detect the position of both hands based on invariant geodesic distances and optical flow within the body region, without involving costly learning procedures.

Abstract: Human body segmentation is a hard task because of the high variability in appearance produced by changes in the point of view, lighting conditions, and number of articulations of the human body. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach for the segmentation of the human body. In a first step, a set of human limbs are described, normalized to be rotation invariant, and trained using cascade of classifiers to be split in a tree structure way. Once the tree structure is trained, it is included in a ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. This first classification step is applied in a windowing way on a new test image, defining a body-like probability map, which is used as an initialization of a GMM color modelling and binary Graph Cuts optimization procedure. The proposed methodology is tested in a novel limb-labelled data set. Results show performance improvements of the novel approach in comparison to classical cascade of classifiers and human detector-based Graph Cuts segmentation approaches.

Abstract: Existing state of the art optical flow approaches, which are evaluated on standard datasets such as Middlebury, not necessarily have a similar performance when evaluated on driving scenarios. This drop on performance is due to several challenges arising on real scenarios during driving. Towards this direction, in this paper, we propose a modification to the regularization term in a variational optical flow formulation, that notably improves the results, specially in driving scenarios. The proposed modification consists on using the Laplacian derivatives of flow components in the regularization term instead of gradients of flow components. We show the improvements in results on a standard real image sequences dataset (KITTI).

Abstract: Normalization of signals coming from linear sensors is an ubiquitous mechanism of neural adaptation.1 Local interaction between sensors tuned to a particular feature at certain spatial position and neighbor sensors explains a wide range of psychophysical facts including (1) masking of spatial patterns, (2) non-linearities of motion sensors, (3) adaptation of color perception, (4) brightness and chromatic induction, and (5) image quality assessment. Although the above models have formal and qualitative similarities, it does not necessarily mean that the mechanisms involved are pursuing the same statistical goal. For instance, in the case of chromatic mechanisms (disregarding spatial information), different parameters in the normalization give rise to optimal discrimination or adaptation, and different non-linearities may give rise to error minimization or component independence. In the case of spatial sensors (disregarding color information), a number of studies have pointed out the benefits of masking in statistical independence terms. However, such statistical analysis has not been performed for spatio-chromatic induction models where chromatic perception depends on spatial configuration. In this work we investigate whether successful spatio-chromatic induction models,6 increase component independence similarly as previously reported for masking models. Mutual information analysis suggests that seeking an efficient chromatic representation may explain the prevalence of induction effects in spatially simple images. © (2013) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.