Abstract: This chapter addresses the recognition of basic facial expressions. It has three main contributions. First, the authors introduce a view- and texture independent schemes that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. they represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Two dynamic recognition schemes are proposed: (1) the first is based on conditional predictive models and on an analysis-synthesis scheme, and (2) the second is based on examples allowing straightforward use of machine learning approaches. Second, the authors propose an efficient recognition scheme based on the detection of keyframes in videos. Third, the authors compare the dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that in general the former performs better than the latter. The authors then provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM).

Abstract: This paper deals with the recognition of symbols and structural textures in architectural plans using string matching techniques. A plan is represented by an attributed graph whose nodes represent characteristic points and whose edges represent segments. Symbols and textures can be seen as a set of regions, i.e. closed loops in the graph, with a particular arrangement. The search for a symbol involves a graph matching between the regions of a model graph and the regions of the graph representing the document. Discriminating a texture means a clustering of neighbouring regions of this graph. Both procedures involve a similarity measure between graph regions. A string codification is used to represent the sequence of outlining edges of a region. Thus, the similarity between two regions is defined in terms of the string edit distance between their boundary strings. The use of string matching allows the recognition method to work also under presence of distortion.

Abstract: The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the Pattern Recognition field. In the literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers . In this scope, the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most of the state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a compact design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best compact ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI data sets and different multi-class Computer Vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than the state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.

Abstract: The recognition of abnormal behaviors in video sequences has raised as a hot topic in video understanding research. Particularly, an important challenge resides on automatically detecting abnormality. However, there is no convention about the types of anomalies that training data should derive. In surveillance, these are typically detected when new observations differ substantially from observed, previously learned behavior models, which represent normality. This paper focuses on properly defining anomalies within trajectory analysis: we propose a hierarchical representation conformed by Soft, Intermediate, and Hard Anomaly, which are identified from the extent and nature of deviation from learned models. Towards this end, a novel Gaussian Mixture Model representation of learned route patterns creates a probabilistic map of the image plane, which is applied to detect and classify anomalies in real-time. Our method overcomes limitations of similar existing approaches, and performs correctly even when the tracking is affected by different sources of noise. The reliability of our approach is demonstrated experimentally.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel non-linear discriminative analysis technique for manifold learning. The proposed approach is a discriminant version of Laplacian Eigenmaps which takes into account the class label information in order to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction. By following the large margin concept, the graph Laplacian is split in two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques. The experimental results confirm that our method outperforms, in general, the existing ones. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.

Abstract: In this paper we present an example of a video surveillance application that exploits Multimodal Interactive (MI) technologies. The main objective of the so-called VID-Hum prototype was to develop a cognitive artificial system for both the detection and description of a particular set of human behaviours arising from real-world events. The main procedure of the prototype described in this chapter entails: (i) adaptation, since the system adapts itself to the most common behaviours (qualitative data) inferred from tracking (quantitative data) thus being able to recognize abnormal behaviors; (ii) feedback, since an advanced interface based on Natural Language understanding allows end-users the communicationwith the prototype by means of conceptual sentences; and (iii) multimodality, since a virtual avatar has been designed to describe what is happening in the scene, based on those textual interpretations generated by the prototype. Thus, the MI methodology has provided an adequate framework for all these cooperating processes.

Abstract: Following their success in image processing (see Chapter Local Smoothing Neighborhood Filters), neighborhood filters have been extended to 3D surface processing. This adaptation is not straightforward. It has led to several variants for surfaces depending on whether the surface is defined as a mesh, or as a raw data point set. The image gray level in the bilateral similarity measure is replaced by a geometric information such as the normal or the curvature. The first section of this chapter reviews the variants of 3D mesh bilateral filters and compares them to the simplest possible isotropic filter, the mean curvature motion.In a second part, this chapter reviews applications of the bilateral filter to a data composed of a sparse depth map (or of depth cues) and of the image on which they have been computed. Such sparse depth cues can be obtained by stereovision or by psychophysical techniques. The underlying assumption to these applications is that pixels with similar intensity around a region are likely to have similar depths. Therefore, when diffusing depth information with a bilateral filter based on locality and color similarity, the discontinuities in depth are assured to be consistent with the color discontinuities, which is generally a desirable property. In the reviewed applications, this ends up with the reconstruction of a dense perceptual depth map from the joint data of an image and of depth cues.