Daniel Hernandez, Juan Carlos Moure, Toni Espinosa, Alejandro Chacon, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). Real-time 3D Reconstruction for Autonomous Driving via Semi-Global Matching. In GPU Technology Conference.
Abstract: Robust and dense computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for real-time autonomous driving. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) [1] approximates heavy-computation global algorithms results but with lower computational complexity, therefore it is a good candidate for a real-time implementation. SGM minimizes energy along several 1D paths across the image. The aim of this work is to provide a real-time system producing reliable results on energy-efficient hardware. Our design runs on a NVIDIA Titan X GPU at 104.62 FPS and on a NVIDIA Drive PX at 6.7 FPS, promising for real-time platforms
Keywords: Stereo; Autonomous Driving; GPU; 3d reconstruction
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German Ros, Laura Sellart, Joanna Materzynska, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). The SYNTHIA Dataset: A Large Collection of Synthetic Images for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes. In 29th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 3234–3243).
Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. The irruption of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) allows to foresee obtaining reliable classifiers to perform such a visual task. However, DCNNs require to learn many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diversified images with this class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained by a human cumbersome labour specially challenging for semantic segmentation, since pixel-level annotations are required. In this paper, we propose to use a virtual world for automatically generating realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations. Then, we address the question of how useful can be such data for the task of semantic segmentation; in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic diversified collection of urban images, named SynthCity, with automatically generated class annotations. We use SynthCity in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments on a DCNN setting that show how the inclusion of SynthCity in the training stage significantly improves the performance of the semantic segmentation task
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Autonomous Driving; Virtual Data; Semantic Segmentation
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Daniel Hernandez, Alejandro Chacon, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Juan Carlos Moure, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). Embedded real-time stereo estimation via Semi-Global Matching on the GPU. In 16th International Conference on Computational Science (Vol. 80, pp. 143–153).
Abstract: Dense, robust and real-time computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely used algorithm that propagates consistency constraints along several paths across the image. This work presents a real-time system producing reliable disparity estimation results on the new embedded energy-efficient GPU devices. Our design runs on a Tegra X1 at 41 frames per second for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; Stereo; CUDA; 3d reconstruction
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Victor Campmany, Sergio Silva, Antonio Espinosa, Juan Carlos Moure, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2016). GPU-based pedestrian detection for autonomous driving. In 16th International Conference on Computational Science (Vol. 80, pp. 2377–2381).
Abstract: We propose a real-time pedestrian detection system for the embedded Nvidia Tegra X1 GPU-CPU hybrid platform. The pipeline is composed by the following state-of-the-art algorithms: Histogram of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features extracted from the input image; Pyramidal Sliding Window technique for foreground segmentation; and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Results show a 8x speedup in the target Tegra X1 platform and a better performance/watt ratio than desktop CUDA platforms in study.
Keywords: Pedestrian detection; Autonomous Driving; CUDA
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2016). Multi-face tracking by extended bag-of-tracklets in egocentric photo-streams. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 146–156.
Abstract: Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
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Onur Ferhat, & Fernando Vilariño. (2016). Low Cost Eye Tracking: The Current Panorama. CIN - Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, , Article ID 8680541.
Abstract: Despite the availability of accurate, commercial gaze tracker devices working with infrared (IR) technology, visible light gaze tracking constitutes an interesting alternative by allowing scalability and removing hardware requirements. Over the last years, this field has seen examples of research showing performance comparable to the IR alternatives. In this work, we survey the previous work on remote, visible light gaze trackers and analyze the explored techniques from various perspectives such as calibration strategies, head pose invariance, and gaze estimation techniques. We also provide information on related aspects of research such as public datasets to test against, open source projects to build upon, and gaze tracking services to directly use in applications. With all this information, we aim to provide the contemporary and future researchers with a map detailing previously explored ideas and the required tools.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2016). On the completeness of feature-driven maximally stable extremal regions. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 74, 9–16.
Abstract: By definition, local image features provide a compact representation of the image in which most of the image information is preserved. This capability offered by local features has been overlooked, despite being relevant in many application scenarios. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the performance of feature-driven Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) in terms of the coverage of informative image parts (completeness). This type of features results from an MSER extraction on saliency maps in which features related to objects boundaries or even symmetry axes are highlighted. These maps are intended to be suitable domains for MSER detection, allowing this detector to provide a better coverage of informative image parts. Our experimental results, which were based on a large-scale evaluation, show that feature-driven MSER have relatively high completeness values and provide more complete sets than a traditional MSER detection even when sets of similar cardinality are considered.
Keywords: Local features; Completeness; Maximally Stable Extremal Regions
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Eugenio Alcala, Laura Sellart, Vicenc Puig, Joseba Quevedo, Jordi Saludes, David Vazquez, et al. (2016). Comparison of two non-linear model-based control strategies for autonomous vehicles. In 24th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (pp. 846–851).
Abstract: This paper presents the comparison of two nonlinear model-based control strategies for autonomous cars. A control oriented model of vehicle based on a bicycle model is used. The two control strategies use a model reference approach. Using this approach, the error dynamics model is developed. Both controllers receive as input the longitudinal, lateral and orientation errors generating as control outputs the steering angle and the velocity of the vehicle. The first control approach is based on a non-linear control law that is designed by means of the Lyapunov direct approach. The second approach is based on a sliding mode-control that defines a set of sliding surfaces over which the error trajectories will converge. The main advantage of the sliding-control technique is the robustness against non-linearities and parametric uncertainties in the model. However, the main drawback of first order sliding mode is the chattering, so it has been implemented a high order sliding mode control. To test and compare the proposed control strategies, different path following scenarios are used in simulation.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; Control
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Joan Mas, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2016). An Interactive Transcription System of Census Records using Word-Spotting based Information Transfer. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 54–59).
Abstract: This paper presents a system to assist in the transcription of historical handwritten census records in a crowdsourcing platform. Census records have a tabular structured layout. They consist in a sequence of rows with information of homes ordered by street address. For each household snippet in the page, the list of family members is reported. The censuses are recorded in intervals of a few years and the information of individuals in each household is quite stable from a point in time to the next one. This redundancy is used to assist the transcriber, so the redundant information is transferred from the census already transcribed to the next one. Household records are aligned from one year to the next one using the knowledge of the ordering by street address. Given an already transcribed census, a query by string word spotting is applied. Thus, names from the census in time t are used as queries in the corresponding home record in time t+1. Since the search is constrained, the obtained precision-recall values are very high, with an important reduction in the transcription time. The proposed system has been tested in a real citizen-science experience where non expert users transcribe the census data of their home town.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Alicia Fornes, Jordi Cucurull, & Josep Llados. (2016). Election Tally Sheets Processing System. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 364–368).
Abstract: In paper based elections, manual tallies at polling station level produce myriads of documents. These documents share a common form-like structure and a reduced vocabulary worldwide. On the other hand, each tally sheet is filled by a different writer and on different countries, different scripts are used. We present a complete document analysis system for electoral tally sheet processing combining state of the art techniques with a new handwriting recognition subprocess based on unsupervised feature discovery with Variational Autoencoders and sequence classification with BLSTM neural networks. The whole system is designed to be script independent and allows a fast and reliable results consolidation process with reduced operational cost.
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Anders Hast, & Alicia Fornes. (2016). A Segmentation-free Handwritten Word Spotting Approach by Relaxed Feature Matching. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 150–155).
Abstract: The automatic recognition of historical handwritten documents is still considered challenging task. For this reason, word spotting emerges as a good alternative for making the information contained in these documents available to the user. Word spotting is defined as the task of retrieving all instances of the query word in a document collection, becoming a useful tool for information retrieval. In this paper we propose a segmentation-free word spotting approach able to deal with large document collections. Our method is inspired on feature matching algorithms that have been applied to image matching and retrieval. Since handwritten words have different shape, there is no exact transformation to be obtained. However, the sufficient degree of relaxation is achieved by using a Fourier based descriptor and an alternative approach to RANSAC called PUMA. The proposed approach is evaluated on historical marriage records, achieving promising results.
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Daniel Hernandez, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, & Juan Carlos Moure. (2017). GPU-accelerated real-time stixel computation. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 1054–1062).
Abstract: The Stixel World is a medium-level, compact representation of road scenes that abstracts millions of disparity pixels into hundreds or thousands of stixels. The goal of this work is to implement and evaluate a complete multi-stixel estimation pipeline on an embedded, energyefficient, GPU-accelerated device. This work presents a full GPU-accelerated implementation of stixel estimation that produces reliable results at 26 frames per second (real-time) on the Tegra X1 for disparity images of 1024×440 pixels and stixel widths of 5 pixels, and achieves more than 400 frames per second on a high-end Titan X GPU card.
Keywords: Autonomous Driving; GPU; Stixel
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Marçal Rusiñol, J. Chazalon, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2016). Filtrage de descripteurs locaux pour l'amélioration de la détection de documents. In Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework.In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements.
Keywords: Local descriptors; mobile capture; document matching; keypoint selection
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, V. Poulain d'Andecy, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2016). Human-Document Interaction – a new frontier for document image analysis. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 369–374).
Abstract: All indications show that paper documents will not cede in favour of their digital counterparts, but will instead be used increasingly in conjunction with digital information. An open challenge is how to seamlessly link the physical with the digital – how to continue taking advantage of the important affordances of paper, without missing out on digital functionality. This paper
presents the authors’ experience with developing systems for Human-Document Interaction based on augmented document interfaces and examines new challenges and opportunities arising for the document image analysis field in this area. The system presented combines state of the art camera-based document
image analysis techniques with a range of complementary tech-nologies to offer fluid Human-Document Interaction. Both fixed and nomadic setups are discussed that have gone through user testing in real-life environments, and use cases are presented that span the spectrum from business to educational application
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Q. Bao, Marçal Rusiñol, M.Coustaty, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, C.D. Tran, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2016). Delaunay triangulation-based features for Camera-based document image retrieval system. In 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (pp. 1–6).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new feature vector, named DElaunay TRIangulation-based Features (DETRIF), for real-time camera-based document image retrieval. DETRIF is computed based on the geometrical constraints from each pair of adjacency triangles in delaunay triangulation which is constructed from centroids of connected components. Besides, we employ a hashing-based indexing system in order to evaluate the performance of DETRIF and to compare it with other systems such as LLAH and SRIF. The experimentation is carried out on two datasets comprising of 400 heterogeneous-content complex linguistic map images (huge size, 9800 X 11768 pixels resolution)and 700 textual document images.
Keywords: Camera-based Document Image Retrieval; Delaunay Triangulation; Feature descriptors; Indexing
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