Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications, e.g. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Intelligent Video Surveillance and Multimedia systems. Most promising pedestrian detectors rely on appearance-based classifiers trained with annotated data. However, the required annotation step represents an intensive and subjective task for humans, what makes worth to minimize their intervention in this process by using computational tools like realistic virtual worlds. The reason to use these kind of tools relies in the fact that they allow the automatic generation of precise and rich annotations of visual information. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of data comes with the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt with virtual-world data work successfully for pedestrian detection in real-world scenarios?. To answer this question, we conduct different experiments that suggest a positive answer. However, the pedestrian classifiers trained with virtual-world data can suffer the so called dataset shift problem as real-world based classifiers does. Accordingly, we have designed different domain adaptation techniques to face this problem, all of them integrated in a same framework (V-AYLA). We have explored different methods to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifiers by collecting a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combining them with many samples of the source domain (virtual world). The extensive experiments we present show that pedestrian detectors developed within the V-AYLA framework do achieve domain adaptation. Ideally, we would like to adapt our system without any human intervention. Therefore, as a first proof of concept we also propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that avoids human intervention during the adaptation process. To the best of our knowledge, this Thesis work is the first demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector. Last but not least, we also assessed a different strategy to avoid the dataset shift that consists in collecting real-world samples and retrain with them in such a way that no bounding boxes of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. We show that the generated classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating pedestrian bounding boxes. The results presented on this Thesis not only end with a proposal for adapting a virtual-world pedestrian detector to the real world, but also it goes further by pointing out a new methodology that would allow the system to adapt to different situations, which we hope will provide the foundations for future research in this unexplored area.

Abstract: Training vision-based pedestrian detectors using synthetic datasets (virtual world) is a useful technique to collect automatically the training examples with their pixel-wise ground truth. However, as it is often the case, these detectors must operate in real-world images, experiencing a significant drop of their performance. In fact, this effect also occurs among different real-world datasets, i.e. detectors' accuracy drops when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, it is required to adapt the detector trained with synthetic data to operate in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation approach based on boosting LDA exemplar classifiers from both virtual and real worlds. We evaluate our proposal on multiple real-world pedestrian detection datasets. The results show that our method can efficiently adapt the exemplar classifiers from virtual to real world, avoiding drops in average precision over the 15%.

Abstract: State-of-the-art deformable part-based models based on latent SVM have shown excellent results on human detection. In this paper, we propose to train a multiview deformable part-based model with automatically generated part examples from virtual-world data. The method is efficient as: (i) the part detectors are trained with precisely extracted virtual examples, thus no latent learning is needed, (ii) the multiview pedestrian detector enhances the performance of the pedestrian root model, (iii) a top-down approach is used for part detection which reduces the searching space. We evaluate our model on Daimler and Karlsruhe Pedestrian Benchmarks with publicly available Caltech pedestrian detection evaluation framework and the result outperforms the state-of-the-art latent SVM V4.0, on both average miss rate and speed (our detector is ten times faster).

Abstract: In this study we propose amodular systemfor automatic rheumatoid arthritis assessment which provides a joint space width measure. A hand joint model is proposed based on the accurate analysis of a X-ray finger joint image sample set. This model shows that the sclerosis and the lower bone are the main necessary features in order to perform a proper finger joint characterization. We propose sclerosis and lower bone detection methods as well as the experimental setup necessary for its performance assessment. Our characterization is used to propose and compute a joint space width score which is shown to be related to the different degrees of arthritis. This assertion is verified by comparing our proposed score with Sharp Van der Heijde score, confirming that the lower our score is the more advanced is the patient affection.

Abstract: Most MAP inference algorithms for CRFs optimize an energy function knowing all the potentials. In this paper, we focus on CRFs where the computational cost of instantiating the potentials is orders of magnitude higher than MAP inference. This is often the case in semantic image segmentation, where most potentials are instantiated by slow classifiers fed with costly features. We introduce Active MAP inference 1) to on-the-fly select a subset of potentials to be instantiated in the energy function, leaving the rest of the parameters of the potentials unknown, and 2) to estimate the MAP labeling from such incomplete energy function. Results for semantic segmentation benchmarks, namely PASCAL VOC 2010 [5] and MSRC-21 [19], show that Active MAP inference achieves similar levels of accuracy but with major efficiency gains.

Abstract: We present a novel technique for estimating initial 3D poses in the context of localization and Visual SLAM problems. The presented approach can deal with noise, outliers and a large amount of input data and still performs in real time in a standard CPU. Our method produces solutions with an accuracy comparable to those produced by RANSAC but can be much faster when the percentage of outliers is high or for large amounts of input data. On the current work we propose to formulate the pose estimation as an optimization problem on Lie groups, considering their manifold structure as well as their associated Lie algebras. This allows us to perform a fast and simple optimization at the same time that conserve all the constraints imposed by the Lie group SE(3). Additionally, we present several key design concepts related with the cost function and its Jacobian; aspects that are critical for the good performance of the algorithm.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique in graphical documents. Graphs are used to represent the documents and a (sub)graph matching technique is used to detect the symbols in them. We propose a graph serialization to reduce the usual computational complexity of graph matching. Serialization of graphs is performed by computing acyclic graph paths between each pair of connected nodes. Graph paths are one-dimensional structures of graphs which are less expensive in terms of computation. At the same time they enable robust localization even in the presence of noise and distortion. Indexing in large graph databases involves a computational burden as well. We propose a graph factorization approach to tackle this problem. Factorization is intended to create a unified indexed structure over the database of graphical documents. Once graph paths are extracted, the entire database of graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. We have performed detailed experiments with various datasets of line drawings and compared our method with the state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our technique.