Abstract: We propose an automatic surveillance system for user identification and object recognition based on multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis. We model a RGBD environment learning a pixel-based background Gaussian distribution. Then, user and object candidate regions are detected and recognized using robust statistical approaches. The system robustly recognizes users and updates the system in an online way, identifying and detecting new actors in the scene. Moreover, segmented objects are described, matched, recognized, and updated online using view-point 3D descriptions, being robust to partial occlusions and local 3D viewpoint rotations. Finally, the system saves the historic of user–object assignments, being specially useful for surveillance scenarios. The system has been evaluated on a novel data set containing different indoor/outdoor scenarios, objects, and users, showing accurate recognition and better performance than standard state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: This thesis evaluates the performance of different state-of-art feature detectors and descriptors algorithms in the Visible-LWIR cross-spectral scenario. The focus is to determine if current detector and descriptor algorithms can be used to match features between the LWIR spectrum and the visible spectrum in applications such as, visual odometry, object recognition, image registration and stereo vision. An outdoor cross-spectral dataset was created to evaluate the suitability of the different algorithms. The results
show that the tested algorithms are not suitable to the task of matching features across different spectra. The repeatability ratio was smaller than the 30 percent in the best case and in general matched features were not accurate located. Additionally, these results also suggest that is necessary to create new algorithms that take into account the nature of the different spectra, describing characteristics that exist in both spectra such as discontinuities.

Abstract: Hand sign language recognition from video is a challenging research area in computer vision, which performance is affected by hand occlusion, fast hand movement, illumination changes, or background complexity, just to mention a few. In recent years, deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in the field, though previous challenges are not completely solved. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based pipeline architecture for efficient automatic hand sign language recognition using Single Shot Detector (SSD), 2D Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN), 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) from RGB input videos. We use a CNN-based model which estimates the 3D hand keypoints from 2D input frames. After that, we connect these estimated keypoints to build the hand skeleton by using midpoint algorithm. In order to obtain a more discriminative representation of hands, we project 3D hand skeleton into three views surface images. We further employ the heatmap image of detected keypoints as input for refinement in a stacked fashion. We apply 3DCNNs on the stacked features of hand, including pixel level, multi-view hand skeleton, and heatmap features, to extract discriminant local spatio-temporal features from these stacked inputs. The outputs of the 3DCNNs are fused and fed to a LSTM to model long-term dynamics of hand sign gestures. Analyzing 2DCNN vs. 3DCNN using different number of stacked inputs into the network, we demonstrate that 3DCNN better capture spatio-temporal dynamics of hands. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this multi-modal and multi-view set of hand skeleton features are applied for hand sign language recognition. Furthermore, we present a new large-scale hand sign language dataset, namely RKS-PERSIANSIGN, including 10′000 RGB videos of 100 Persian sign words. Evaluation results of the proposed model on three datasets, NYU, First-Person, and RKS-PERSIANSIGN, indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in hand sign language recognition, hand pose estimation, and hand action recognition.

Abstract: We present MVMO (Multi-View, Multi-Object dataset): a synthetic dataset of 116,000 scenes containing randomly placed objects of 10 distinct classes and captured from 25 camera locations in the upper hemisphere. MVMO comprises photorealistic, path-traced image renders, together with semantic segmentation ground truth for every view. Unlike existing multi-view datasets, MVMO features wide baselines between cameras and high density of objects, which lead to large disparities, heavy occlusions and view-dependent object appearance. Single view semantic segmentation is hindered by self and inter-object occlusions that could benefit from additional viewpoints. Therefore, we expect that MVMO will propel research in multi-view semantic segmentation and cross-view semantic transfer. We also provide baselines that show that new research is needed in such fields to exploit the complementary information of multi-view setups 1 .

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, object detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities, and a strong multiview (MV) classifier that accounts for different object views and poses. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multicue, multimodality, and strong MV classifier) affect accuracy both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component, we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition light detection and ranging, a type of modality that is starting to receive increasing attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the accuracy, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient.

Abstract: We present a vision-inertial system which combines two RGB-Depth devices together with a wearable inertial movement unit in order to detect activities of the daily living. From multi-view videos, we extract dense trajectories enriched with a histogram of normals description computed from the depth cue and bag them into multi-view codebooks. During the later classification step a multi-class support vector machine with a RBF- 2 kernel combines the descriptions at kernel level. In order to perform action detection from the videos, a sliding window approach is utilized. On the other hand, we extract accelerations, rotation angles, and jerk features from the inertial data collected by the wearable placed on the user’s dominant wrist. During gesture spotting, a dynamic time warping is applied and the aligning costs to a set of pre-selected gesture sub-classes are thresholded to determine possible detections. The outputs of the two modules are combined in a late-fusion fashion. The system is validated in a real-case scenario with elderly from an elder home. Learning-based fusion results improve the ones from the single modalities, demonstrating the success of such multimodal approach.

Abstract: Far-Infrared and Visible Spectrum images. It allows matching interest points on images of the same scene but acquired in different spectral bands. Initially, points of interest are detected on both images through a SIFT-like based scale space representation. Then, these points are characterized using an Edge Oriented Histogram (EOH) descriptor. Finally, points of interest from multispectral images are matched by finding nearest couples using the information from the descriptor. The provided experimental results and comparisons with similar methods show both the validity of the proposed approach as well as the improvements it offers with respect to the current state-of-the-art.

Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary study on the registration and fusion of cross-spectral imaging. The objective is to evaluate the validity of widely used computer vision approaches when they are applied at different
spectral bands. In particular, we are interested in merging images from the infrared (both long wave infrared: LWIR and near infrared: NIR) and visible spectrum (VS). Experimental results with different data sets are presented.