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Author Fahad Shahbaz Khan edit  openurl
  Title Coloring bag-of-words based image representations Type Book Whole
  Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Put succinctly, the bag-of-words based image representation is the most successful approach for object and scene recognition. Within the bag-of-words framework the optimal fusion of multiple cues, such as shape, texture and color, still remains an active research domain. There exist two main approaches to combine color and shape information within the bag-of-words framework. The first approach called, early fusion, fuses color and shape at the feature level as a result of which a joint colorshape vocabulary is produced. The second approach, called late fusion, concatenates histogram representation of both color and shape, obtained independently. In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the theoretical implications of both early and late feature fusion. We demonstrate that both these approaches are suboptimal for a subset of object categories. Consequently, we propose a novel method for recognizing object categories when using multiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom-up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, the color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. Shape features are given more weight in regions with higher attention and vice versa. The approach is tested on several benchmark object recognition data sets and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of obtaining compact spatial pyramid representations for object and scene recognition. Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback of spatial pyramids is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. We present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. The approach reduces the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation upto an order of magnitude without any significant reduction in accuracy. Moreover, we also investigate the optimal combination of multiple features such as color and shape within the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, we describe a novel technique to build discriminative visual words from multiple cues learned independently from training images. To this end, we use an information theoretic vocabulary compression technique to find discriminative combinations of visual cues and the resulting visual vocabulary is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. The approach is tested on standard object recognition data sets. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Kha2011 Serial 1838  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Shida Beigpour edit  openurl
  Title Illumination and object reflectance modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Bei2013 Serial 2267  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Susana Alvarez edit  openurl
  Title Revisión de la teoría de los Textons Enfoque computacional en color Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract El color y la textura son dos estímulos visuales importantes para la interpretación de las imágenes. La definición de descriptores computacionales que combinan estas dos características es aún un problema abierto. La dificultad se deriva esencialmente de la propia naturaleza de ambas, mientras que la textura es una propiedad de una región, el color es una propiedad de un punto.

Hasta ahora se han utilizado tres los tipos de aproximaciones para la combinación, (a) se describe la textura directamente en cada uno de los canales color, (b) se describen textura y color por separado y se combinan al final, y (c) la combinación se realiza con técnicas de aprendizaje automático. Considerando que este problema se resuelve en el sistema visual humano en niveles muy tempranos, en esta tesis se propone estudiar el problema a partir de la implementación directa de una teoría perceptual, la teoría de los textons, y explorar así su extensión a color.

Puesto que la teoría de los textons se basa en la descripción de la textura a partir de las densidades de los atributos locales, esto se adapta perfectamente al marco de trabajo de los descriptores holísticos (bag-of-words). Se han estudiado diversos descriptores basados en diferentes espacios de textons, y diferentes representaciones de las imágenes. Asimismo se ha estudiado la viabilidad de estos descriptores en una representación conceptual de nivel intermedio.

Los descriptores propuestos han demostrado ser muy eficientes en aplicaciones de recuperación y clasificación de imágenes, presentando ventajas en la generación de vocabularios. Los vocabularios se obtienen cuantificando directamente espacios de baja dimensión y la perceptualidad de estos espacios permite asociar semántica de bajo nivel a las palabras visuales. El estudio de los resultados permite concluir que si bien la aproximación holística es muy eficiente, la introducción de co-ocurrencia espacial de las propiedades de forma y color de los blobs de la imagen es un elemento clave para su combinación, hecho que no contradice las evidencias en percepción
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Alv2012b Serial 2216  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Naila Murray edit  openurl
  Title Predicting Saliency and Aesthetics in Images: A Bottom-up Perspective Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.

In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.

Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.

As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu;Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mur2012 Serial 2212  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jordi Roca edit  openurl
  Title Constancy and inconstancy in categorical colour perception Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract To recognise objects is perhaps the most important task an autonomous system, either biological or artificial needs to perform. In the context of human vision, this is partly achieved by recognizing the colour of surfaces despite changes in the wavelength distribution of the illumination, a property called colour constancy. Correct surface colour recognition may be adequately accomplished by colour category matching without the need to match colours precisely, therefore categorical colour constancy is likely to play an important role for object identification to be successful. The main aim of this work is to study the relationship between colour constancy and categorical colour perception. Previous studies of colour constancy have shown the influence of factors such the spatio-chromatic properties of the background, individual observer's performance, semantics, etc. However there is very little systematic study of these influences. To this end, we developed a new approach to colour constancy which includes both individual observers' categorical perception, the categorical structure of the background, and their interrelations resulting in a more comprehensive characterization of the phenomenon. In our study, we first developed a new method to analyse the categorical structure of 3D colour space, which allowed us to characterize individual categorical colour perception as well as quantify inter-individual variations in terms of shape and centroid location of 3D categorical regions. Second, we developed a new colour constancy paradigm, termed chromatic setting, which allows measuring the precise location of nine categorically-relevant points in colour space under immersive illumination. Additionally, we derived from these measurements a new colour constancy index which takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift, memory effects and the interrelations among colours and a model of colour naming tuned to each observer/adaptation state. Our results lead to the following conclusions: (1) There exists large inter-individual variations in the categorical structure of colour space, and thus colour naming ability varies significantly but this is not well predicted by low-level chromatic discrimination ability; (2) Analysis of the average colour naming space suggested the need for an additional three basic colour terms (turquoise, lilac and lime) for optimal colour communication; (3) Chromatic setting improved the precision of more complex linear colour constancy models and suggested that mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain colour constancy; (4) The categorical structure of colour space is broadly stable under illuminant changes for categorically balanced backgrounds; (5) Categorical inconstancy exists for categorically unbalanced backgrounds thus indicating that categorical information perceived in the initial stages of adaptation may constrain further categorical perception.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;C. Alejandro Parraga  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Roc2012 Serial 2893  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ivet Rafegas edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Color in Visual Recognition: from flat to deep representations and some biological parallelisms Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.

Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.

Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.
 
  Address November 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-7-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Raf2017 Serial 3100  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Theo Gevers; Arjan Gijsenij; Joost Van de Weijer; J.M. Geusebroek edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Color in Computer Vision: Fundamentals and Applications Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication Color in Computer Vision: Fundamentals and Applications Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher The Wiley-IS&T Series in Imaging Science and Technology Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-0-470-89084-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ALTRES;ISE Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ GGG2012a Serial 2068  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Angel Sappa; Jordi Vitria edit  doi
isbn  openurl
  Title Multimodal Interaction in Image and Video Applications Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication Multimodal Interaction in Image and Video Applications Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 48 Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Book Series Intelligent Systems Reference Library  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Springer Berlin Heidelberg Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN 1868-4394 ISBN 978-3-642-35931-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; OR;MV Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ SaV2013 Serial 2199  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Antonio Lopez; Atsushi Imiya; Tomas Pajdla; Jose Manuel Alvarez edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages 161-163  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Summary This chapter examines different vision-based commercial solutions for real-live problems related to vehicles. It is worth mentioning the recent astonishing performance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in difficult visual tasks such as image classification, object recognition/localization/detection, and semantic segmentation. In fact,
different DCNN architectures are already being explored for low-level tasks such as optical flow and disparity computation, and higher level ones such as place recognition.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-1-118-86807-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ LIP2017a Serial 2937  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Cristhian Aguilera edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Local feature description in cross-spectral imagery Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Over the last few years, the number of consumer computer vision applications has increased dramatically. Today, computer vision solutions can be found in video game consoles, smartphone applications, driving assistance – just to name a few. Ideally, we require the performance of those applications, particularly those that are safety critical to remain constant under any external environment factors, such as changes in illumination or weather conditions. However, this is not always possible or very difficult to obtain by only using visible imagery, due to the inherent limitations of the images from that spectral band. For that reason, the use of images from different or multiple spectral bands is becoming more appealing.
The aforementioned possible advantages of using images from multiples spectral bands on various vision applications make multi-spectral image processing a relevant topic for research and development. Like in visible image processing, multi-spectral image processing needs tools and algorithms to handle information from various spectral bands. Furthermore, traditional tools such as local feature detection, which is the basis of many vision tasks such as visual odometry, image registration, or structure from motion, must be adjusted or reformulated to operate under new conditions. Traditional feature detection, description, and matching methods tend to underperform in multi-spectral settings, in comparison to mono-spectral settings, due to the natural differences between each spectral band.
The work in this thesis is focused on the local feature description problem when cross-spectral images are considered. In this context, this dissertation has three main contributions. Firstly, the work starts by proposing the usage of a combination of frequency and spatial information, in a multi-scale scheme, as feature description. Evaluations of this proposal, based on classical hand-made feature descriptors, and comparisons with state of the art cross-spectral approaches help to find and understand limitations of such strategy. Secondly, different convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures are evaluated when used to describe cross-spectral image patches. Results showed that CNN-based methods, designed to work with visible monocular images, could be successfully applied to the description of images from two different spectral bands, with just minor modifications. In this framework, a novel CNN-based network model, specifically intended to describe image patches from two different spectral bands, is proposed. This network, referred to as Q-Net, outperforms state of the art in the cross-spectral domain, including both previous hand-made solutions as well as L2 CNN-based architectures. The third contribution of this dissertation is in the cross-spectral feature description application domain. The multispectral odometry problem is tackled showing a real application of cross-spectral descriptors
In addition to the three main contributions mentioned above, in this dissertation, two different multi-spectral datasets are generated and shared with the community to be used as benchmarks for further studies.
 
  Address October 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-6-3 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Agu2017 Serial 3020  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Cesar de Souza edit  openurl
  Title Action Recognition in Videos: Data-efficient approaches for supervised learning of human action classification models for video Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this dissertation, we explore different ways to perform human action recognition in video clips. We focus on data efficiency, proposing new approaches that alleviate the need for laborious and time-consuming manual data annotation. In the first part of this dissertation, we start by analyzing previous state-of-the-art models, comparing their differences and similarities in order to pinpoint where their real strengths come from. Leveraging this information, we then proceed to boost the classification accuracy of shallow models to levels that rival deep neural networks. We introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of handcrafted spatiotemporal features classified by supervised deep networks. We show in our experiments that our hybrid model combine the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10,000 short clips) and yet improved significantly on the state of the art, including deep models trained on millions of manually labeled images and videos. In the second part of this research, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We then introduce deep multi-task representation learning architectures to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.  
  Address April 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Naila Murray  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Sou2018 Serial 3127  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Felipe Codevilla edit  openurl
  Title On Building End-to-End Driving Models Through Imitation Learning Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.
 
  Address May 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Cod2019 Serial 3387  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Zhijie Fang edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Behavior understanding of vulnerable road users by 2D pose estimation Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians
and cyclists can be critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, therefore, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, i.e. from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this PhD work, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow the established traffic codes to indicate future left/right turns and stop maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed a priori. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian can allow us to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the egovehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this PhD work, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists’ intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the publicly available Daimler and JAAD datasets. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, therefore, we created our own one by acquiring
and annotating corresponding video-sequences which we aim to share with the
research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
 
  Address May 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;David Vazquez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-6-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Fan2019 Serial 3388  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Gabriel Villalonga edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Leveraging Synthetic Data to Create Autonomous Driving Perception Systems Type Book Whole
  Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Manually annotating images to develop vision models has been a major bottleneck
since computer vision and machine learning started to walk together. This has
been more evident since computer vision falls on the shoulders of data-hungry
deep learning techniques. When addressing on-board perception for autonomous
driving, the curse of data annotation is exacerbated due to the use of additional
sensors such as LiDAR. Therefore, any approach aiming at reducing such a timeconsuming and costly work is of high interest for addressing autonomous driving
and, in fact, for any application requiring some sort of artificial perception. In the
last decade, it has been shown that leveraging from synthetic data is a paradigm
worth to pursue in order to minimizing manual data annotation. The reason is
that the automatic process of generating synthetic data can also produce different
types of associated annotations (e.g. object bounding boxes for synthetic images
and LiDAR pointclouds, pixel/point-wise semantic information, etc.). Directly
using synthetic data for training deep perception models may not be the definitive
solution in all circumstances since it can appear a synth-to-real domain shift. In
this context, this work focuses on leveraging synthetic data to alleviate manual
annotation for three perception tasks related to driving assistance and autonomous
driving. In all cases, we assume the use of deep convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) to develop our perception models.
The first task addresses traffic sign recognition (TSR), a kind of multi-class
classification problem. We assume that the number of sign classes to be recognized
must be suddenly increased without having annotated samples to perform the
corresponding TSR CNN re-training. We show that leveraging synthetic samples of
such new classes and transforming them by a generative adversarial network (GAN)
trained on the known classes (i.e. without using samples from the new classes), it is
possible to re-train the TSR CNN to properly classify all the signs for a ∼ 1/4 ratio of
new/known sign classes. The second task addresses on-board 2D object detection,
focusing on vehicles and pedestrians. In this case, we assume that we receive a set
of images without the annotations required to train an object detector, i.e. without
object bounding boxes. Therefore, our goal is to self-annotate these images so
that they can later be used to train the desired object detector. In order to reach
this goal, we leverage from synthetic data and propose a semi-supervised learning
approach based on the co-training idea. In fact, we use a GAN to reduce the synthto-real domain shift before applying co-training. Our quantitative results show
that co-training and GAN-based image-to-image translation complement each
other up to allow the training of object detectors without manual annotation, and still almost reaching the upper-bound performances of the detectors trained from
human annotations. While in previous tasks we focus on vision-based perception,
the third task we address focuses on LiDAR pointclouds. Our initial goal was to
develop a 3D object detector trained on synthetic LiDAR-style pointclouds. While
for images we may expect synth/real-to-real domain shift due to differences in
their appearance (e.g. when source and target images come from different camera
sensors), we did not expect so for LiDAR pointclouds since these active sensors
factor out appearance and provide sampled shapes. However, in practice, we have
seen that it can be domain shift even among real-world LiDAR pointclouds. Factors
such as the sampling parameters of the LiDARs, the sensor suite configuration onboard the ego-vehicle, and the human annotation of 3D bounding boxes, do induce
a domain shift. We show it through comprehensive experiments with different
publicly available datasets and 3D detectors. This redirected our goal towards the
design of a GAN for pointcloud-to-pointcloud translation, a relatively unexplored
topic.
Finally, it is worth to mention that all the synthetic datasets used for these three
tasks, have been designed and generated in the context of this PhD work and will
be publicly released. Overall, we think this PhD presents several steps forward to
encourage leveraging synthetic data for developing deep perception models in the
field of driving assistance and autonomous driving.
 
  Address February 2021  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;German Ros  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-2-3 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Vil2021 Serial 3599  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author David Geronimo; Antonio Lopez edit  doi
isbn  openurl
  Title Vision-based Pedestrian Protection Systems for Intelligent Vehicles Type Book Whole
  Year 2014 Publication SpringerBriefs in Computer Science Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages 1-114  
  Keywords Computer Vision; Driver Assistance Systems; Intelligent Vehicles; Pedestrian Detection; Vulnerable Road Users  
  Abstract Pedestrian Protection Systems (PPSs) are on-board systems aimed at detecting and tracking people in the surroundings of a vehicle in order to avoid potentially dangerous situations. These systems, together with other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane departure warning or adaptive cruise control, are one of the most promising ways to improve traffic safety. By the use of computer vision, cameras working either in the visible or infra-red spectra have been demonstrated as a reliable sensor to perform this task. Nevertheless, the variability of human’s appearance, not only in terms of clothing and sizes but also as a result of their dynamic shape, makes pedestrians one of the most complex classes even for computer vision. Moreover, the unstructured changing and unpredictable environment in which such on-board systems must work makes detection a difficult task to be carried out with the demanded robustness. In this brief, the state of the art in PPSs is introduced through the review of the most relevant papers of the last decade. A common computational architecture is presented as a framework to organize each method according to its main contribution. More than 300 papers are referenced, most of them addressing pedestrian detection and others corresponding to the descriptors (features), pedestrian models, and learning machines used. In addition, an overview of topics such as real-time aspects, systems benchmarking and future challenges of this research area are presented.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Springer Briefs in Computer Vision Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-1-4614-7986-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (down) ADAS; 600.076 Approved no  
  Call Number GeL2014 Serial 2325  
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