Xavier Perez Sala, Sergio Escalera, Cecilio Angulo, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). A survey on model based approaches for 2D and 3D visual human pose recovery. SENS - Sensors, 14(3), 4189–4210.
Abstract: Human Pose Recovery has been studied in the field of Computer Vision for the last 40 years. Several approaches have been reported, and significant improvements have been obtained in both data representation and model design. However, the problem of Human Pose Recovery in uncontrolled environments is far from being solved. In this paper, we define a general taxonomy to group model based approaches for Human Pose Recovery, which is composed of five main modules: appearance, viewpoint, spatial relations, temporal consistence, and behavior. Subsequently, a methodological comparison is performed following the proposed taxonomy, evaluating current SoA approaches in the aforementioned five group categories. As a result of this comparison, we discuss the main advantages and drawbacks of the reviewed literature.
Keywords: human pose recovery; human body modelling; behavior analysis; computer vision
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Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Baro, Fernando Alonso, & Martha Mackay. (2016). Care Respite: a remote monitoring eHealth system for improving ambient assisted living. In Human Motion Analysis for Healthcare Applications.
Abstract: Advances in technology that capture human motion have been quite remarkable during the last five years. New sensors have been developed, such as the Microsoft Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro live, PrimeSense Carmine and Leap Motion. Their main advantages are their non-intrusive nature, low cost and widely available support for developers offered by large corporations or Open Communities. Although they were originally developed for computer games, they have inspired numerous healthcare related ideas and projects in areas such as Medical Disorder Diagnosis, Assisted Living, Rehabilitation and Surgery.
In Assisted Living, human motion analysis allows continuous monitoring of elderly and vulnerable people and their activities to potentially detect life-threatening events such as falls. Human motion analysis in rehabilitation provides the opportunity for motivating patients through gamification, evaluating prescribed programmes of exercises and assessing patients’ progress. In operating theatres, surgeons may use a gesture-based interface to access medical information or control a tele-surgery system. Human motion analysis may also be used to diagnose a range of mental and physical diseases and conditions.
This event will discuss recent advances in human motion sensing and provide an application to healthcare for networking and exploring potential synergies and collaborations.
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, O. Pujol, Petia Radeva, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2009). Blurred Shape Model for Binary and Grey-level Symbol Recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(15), 1424–1433.
Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.
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Hugo Jair Escalante, Victor Ponce, Jun Wan, Michael A. Riegler, Baiyu Chen, Albert Clapes, et al. (2016). ChaLearn Joint Contest on Multimedia Challenges Beyond Visual Analysis: An Overview. In 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the Joint Contest on Multimedia Challenges Beyond Visual Analysis. We organized an academic competition that focused on four problems that require effective processing of multimodal information in order to be solved. Two tracks were devoted to gesture spotting and recognition from RGB-D video, two fundamental problems for human computer interaction. Another track was devoted to a second round of the first impressions challenge of which the goal was to develop methods to recognize personality traits from
short video clips. For this second round we adopted a novel collaborative-competitive (i.e., coopetition) setting. The fourth track was dedicated to the problem of video recommendation for improving user experience. The challenge was open for about 45 days, and received outstanding participation: almost
200 participants registered to the contest, and 20 teams sent predictions in the final stage. The main goals of the challenge were fulfilled: the state of the art was advanced considerably in the four tracks, with novel solutions to the proposed problems (mostly relying on deep learning). However, further research is still required. The data of the four tracks will be available to
allow researchers to keep making progress in the four tracks.
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Fatemeh Noroozi, Marina Marjanovic, Angelina Njegus, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2019). Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition in Video Clips. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 10(1), 60–75.
Abstract: This paper presents a multimodal emotion recognition system, which is based on the analysis of audio and visual cues. From the audio channel, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Filter Bank Energies and prosodic features are extracted. For the visual part, two strategies are considered. First, facial landmarks’ geometric relations, i.e. distances and angles, are computed. Second, we summarize each emotional video into a reduced set of key-frames, which are taught to visually discriminate between the emotions. In order to do so, a convolutional neural network is applied to key-frames summarizing videos. Finally, confidence outputs of all the classifiers from all the modalities are used to define a new feature space to be learned for final emotion label prediction, in a late fusion/stacking fashion. The experiments conducted on the SAVEE, eNTERFACE’05, and RML databases show significant performance improvements by our proposed system in comparison to current alternatives, defining the current state-of-the-art in all three databases.
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Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Xavier Baro, & Sergio Escalera. (2017). Exploiting feature representations through similarity learning and ranking aggregation for person re-identification. In 12th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Abstract: Person re-identification has received special attentionby the human analysis community in the last few years.To address the challenges in this field, many researchers haveproposed different strategies, which basically exploit eithercross-view invariant features or cross-view robust metrics. Inthis work we propose to combine different feature representationsthrough ranking aggregation. Spatial information, whichpotentially benefits the person matching, is represented usinga 2D body model, from which color and texture informationare extracted and combined. We also consider contextualinformation (background and foreground data), automaticallyextracted via Deep Decompositional Network, and the usage ofConvolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. To describe thematching between images we use the polynomial feature map,also taking into account local and global information. Finally,the Stuart ranking aggregation method is employed to combinecomplementary ranking lists obtained from different featurerepresentations. Experimental results demonstrated that weimprove the state-of-the-art on VIPeR and PRID450s datasets,achieving 58.77% and 71.56% on top-1 rank recognitionrate, respectively, as well as obtaining competitive results onCUHK01 dataset.
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Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Hugo Jair Escalante, & Isabelle Guyon. (2017). ChaLearn Looking at People: A Review of Events and Resources. In 30th International Joint Conference on Neural Networks.
Abstract: This paper reviews the historic of ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) events. We started in 2011 (with the release of the first Kinect device) to run challenges related to human action/activity and gesture recognition. Since then we have regularly organized events in a series of competitions covering all aspects of visual analysis of humans. So far we have organized more than 10 international challenges and events in this field. This paper reviews associated events, and introduces the ChaLearn LAP platform where public resources (including code, data and preprints of papers) related to the organized events are available. We also provide a discussion on perspectives of ChaLearn LAP activities.
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Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Xavier Baro, & Sergio Escalera. (2018). Exploiting feature representations through similarity learning, post-ranking and ranking aggregation for person re-identification. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 79, 76–85.
Abstract: Person re-identification has received special attention by the human analysis community in the last few years. To address the challenges in this field, many researchers have proposed different strategies, which basically exploit either cross-view invariant features or cross-view robust metrics. In this work, we propose to exploit a post-ranking approach and combine different feature representations through ranking aggregation. Spatial information, which potentially benefits the person matching, is represented using a 2D body model, from which color and texture information are extracted and combined. We also consider background/foreground information, automatically extracted via Deep Decompositional Network, and the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. To describe the matching between images we use the polynomial feature map, also taking into account local and global information. The Discriminant Context Information Analysis based post-ranking approach is used to improve initial ranking lists. Finally, the Stuart ranking aggregation method is employed to combine complementary ranking lists obtained from different feature representations. Experimental results demonstrated that we improve the state-of-the-art on VIPeR and PRID450s datasets, achieving 67.21% and 75.64% on top-1 rank recognition rate, respectively, as well as obtaining competitive results on CUHK01 dataset.
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Mohammad N. S. Jahromi, Morten Bojesen Bonderup, Maryam Asadi-Aghbolaghi, Egils Avots, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera, et al. (2018). Automatic Access Control Based on Face and Hand Biometrics in a Non-cooperative Context. In IEEE Winter Applications of Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 28–36).
Abstract: Automatic access control systems (ACS) based on the human biometrics or physical tokens are widely employed in public and private areas. Yet these systems, in their conventional forms, are restricted to active interaction from the users. In scenarios where users are not cooperating with the system, these systems are challenged. Failure in cooperation with the biometric systems might be intentional or because the users are incapable of handling the interaction procedure with the biometric system or simply forget to cooperate with it, due to for example, illness like dementia. This work introduces a challenging bimodal database, including face and hand information of the users when they approach a door to open it by its handle in a noncooperative context. We have defined two (an easy and a challenging) protocols on how to use the database. We have reported results on many baseline methods, including deep learning techniques as well as conventional methods on the database. The obtained results show the merit of the proposed database and the challenging nature of access control with non-cooperative users.
Keywords: IEEE Winter Applications of Computer Vision Workshops
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Jelena Gorbova, Egils Avots, Iiris Lusi, Mark Fishel, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2018). Integrating Vision and Language for First Impression Personality Analysis. MULTIMEDIA - IEEE Multimedia, 25(2), 24–33.
Abstract: The authors present a novel methodology for analyzing integrated audiovisual signals and language to assess a persons personality. An evaluation of their proposed multimodal method using a job candidate screening system that predicted five personality traits from a short video demonstrates the methods effectiveness.
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Rain Eric Haamer, Eka Rusadze, Iiris Lusi, Tauseef Ahmed, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2018). Review on Emotion Recognition Databases. In Human-Robot Interaction: Theory and Application.
Abstract: Over the past few decades human-computer interaction has become more important in our daily lives and research has developed in many directions: memory research, depression detection, and behavioural deficiency detection, lie detection, (hidden) emotion recognition etc. Because of that, the number of generic emotion and face databases or those tailored to specific needs have grown immensely large. Thus, a comprehensive yet compact guide is needed to help researchers find the most suitable database and understand what types of databases already exist. In this paper, different elicitation methods are discussed and the databases are primarily organized into neat and informative tables based on the format.
Keywords: emotion; computer vision; databases
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Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu, Marc Perez, Hugo Jair Escalante, Xavier Baro, Isabelle Guyon, et al. (2017). Visualizing Apparent Personality Analysis with Deep Residual Networks. In Chalearn Workshop on Action, Gesture, and Emotion Recognition: Large Scale Multimodal Gesture Recognition and Real versus Fake expressed emotions at ICCV (pp. 3101–3109).
Abstract: Automatic prediction of personality traits is a subjective task that has recently received much attention. Specifically, automatic apparent personality trait prediction from multimodal data has emerged as a hot topic within the filed of computer vision and, more particularly, the so called “looking
at people” sub-field. Considering “apparent” personality traits as opposed to real ones considerably reduces the subjectivity of the task. The real world applications are encountered in a wide range of domains, including entertainment, health, human computer interaction, recruitment and security. Predictive models of personality traits are useful for individuals in many scenarios (e.g., preparing for job interviews, preparing for public speaking). However, these predictions in and of themselves might be deemed to be untrustworthy without human understandable supportive evidence. Through a series of experiments on a recently released benchmark dataset for automatic apparent personality trait prediction, this paper characterizes the audio and
visual information that is used by a state-of-the-art model while making its predictions, so as to provide such supportive evidence by explaining predictions made. Additionally, the paper describes a new web application, which gives feedback on apparent personality traits of its users by combining
model predictions with their explanations.
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Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera, Alex Carruesco Llorens, Carlos Andujar, Xavier Baro, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2018). Top-down model fitting for hand pose recovery in sequences of depth images. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 79, 63–75.
Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches on hand pose estimation from depth images have reported promising results under quite controlled considerations. In this paper we propose a two-step pipeline for recovering the hand pose from a sequence of depth images. The pipeline has been designed to deal with images taken from any viewpoint and exhibiting a high degree of finger occlusion. In a first step we initialize the hand pose using a part-based model, fitting a set of hand components in the depth images. In a second step we consider temporal data and estimate the parameters of a trained bilinear model consisting of shape and trajectory bases. We evaluate our approach on a new created synthetic hand dataset along with NYU and MSRA real datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the most recent pose recovering approaches, including those based on CNNs.
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S.Grau, Ana Puig, Sergio Escalera, & Maria Salamo. (2013). Intelligent Interactive Volume Classification. In Pacific Graphics (Vol. 32, pp. 23–28).
Abstract: This paper defines an intelligent and interactive framework to classify multiple regions of interest from the original data on demand, without requiring any preprocessing or previous segmentation. The proposed intelligent and interactive approach is divided in three stages: visualize, training and testing. First, users visualize and label some samples directly on slices of the volume. Training and testing are based on a framework of Error Correcting Output Codes and Adaboost classifiers that learn to classify each region the user has painted. Later, at the testing stage, each classifier is directly applied on the rest of samples and combined to perform multi-class labeling, being used in the final rendering. We also parallelized the training stage using a GPU-based implementation for
obtaining a rapid interaction and classification.
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S.Grau, Anna Puig, Sergio Escalera, Maria Salamo, & Oscar Amoros. (2013). Efficient complementary viewpoint selection in volume rendering. In 21st WSCG Conference on Computer Graphics,.
Abstract: A major goal of visualization is to appropriately express knowledge of scientific data. Generally, gathering visual information contained in the volume data often requires a lot of expertise from the final user to setup the parameters of the visualization. One way of alleviating this problem is to provide the position of inner structures with different viewpoint locations to enhance the perception and construction of the mental image. To this end, traditional illustrations use two or three different views of the regions of interest. Similarly, with the aim of assisting the users to easily place a good viewpoint location, this paper proposes an automatic and interactive method that locates different complementary viewpoints from a reference camera in volume datasets. Specifically, the proposed method combines the quantity of information each camera provides for each structure and the shape similarity of the projections of the remaining viewpoints based on Dynamic Time Warping. The selected complementary viewpoints allow a better understanding of the focused structure in several applications. Thus, the user interactively receives feedback based on several viewpoints that helps him to understand the visual information. A live-user evaluation on different data sets show a good convergence to useful complementary viewpoints.
Keywords: Dual camera; Visualization; Interactive Interfaces; Dynamic Time Warping.
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