Joan Serrat, Javier Varona, Antonio Lopez, Xavier Roca, & Juan J. Villanueva. (2001). P3: a three-dimensional digitizer prototype..
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Daniel Ponsa, & Xavier Roca. (2002). A Novel Approach to Generate Multiple Shape Models..
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Daniel Ponsa, & Xavier Roca. (2002). Unsupervised Parameterisation of Gaussian Mixture Models.
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Daniel Ponsa, & Xavier Roca. (2003). Multiple Model Approach to Deformable Shape Tracking.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2009). Learning Photometric Invariance from Diversified Color Model Ensembles. In 22nd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (565–572).
Abstract: Color is a powerful visual cue for many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions affecting negatively the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, those reflection models might be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms may hold simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is taken on input composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines and weights these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, the fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the method. From the theoretical and experimental results, it is concluded that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning. Further, the method outperforms state-of- the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition.
Keywords: road detection
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Xavier Boix, Josep M. Gonfaus, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Marco Pedersoli, et al. (2009). Combining local and global bag-of-word representations for semantic segmentation. In Workshop on The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge.
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). 3D Scene Priors for Road Detection. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (57–64).
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important in different areas of computer vision such as autonomous driving, car collision warning and pedestrian crossing detection. However, current vision-based road detection methods are usually based on low-level features and they assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions. Therefore, in this paper, contextual 3D information is used in addition to low-level cues. Low-level photometric invariant cues are derived from the appearance of roads. Contextual cues used include horizon lines, vanishing points, 3D scene layout and 3D road stages. Moreover, temporal road cues are included. All these cues are sensitive to different imaging conditions and hence are considered as weak cues. Therefore, they are combined to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. To this end, the low-level, contextual and temporal cues are combined in a Bayesian framework to classify road sequences. Large scale experiments on road sequences show that the road detection method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios (tunnels, urban and highway). Further, using the combined cues outperforms all other individual cues. Finally, the proposed method provides highest road detection accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Geographic Information for vision-based Road Detection. In IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (621–626).
Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Learning photometric invariance for object detection. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 90(1), 45–61.
Abstract: Impact factor: 3.508 (the last available from JCR2009SCI). Position 4/103 in the category Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Quartile
Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.
Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is computed composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, our fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the proposed method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Further, the proposed method is extended to deal with temporal data by predicting the evolution of observations over time.
Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning, and outperforms state-of-the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition. Considering sequential data, the proposed method (extended to deal with future observations) outperforms the other methods
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, Ferran Diego, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Road Geometry Classification by Adaptative Shape Models. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 14(1), 459–468.
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important for different applications in transportation, such as autonomous driving, vehicle collision warning, and pedestrian crossing detection. Common approaches to road detection are based on low-level road appearance (e.g., color or texture) and neglect of the scene geometry and context. Hence, using only low-level features makes these algorithms highly depend on structured roads, road homogeneity, and lighting conditions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to classify road geometries for road detection through the analysis of scene composition and temporal coherence. Road geometry classification is proposed by building corresponding models from training images containing prototypical road geometries. We propose adaptive shape models where spatial pyramids are steered by the inherent spatial structure of road images. To reduce the influence of lighting variations, invariant features are used. Large-scale experiments show that the proposed road geometry classifier yields a high recognition rate of 73.57% ± 13.1, clearly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. Including road shape information improves road detection results over existing appearance-based methods. Finally, it is shown that invariant features and temporal information provide robustness against disturbing imaging conditions.
Keywords: road detection
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Yainuvis Socarras, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, David Geronimo, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Improving HOG with Image Segmentation: Application to Human Detection. In J. Blanc-Talon et al. (Ed.), 11th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (Vol. 7517, pp. 178–189). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we improve the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), a core descriptor of state-of-the-art object detection, by the use of higher-level information coming from image segmentation. The idea is to re-weight the descriptor while computing it without increasing its size. The benefits of the proposal are two-fold: (i) to improve the performance of the detector by enriching the descriptor information and (ii) take advantage of the information of image segmentation, which in fact is likely to be used in other stages of the detection system such as candidate generation or refinement.
We test our technique in the INRIA person dataset, which was originally developed to test HOG, embedding it in a human detection system. The well-known segmentation method, mean-shift (from smaller to larger super-pixels), and different methods to re-weight the original descriptor (constant, region-luminance, color or texture-dependent) has been evaluated. We achieve performance improvements of 4:47% in detection rate through the use of differences of color between contour pixel neighborhoods as re-weighting function.
Keywords: Segmentation; Pedestrian Detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, Y. LeCun, & Antonio Lopez. (2012). Road Scene Segmentation from a Single Image. In 12th European Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 7578, pp. 376–389). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Road scene segmentation is important in computer vision for different applications such as autonomous driving and pedestrian detection. Recovering the 3D structure of road scenes provides relevant contextual information to improve their understanding.
In this paper, we use a convolutional neural network based algorithm to learn features from noisy labels to recover the 3D scene layout of a road image. The novelty of the algorithm relies on generating training labels by applying an algorithm trained on a general image dataset to classify on–board images. Further, we propose a novel texture descriptor based on a learned color plane fusion to obtain maximal uniformity in road areas. Finally, acquired (off–line) and current (on–line) information are combined to detect road areas in single images.
From quantitative and qualitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, it is concluded that convolutional neural networks are suitable for learning 3D scene layout from noisy labels and provides a relative improvement of 7% compared to the baseline. Furthermore, combining color planes provides a statistical description of road areas that exhibits maximal uniformity and provides a relative improvement of 8% compared to the baseline. Finally, the improvement is even bigger when acquired and current information from a single image are combined
Keywords: road detection
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Y. LeCun, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2012). Semantic Road Segmentation via Multi-Scale Ensembles of Learned Features. In 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations (Vol. 7584, pp. 586–595). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.
Keywords: road detection
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Xu Hu. (2012). Real-Time Part Based Models for Object Detection (Vol. 171). Master's thesis, , .
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Evaluating Color Representation for Online Road Detection. In ICCV Workshop on Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: From Earth to Mars (pp. 594–595).
Abstract: Detecting traversable road areas ahead a moving vehicle is a key process for modern autonomous driving systems. Most existing algorithms use color to classify pixels as road or background. These algorithms reduce the effect of lighting variations and weather conditions by exploiting the discriminant/invariant properties of different color representations. However, up to date, no comparison between these representations have been conducted. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an evaluation of existing color representations for road detection. More specifically, we focus on color planes derived from RGB data and their most com-
mon combinations. The evaluation is done on a set of 7000 road images acquired
using an on-board camera in different real-driving situations.
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