Abstract: Computer vision technologies are at the core of different advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and will play a key role in oncoming autonomous vehicles too. One of the main challenges for such technologies is to perceive the driving environment, i.e. to detect and track relevant driving information in a reliable manner (e.g. pedestrians in the vehicle route, free space to drive through). Nowadays it is clear that machine learning techniques are essential for developing such a visual perception for driving. In particular, the standard working pipeline consists of collecting data (i.e. on-board images), manually annotating the data (e.g. drawing bounding boxes around pedestrians), learning a discriminative data representation taking advantage of such annotations (e.g. a deformable part-based model, a deep convolutional neural network), and then assessing the reliability of such representation with the acquired data. In the last two decades most of the research efforts focused on representation learning (first, designing descriptors and learning classifiers; later doing it end-to-end). Hence, collecting data and, especially, annotating it, is essential for learning good representations. While this has been the case from the very beginning, only after the disruptive appearance of deep convolutional neural networks that it became a serious issue due to their data hungry nature. In this context, the problem is that manual data annotation is a tiresome work prone to errors. Accordingly, in the late 00’s we initiated a research line consisting of training visual models using photo-realistic computer graphics, especially focusing on assisted and autonomous driving. In this paper, we summarize such a work and show how it has become a new tendency with increasing acceptance.

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.

Abstract: Simulation can enable several developments in the field of intelligent vehicles. This chapter is divided into three main subsections. The first one deals with driving simulators. The continuous improvement of hardware performance is a well-known fact that is allowing the development of more complex driving simulators. The immersion in the simulation scene is increased by high fidelity feedback to the driver. In the second subsection, traffic simulation is explained as well as how it can be used for intelligent transport systems. Finally, it is rather clear that sensor-based perception and action must be based on data-driven algorithms. Simulation could provide data to train and test algorithms that are afterwards implemented in vehicles. These tools are explained in the third subsection.

Abstract: With the massive explosion of machine learning in our day-to-day life, incremental and adaptive learning has become a major topic, crucial to keep up-to-date and improve classification models and their corresponding feature extraction processes. This paper presents a categorized overview of incremental feature extraction based on linear subspace methods which aim at incorporating new information to the already acquired knowledge without accessing previous data. Specifically, this paper focuses on those linear dimensionality reduction methods with orthogonal matrix constraints based on global loss function, due to the extensive use of their batch approaches versus other linear alternatives. Thus, we cover the approaches derived from Principal Components Analysis, Linear Discriminative Analysis and Discriminative Common Vector methods. For each basic method, its incremental approaches are differentiated according to the subspace model and matrix decomposition involved in the updating process. Besides this categorization, several updating strategies are distinguished according to the amount of data used to update and to the fact of considering a static or dynamic number of classes. Moreover, the specific role of the size/dimension ratio in each method is considered. Finally, computational complexity, experimental setup and the accuracy rates according to published results are compiled and analyzed, and an empirical evaluation is done to compare the best approach of each kind.

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.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is a highly relevant topic for both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this entry, we review the ideas behind pedestrian detection systems from the point of view of perception based on computer vision and machine learning.

Abstract: Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in preoperative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.

Abstract: Rainfall is a problem in automated traffic surveillance. Rain streaks occlude the road users and degrade the overall visibility which in turn decrease object detection performance. One way of alleviating this is by artificially removing the rain from the images. This requires knowledge of corresponding rainy and rain-free images. Such images are often produced by overlaying synthetic rain on top of rain-free images. However, this method fails to incorporate the fact that rain fall in the entire three-dimensional volume of the scene. To overcome this, we introduce training data from the SYNTHIA virtual world that models rain streaks in the entirety of a scene. We train a conditional Generative Adversarial Network for rain removal and apply it on traffic surveillance images from SYNTHIA and the AAU RainSnow datasets. To measure the applicability of the rain-removed images in a traffic surveillance context, we run the YOLOv2 object detection algorithm on the original and rain-removed frames. The results on SYNTHIA show an 8% increase in detection accuracy compared to the original rain image. Interestingly, we find that high PSNR or SSIM scores do not imply good object detection performance.