toggle visibility Search & Display Options

Select All    Deselect All
 |   | 
Details
   print
  Records Links
Author Javier Marin edit  openurl
  Title Pedestrian Detection Based on Local Experts Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract During the last decade vision-based human detection systems have started to play a key rolein multiple applications linked to driver assistance, surveillance, robot sensing and home automation.
Detecting humans is by far one of the most challenging tasks in Computer Vision.
This is mainly due to the high degree of variability in the human appearanceassociated to
the clothing, pose, shape and size. Besides, other factors such as cluttered scenarios, partial occlusions, or environmental conditions can make the detection task even harder.
Most promising methods of the state-of-the-art rely on discriminative learning paradigms which are fed with positive and negative examples. The training data is one of the most
relevant elements in order to build a robust detector as it has to cope the large variability of the target. In order to create this dataset human supervision is required. The drawback at this point is the arduous effort of annotating as well as looking for such claimed variability.
In this PhD thesis we address two recurrent problems in the literature. In the first stage,we aim to reduce the consuming task of annotating, namely, by using computer graphics.
More concretely, we develop a virtual urban scenario for later generating a pedestrian dataset.
Then, we train a detector using this dataset, and finally we assess if this detector can be successfully applied in a real scenario.
In the second stage, we focus on increasing the robustness of our pedestrian detectors
under partial occlusions. In particular, we present a novel occlusion handling approach to increase the performance of block-based holistic methods under partial occlusions. For this purpose, we make use of local experts via a RandomSubspaceMethod (RSM) to handle these cases. If the method infers a possible partial occlusion, then the RSM, based on performance statistics obtained from partially occluded data, is applied. The last objective of this thesis
is to propose a robust pedestrian detector based on an ensemble of local experts. To achieve this goal, we use the random forest paradigm, where the trees act as ensembles an their nodesare the local experts. In particular, each expert focus on performing a robust classification ofa pedestrian body patch. This approach offers computational efficiency and far less design complexity when compared to other state-of-the-artmethods, while reaching better accuracy
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Jaume Amores  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mar2013 Serial 2280  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author David Vazquez edit   pdf
isbn  openurl
  Title Domain Adaptation of Virtual and Real Worlds for Pedestrian Detection Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 1 Issue 1 Pages 1-105  
  Keywords Pedestrian Detection; Domain Adaptation  
  Abstract Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications, e.g. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Intelligent Video Surveillance and Multimedia systems. Most promising pedestrian detectors rely on appearance-based classifiers trained with annotated data. However, the required annotation step represents an intensive and subjective task for humans, what makes worth to minimize their intervention in this process by using computational tools like realistic virtual worlds. The reason to use these kind of tools relies in the fact that they allow the automatic generation of precise and rich annotations of visual information. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of data comes with the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt with virtual-world data work successfully for pedestrian detection in real-world scenarios?. To answer this question, we conduct different experiments that suggest a positive answer. However, the pedestrian classifiers trained with virtual-world data can suffer the so called dataset shift problem as real-world based classifiers does. Accordingly, we have designed different domain adaptation techniques to face this problem, all of them integrated in a same framework (V-AYLA). We have explored different methods to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifiers by collecting a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combining them with many samples of the source domain (virtual world). The extensive experiments we present show that pedestrian detectors developed within the V-AYLA framework do achieve domain adaptation. Ideally, we would like to adapt our system without any human intervention. Therefore, as a first proof of concept we also propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that avoids human intervention during the adaptation process. To the best of our knowledge, this Thesis work is the first demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector. Last but not least, we also assessed a different strategy to avoid the dataset shift that consists in collecting real-world samples and retrain with them in such a way that no bounding boxes of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. We show that the generated classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating pedestrian bounding boxes. The results presented on this Thesis not only end with a proposal for adapting a virtual-world pedestrian detector to the real world, but also it goes further by pointing out a new methodology that would allow the system to adapt to different situations, which we hope will provide the foundations for future research in this unexplored area.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Barcelona Editor Antonio Lopez;Daniel Ponsa  
  Language English Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-940530-1-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) adas Approved yes  
  Call Number ADAS @ adas @ Vaz2013 Serial 2276  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Angel Sappa; George A. Triantafyllid edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Computer Graphics and Imaging Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication Computer Graphics and Imaging Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract  
  Address Crete, Greece  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-0-88986-921-9 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Sap2012 Serial 2067  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Mohammad Rouhani edit  openurl
  Title Shape Representation and Registration using Implicit Functions Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Shape representation and registration are two important problems in computer vision and graphics. Representing the given cloud of points through an implicit function provides a higher level information describing the data. This representation can be more compact more robust to noise and outliers, hence it can be exploited in different computer vision application. In the first part of this thesis implicit shape representations, including both implicit B-spline and polynomial, are tackled. First, an approximation of a geometric distance is proposed to measure the closeness of the given cloud of points and the implicit surface. The analysis of the proposed distance shows an accurate estimation with smooth behavior. The distance by itself is used in a RANSAC based quadratic fitting method. Moreover, since the gradient information of the distance with respect to the surface parameters can be analytically computed, it is used in Levenberg-Marquadt algorithm to refine the surface parameters. In a different approach, an algebraic fitting method is used to represent an object through implicit B-splines. The outcome is a smooth flexible surface and can be represented in different levels from coarse to fine. This property has been exploited to solve the registration problem in the second part of the thesis. In the proposed registration technique the model set is replaced with an implicit representation provided in the first part; then, the point-to-point registration is converted to a point-to-model one in a higher level. This registration error can benefit from different distance estimations to speed up the registration process even without need of correspondence search. Finally, the non-rigid registration problem is tackled through a quadratic distance approximation that is based on the curvature information of the model set. This approximation is used in a free form deformation model to update its control lattice. Then it is shown how an accurate distance approximation can benefit non-rigid registration problems.  
  Address  
  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 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rou2012 Serial 2205  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jose Carlos Rubio edit  openurl
  Title Many-to-Many High Order Matching. Applications to Tracking and Object Segmentation Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Feature matching is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision, having multiple applications such as tracking, image classification and retrieval, shape recognition and stereo fusion. In numerous domains, it is useful to represent the local structure of the matching features to increase the matching accuracy or to make the correspondence invariant to certain transformations (affine, homography, etc. . . ). However, encoding this knowledge requires complicating the model by establishing high-order relationships between the model elements, and therefore increasing the complexity of the optimization problem.

The importance of many-to-many matching is sometimes dismissed in the literature. Most methods are restricted to perform one-to-one matching, and are usually validated on synthetic, or non-realistic datasets. In a real challenging environment, with scale, pose and illumination variations of the object of interest, as well as the presence of occlusions, clutter, and noisy observations, many-to-many matching is necessary to achieve satisfactory results. As a consequence, finding the most likely many-to-many correspondence often involves a challenging combinatorial optimization process.

In this work, we design and demonstrate matching algorithms that compute many-to-many correspondences, applied to several challenging problems. Our goal is to make use of high-order representations to improve the expressive power of the matching, at the same time that we make feasible the process of inference or optimization of such models. We effectively use graphical models as our preferred representation because they provide an elegant probabilistic framework to tackle structured prediction problems.

We introduce a matching-based tracking algorithm which performs matching between frames of a video sequence in order to solve the difficult problem of headlight tracking at night-time. We also generalise this algorithm to solve the problem of data association applied to various tracking scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of such approach in real video sequences and we show that our tracking algorithm can be used to improve the accuracy of a headlight classification system.

In the second part of this work, we move from single (point) matching to dense (region) matching and we introduce a new hierarchical image representation. We make use of such model to develop a high-order many-to-many matching between pairs of images. We show that the use of high-order models in comparison to simpler models improves not only the accuracy of the results, but also the convergence speed of the inference algorithm.

Finally, we keep exploiting the idea of region matching to design a fully unsupervised image co-segmentation algorithm that is able to perform competitively with state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our method also overcomes the typical drawbacks of some of the past works, such as avoiding the necessity of variate appearances on the image backgrounds. The region matching in this case is applied to effectively exploit inter-image information. We also extend this work to perform co-segmentation of videos, being the first time that such problem is addressed, as a way to perform video object segmentation
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joan Serrat  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rub2012 Serial 2206  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Fernando Barrera edit  openurl
  Title Multimodal Stereo from Thermal Infrared and Visible Spectrum Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Recent advances in thermal infrared imaging (LWIR) has allowed its use in applications beyond of the military domain. Nowadays, this new family of sensors is included in different technical and scientific applications. They offer features that facilitate tasks, such as detection of pedestrians, hot spots, differences in temperature, among others, which can significantly improve the performance of a system where the persons are expected to play the principal role. For instance, video surveillance applications, monitoring, and pedestrian detection.
During this dissertation the next question is stated: Could a couple of sensors measuring different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as the visible and thermal infrared, be used to extract depth information? Although it is a complex question, we shows that a system of these characteristics is possible as well as their advantages, drawbacks, and potential opportunities.
The matching and fusion of data coming from different sensors, as the emissions registered at visible and infrared bands, represents a special challenge, because it has been showed that theses signals are weak correlated. Therefore, many traditional techniques of image processing and computer vision are not helpful, requiring adjustments for their correct performance in every modality.
In this research an experimental study that compares different cost functions and matching approaches is performed, in order to build a multimodal stereovision system. Furthermore, the common problems in infrared/visible stereo, specially in the outdoor scenes are identified. Our framework summarizes the architecture of a generic stereo algorithm, at different levels: computational, functional, and structural, which can be extended toward high-level fusion (semantic) and high-order (prior).The proposed framework is intended to explore novel multimodal stereo matching approaches, going from sparse to dense representations (both disparity and depth maps). Moreover, context information is added in form of priors and assumptions. Finally, this dissertation shows a promissory way toward the integration of multiple sensors for recovering three-dimensional information.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Felipe Lumbreras;Angel Sappa  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Bar2012 Serial 2209  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Diego Alejandro Cheda edit  openurl
  Title Monocular Depth Cues in Computer Vision Applications Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.

In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.

In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Daniel Ponsa;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 (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Che2012 Serial 2210  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Katerine Diaz; Francesc J. Ferri edit  url
isbn  openurl
  Title Extensiones del método de vectores comunes discriminantes Aplicadas a la clasificación de imágenes Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication Extensiones del método de vectores comunes discriminantes Aplicadas a la clasificación de imágenes Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Los métodos basados en subespacios son una herramienta muy utilizada en aplicaciones de visión por computador. Aquí se presentan y validan algunos algoritmos que hemos propuesto en este campo de investigación. El primer algoritmo está relacionado con una extensión del método de vectores comunes discriminantes con kernel, que reinterpreta el espacio nulo de la matriz de dispersión intra-clase del conjunto de entrenamiento para obtener las características discriminantes. Dentro de los métodos basados en subespacios existen diferentes tipos de entrenamiento. Uno de los más populares, pero no por ello uno de los más eficientes, es el aprendizaje por lotes. En este tipo de aprendizaje, todas las muestras del conjunto de entrenamiento tienen que estar disponibles desde el inicio. De este modo, cuando nuevas muestras se ponen a disposición del algoritmo, el sistema tiene que ser reentrenado de nuevo desde cero. Una alternativa a este tipo de entrenamiento es el aprendizaje incremental. Aquí­ se proponen diferentes algoritmos incrementales del método de vectores comunes discriminantes.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-3-639-55339-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ DiF2013 Serial 2440  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Naveen Onkarappa edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Optical Flow in Driver Assistance Systems Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Motion perception is one of the most important attributes of the human brain. Visual motion perception consists in inferring speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual inputs. Analogously, computer vision is assisted by motion cues in the scene. Motion detection in computer vision is useful in solving problems such as segmentation, depth from motion, structure from motion, compression, navigation and many others. These problems are common in several applications, for instance, video surveillance, robot navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the most widely used techniques for motion detection is the optical flow estimation. The work in this thesis attempts to make optical flow suitable for the requirements and conditions of driving scenarios. In this context, a novel space-variant representation called reverse log-polar representation is proposed that is shown to be better than the traditional log-polar space-variant representation for ADAS. The space-variant representations reduce the amount of data to be processed. Another major contribution in this research is related to the analysis of the influence of specific characteristics from driving scenarios on the optical flow accuracy. Characteristics such as vehicle speed and
road texture are considered in the aforementioned analysis. From this study, it is inferred that the regularization weight has to be adapted according to the required error measure and for different speeds and road textures. It is also shown that polar represented optical flow suits driving scenarios where predominant motion is translation. Due to the requirements of such a study and by the lack of needed datasets a new synthetic dataset is presented; it contains: i) sequences of different speeds and road textures in an urban scenario; ii) sequences with complex motion of an on-board camera; and iii) sequences with additional moving vehicles in the scene. The ground-truth optical flow is generated by the ray-tracing technique. Further, few applications of optical flow in ADAS are shown. Firstly, a robust RANSAC based technique to estimate horizon line is proposed. Then, an egomotion estimation is presented to compare the proposed space-variant representation with the classical one. As a final contribution, a modification in the regularization term is proposed that notably improves the results
in the ADAS applications. This adaptation is evaluated using a state of the art optical flow technique. The experiments on a public dataset (KITTI) validate the advantages of using the proposed modification.
 
  Address Bellaterra  
  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 978-84-940902-1-9 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Nav2013 Serial 2447  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author German Ros edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Visual Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding Where and What Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Making Ground Autonomous Vehicles (GAVs) a reality as a service for the society is one of the major scientific and technological challenges of this century. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles include reducing accidents, improving traffic congestion and better usage of road infrastructures, among others. These vehicles must operate in our cities, towns and highways, dealing with many different types of situations while respecting traffic rules and protecting human lives. GAVs are expected to deal with all types of scenarios and situations, coping with an uncertain and chaotic world.
Therefore, in order to fulfill these demanding requirements GAVs need to be endowed with the capability of understanding their surrounding at many different levels, by means of affordable sensors and artificial intelligence. This capacity to understand the surroundings and the current situation that the vehicle is involved in is called scene understanding. In this work we investigate novel techniques to bring scene understanding to autonomous vehicles by combining the use of cameras as the main source of information—due to their versatility and affordability—and algorithms based on computer vision and machine learning. We investigate different degrees of understanding of the scene, starting from basic geometric knowledge about where is the vehicle within the scene. A robust and efficient estimation of the vehicle location and pose with respect to a map is one of the most fundamental steps towards autonomous driving. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness and computational efficiency, proposing key insights to improve current solutions. Then we advance to higher levels of abstraction to discover what is in the scene, by recognizing and parsing all the elements present on a driving scene, such as roads, sidewalks, pedestrians, etc. We investigate this problem known as semantic segmentation, proposing new approaches to improve recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. We cover these points by focusing on key aspects such as: (i) how to leverage computation moving semantics to an offline process, (ii) how to train compact architectures based on deconvolutional networks to achieve their maximum potential, (iii) how to use virtual worlds in combination with domain adaptation to produce accurate models in a cost-effective fashion, and (iv) how to use transfer learning techniques to prepare models to new situations. We finally extend the previous level of knowledge enabling systems to reasoning about what has change in a scene with respect to a previous visit, which in return allows for efficient and cost-effective map updating.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa;Julio Guerrero;Antonio Lopez  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-1-8 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Ros2016 Serial 2860  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Gemma Rotger edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Lifelike Humans: Detailed Reconstruction of Expressive Human Faces Type Book Whole
  Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Developing human-like digital characters is a challenging task since humans are used to recognizing our fellows, and find the computed generated characters inadequately humanized. To fulfill the standards of the videogame and digital film productions it is necessary to model and animate these characters the most closely to human beings. However, it is an arduous and expensive task, since many artists and specialists are required to work on a single character. Therefore, to fulfill these requirements we found an interesting option to study the automatic creation of detailed characters through inexpensive setups. In this work, we develop novel techniques to bring detailed characters by combining different aspects that stand out when developing realistic characters, skin detail, facial hairs, expressions, and microexpressions. We examine each of the mentioned areas with the aim of automatically recover each of the parts without user interaction nor training data. We study the problems for their robustness but also for the simplicity of the setup, preferring single-image with uncontrolled illumination and methods that can be easily computed with the commodity of a standard laptop. A detailed face with wrinkles and skin details is vital to develop a realistic character. In this work, we introduce our method to automatically describe facial wrinkles on the image and transfer to the recovered base face. Then we advance to facial hair recovery by resolving a fitting problem with a novel parametrization model. As of last, we develop a mapping function that allows transfer expressions and microexpressions between different meshes, which provides realistic animations to our detailed mesh. We cover all the mentioned points with the focus on key aspects as (i) how to describe skin wrinkles in a simple and straightforward manner, (ii) how to recover 3D from 2D detections, (iii) how to recover and model facial hair from 2D to 3D, (iv) how to transfer expressions between models holding both skin detail and facial hair, (v) how to perform all the described actions without training data nor user interaction. In this work, we present our proposals to solve these aspects with an efficient and simple setup. We validate our work with several datasets both synthetic and real data, prooving remarkable results even in challenging cases as occlusions as glasses, thick beards, and indeed working with different face topologies like single-eyed cyclops.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Felipe Lumbreras;Antonio Agudo  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-3-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rot2021 Serial 3513  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Akhil Gurram edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Monocular Depth Estimation for Autonomous Driving Type Book Whole
  Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract 3D geometric information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are equipped with calibrated sensor suites. As part of these suites, we can find LiDARs, which are expensive active sensors in charge of providing the 3D geometric information. Depending on the operational conditions for the AV, calibrated stereo rigs may be also sufficient for obtaining 3D geometric information, being these rigs less expensive and easier to install than LiDARs. However, ensuring a proper maintenance and calibration of these types of sensors is not trivial. Accordingly, there is an increasing interest on performing monocular depth estimation (MDE) to obtain 3D geometric information on-board. MDE is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Moreover, a set of single cameras with MDE capabilities would still be a cheap solution for on-board perception, relatively easy to integrate and maintain in an AV.
Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Accordingly, the overall goal of this PhD is to study methods for improving CNN-based MDE accuracy under different training settings. More specifically, this PhD addresses different research questions that are described below. When we started to work in this PhD, state-of-theart methods for MDE were already based on CNNs. In fact, a promising line of work consisted in using image-based semantic supervision (i.e., pixel-level class labels) while training CNNs for MDE using LiDAR-based supervision (i.e., depth). It was common practice to assume that the same raw training data are complemented by both types of supervision, i.e., with depth and semantic labels. However, in practice, it was more common to find heterogeneous datasets with either only depth supervision or only semantic supervision. Therefore, our first work was to research if we could train CNNs for MDE by leveraging depth and semantic information from heterogeneous datasets. We show that this is indeed possible, and we surpassed the state-of-the-art results on MDE at the time we did this research. To achieve our results, we proposed a particular CNN architecture and a new training protocol.
After this research, it was clear that the upper-bound setting to train CNN-based MDE models consists in using LiDAR data as supervision. However, it would be cheaper and more scalable if we would be able to train such models from monocular sequences. Obviously, this is far more challenging, but worth to research. Training MDE models using monocular sequences is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. To alleviate these problems, we perform MDE by virtual-world supervision and real-world SfM self-supervision. We call our proposalMonoDEVSNet. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging
virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision, as well as addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. MonoDEVSNet outperformed previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences. We have publicly released MonoDEVSNet at <https://github.com/HMRC-AEL/MonoDEVSNet>.
Finally, since MDE is performed to produce 3D information for being used in downstream tasks related to on-board perception. We also address the question of whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator for future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. By using 3D object detection on point clouds as proxy of on-board perception, we conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods which reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect.
 
  Address March, 2022  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Onay Urfalioglu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-0-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gur2022 Serial 3712  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Idoia Ruiz edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Deep Metric Learning for re-identification, tracking and hierarchical novelty detection Type Book Whole
  Year 2022 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Metric learning refers to the problem in machine learning of learning a distance or similarity measurement to compare data. In particular, deep metric learning involves learning a representation, also referred to as embedding, such that in the embedding space data samples can be compared based on the distance, directly providing a similarity measure. This step is necessary to perform several tasks in computer vision. It allows to perform the classification of images, regions or pixels, re-identification, out-of-distribution detection, object tracking in image sequences and any other task that requires computing a similarity score for their solution. This thesis addresses three specific problems that share this common requirement. The first one is person re-identification. Essentially, it is an image retrieval task that aims at finding instances of the same person according to a similarity measure. We first compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency, classical metric learning to basic deep learning based methods for this problem. In this context, we also study network distillation as a strategy to optimize the trade-off between accuracy and speed at inference time. The second problem we contribute to is novelty detection in image classification. It consists in detecting samples of novel classes, i.e. never seen during training. However, standard novelty detection does not provide any information about the novel samples besides they are unknown. Aiming at more informative outputs, we take advantage from the hierarchical taxonomies that are intrinsic to the classes. We propose a metric learning based approach that leverages the hierarchical relationships among classes during training, being able to predict the parent class for a novel sample in such hierarchical taxonomy. Our third contribution is in multi-object tracking and segmentation. This joint task comprises classification, detection, instance segmentation and tracking. Tracking can be formulated as a retrieval problem to be addressed with metric learning approaches. We tackle the existing difficulty in academic research that is the lack of annotated benchmarks for this task. To this matter, we introduce the problem of weakly supervised multi-object tracking and segmentation, facing the challenge of not having available ground truth for instance segmentation. We propose a synergistic training strategy that benefits from the knowledge of the supervised tasks that are being learnt simultaneously.  
  Address July, 2022  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Joan Serrat  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-124793-4-8 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rui2022 Serial 3717  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jose Luis Gomez edit  openurl
  Title Synth-to-real semi-supervised learning for visual tasks Type Book Whole
  Year 2023 Publication Going beyond Classification Problems for the Continual Learning of Deep Neural Networks Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract The curse of data labeling is a costly bottleneck in supervised deep learning, where large amounts of labeled data are needed to train intelligent systems. In onboard perception for autonomous driving, this cost corresponds to the labeling of raw data from sensors such as cameras, LiDARs, RADARs, etc. Therefore, synthetic data with automatically generated ground truth (labels) has aroused as a reliable alternative for training onboard perception models.
However, synthetic data commonly suffers from synth-to-real domain shift, i.e., models trained on the synthetic domain do not show their achievable accuracy when performing in the real world. This shift needs to be addressed by techniques falling in the realm of domain adaptation (DA).
The semi-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm can be followed to address DA. In this case, a model is trained using source data with labels (here synthetic) and leverages minimal knowledge from target data (here the real world) to generate pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels help the training process to reduce the gap between the source and the target domains. In general, we can assume accessing both, pseudo-labels and a few amounts of human-provided labels for the target-domain data. However, the most interesting and challenging setting consists in assuming that we do not have human-provided labels at all. This setting is known as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). This PhD focuses on applying SSL to the UDA setting, for onboard visual tasks related to autonomous driving. We start by addressing the synth-to-real UDA problem on onboard vision-based object detection (pedestrians and cars), a critical task for autonomous driving and driving assistance. In particular, we propose to apply an SSL technique known as co-training, which we adapt to work with deep models that process a multi-modal input. The multi-modality consists of the visual appearance of the images (RGB) and their monocular depth estimation. The synthetic data we use as the source domain contains both, object bounding boxes and depth information. This prior knowledge is the
starting point for the co-training technique, which iteratively labels unlabeled real-world data and uses such pseudolabels (here bounding boxes with an assigned object class) to progressively improve the labeling results. Along this
process, two models collaborate to automatically label the images, in a way that one model compensates for the errors of the other, so avoiding error drift. While this automatic labeling process is done offline, the resulting pseudolabels can be used to train object detection models that must perform in real-time onboard a vehicle. We show that multi-modal co-training improves the labeling results compared to single-modal co-training, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Given the success of co-training in the context of object detection, we have also adapted this technique to a more crucial and challenging visual task, namely, onboard semantic segmentation. In fact, providing labels for a single image
can take from 30 to 90 minutes for a human labeler, depending on the content of the image. Thus, developing automatic labeling techniques for this visual task is of great interest to the automotive industry. In particular, the new co-training framework addresses synth-to-real UDA by an initial stage of self-training. Intermediate models arising from this stage are used to start the co-training procedure, for which we have elaborated an accurate collaboration policy between the two models performing the automatic labeling. Moreover, our co-training seamlessly leverages datasets from different synthetic domains. In addition, the co-training procedure is agnostic to the loss function used to train the semantic segmentation models which perform the automatic labeling. We achieve state-of-the-art results on publicly available benchmark datasets, again, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Finally, on the ground of our previous experience, we have designed and implemented a new SSL technique for UDA in the context of visual semantic segmentation. In this case, we mimic the labeling methodology followed by human labelers. In particular, rather than labeling full images at a time, categories of semantic classes are defined and only those are labeled in a labeling pass. In fact, different human labelers can become specialists in labeling different categories. Afterward, these per-category-labeled layers are combined to provide fully labeled images. Our technique is inspired by this methodology since we perform synth-to-real UDA per category, using the self-training stage previously developed as part of our co-training framework. The pseudo-labels obtained for each category are finally
fused to obtain fully automatically labeled images. In this context, we have also contributed to the development of a new photo-realistic synthetic dataset based on path-tracing rendering. Our new SSL technique seamlessly leverages publicly available synthetic datasets as well as this new one to obtain state-of-the-art results on synth-to-real UDA for semantic segmentation. We show that the new dataset allows us to reach better labeling accuracy than previously existing datasets, at the same time that it complements well them when combined. Moreover, we also show that the new human-inspired SSL technique outperforms co-training.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher IMPRIMA 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 (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gom2023 Serial 3961  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Yi Xiao edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Advancing Vision-based End-to-End Autonomous Driving Type Book Whole
  Year 2023 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI) processes the traffic environment to drive the vehicle to a desired destination. Currently, there are different paradigms that address the development of AI-enabled drivers. On the one hand, we find modular pipelines, which divide the driving task into sub-tasks such as perception, maneuver planning, and control. On the other hand, we find end-to-end driving approaches that attempt to learn the direct mapping of raw data from input sensors to vehicle control signals. The latter are relatively less studied but are gaining popularity as they are less demanding in terms of data labeling. Therefore, in this thesis, our goal is to investigate end-to-end autonomous driving.
We propose to evaluate three approaches to tackle the challenge of end-to-end
autonomous driving. First, we focus on the input, considering adding depth information as complementary to RGB data, in order to mimic the human being’s
ability to estimate the distance to obstacles. Notice that, in the real world, these depth maps can be obtained either from a LiDAR sensor, or a trained monocular
depth estimation module, where human labeling is not needed. Then, based on
the intuition that the latent space of end-to-end driving models encodes relevant
information for driving, we use it as prior knowledge for training an affordancebased driving model. In this case, the trained affordance-based model can achieve good performance while requiring less human-labeled data, and it can provide interpretability regarding driving actions. Finally, we present a new pure vision-based end-to-end driving model termed CIL++, which is trained by imitation learning.
CIL++ leverages modern best practices, such as a large horizontal field of view and
a self-attention mechanism, which are contributing to the agent’s understanding of
the driving scene and bringing a better imitation of human drivers. Using training
data without any human labeling, our model yields almost expert performance in
the CARLA NoCrash benchmark and could rival SOTA models that require large amounts of human-labeled data.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher IMPRIMA 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 978-84-126409-4-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) ADAS Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Xia2023 Serial 3964  
Permanent link to this record
Select All    Deselect All
 |   | 
Details
   print

Save Citations:
Export Records: