Abstract: This paper presents an efficient technique for estimating the pose of an onboard stereo vision system relative to the environment’s dominant surface area, which is supposed to be the road surface. Unlike previous approaches, it can be used either for urban or highway scenarios since it is not based on a specific visual traffic feature extraction but on 3-D raw data points. The whole process is performed in the Euclidean space and consists of two stages. Initially, a compact 2-D representation of the original 3-D data points is computed. Then, a RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) based least-squares approach is used to fit a plane to the road. Fast RANSAC fitting is obtained by selecting points according to a probability function that takes into account the density of points at a given depth. Finally, stereo camera height and pitch angle are computed related to the fitted road plane. The proposed technique is intended to be used in driverassistance systems for applications such as vehicle or pedestrian detection. Experimental results on urban environments, which are the most challenging scenarios (i.e., flat/uphill/downhill driving, speed bumps, and car’s accelerations), are presented. These results are validated with manually annotated ground truth. Additionally, comparisons with previous works are presented to show the improvements in the central processing unit processing time, as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results.

Abstract: This paper presents a robust approach for detecting moving objects from on-board stereo vision systems. It relies on a feature point quaternion-based registration, which avoids common problems that appear when computationally expensive iterative-based algorithms are used on dynamic environments. The proposed approach consists of three stages. Initially, feature points are extracted and tracked through consecutive frames. Then, a RANSAC based approach is used for registering
two 3D point sets with known correspondences by means of the quaternion method. Finally, the computed 3D rigid displacement is used to map two consecutive frames into the same coordinate system. Moving objects correspond to those areas with large registration errors. Experimental results, in different scenarios, show the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper presents an adaptation of the alternation technique to tackle the prediction task in recommender systems. These systems are widely considered in electronic commerce to help customers to find products they will probably like or dislike. As the SVD-based approaches, the proposed adapted alternation technique uses all the information stored in the system to find the predictions. The main advantage of this technique with respect to the SVD-based ones is that it can deal with missing data. Furthermore, it has a smaller computational cost. Experimental results with public data sets are provided in order to show the viability of the proposed adapted alternation approach.