Abstract: This work compiles the different computer vision-based approaches
from the state-of-the-art intended for video analytics in urban environments.
The manuscript groups the different approaches according to the typical modules present in video analysis, including image preprocessing, object detection,
classification, and tracking. This proposed pipeline serves as a basic guide to
representing these most representative approaches in this topic of video analysis
that will be addressed in this work. Furthermore, the manuscript is not intended
to be an exhaustive review of the most advanced approaches, but only a list of
common techniques proposed to address recurring problems in this field.

Abstract: Due to the lack of thermal image datasets, a new dataset has been acquired for proposed a super-resolution approach using a Deep Convolution Neural Network schema. In order to achieve this image enhancement process, a new thermal images dataset is used. Different experiments have been carried out, firstly, the proposed architecture has been trained using only images of the visible spectrum, and later it has been trained with images of the thermal spectrum, the results showed that with the network trained with thermal images, better results are obtained in the process of enhancing the images, maintaining the image details and perspective. The thermal dataset is available at http://www.
cidis.espol.edu.ec/es/dataset.

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach to estimate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) just from an RGB image. The NDVI values are obtained by using images from the visible spectral band together with a synthetic near infrared image obtained by a cycled GAN. The cycled GAN network is able to obtain a NIR image from a given gray scale image. It is trained by using unpaired set of gray scale and NIR images by using a U-net architecture and a multiple loss function (gray scale images are obtained from the provided RGB images). Then, the NIR image estimated with the proposed cycle generative adversarial network is used to compute the NDVI index. Experimental results are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach. Additionally, comparisons with previous approaches are also provided.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel Siamese network architecture, as a variant of Resnet-50, to estimate the relative camera pose on multi-view environments. In order to improve the performance of the proposed model a transfer learning strategy, based on synthetic images obtained from a virtual-world, is considered. The transfer learning consists of first training the network using pairs of images from the virtual-world scenario
considering different conditions (i.e., weather, illumination, objects, buildings, etc.); then, the learned weight
of the network are transferred to the real case, where images from real-world scenarios are considered. Experimental results and comparisons with the state of the art show both, improvements on the relative pose estimation accuracy using the proposed model, as well as further improvements when the transfer learning strategy (synthetic-world data transfer learning real-world data) is considered to tackle the limitation on the
training due to the reduced number of pairs of real-images on most of the public data sets.

Abstract: This work compares Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO) deep neural networks for the outdoor advertisement panel detection problem by handling multiple and combined variabilities in the scenes. Publicity panel detection in images offers important advantages both in the real world as well as in the virtual one. For example, applications like Google Street View can be used for Internet publicity and when detecting these ads panels in images, it could be possible to replace the publicity appearing inside the panels by another from a funding company. In our experiments, both SSD and YOLO detectors have produced acceptable results under variable sizes of panels, illumination conditions, viewing perspectives, partial occlusion of panels, complex background and multiple panels in scenes. Due to the difficulty of finding annotated images for the considered problem, we created our own dataset for conducting the experiments. The major strength of the SSD model was the almost elimination of False Positive (FP) cases, situation that is preferable when the publicity contained inside the panel is analyzed after detecting them. On the other side, YOLO produced better panel localization results detecting a higher number of True Positive (TP) panels with a higher accuracy. Finally, a comparison of the two analyzed object detection models with different types of semantic segmentation networks and using the same evaluation metrics is also included.

Abstract: This paper presents a domain adaptation strategy to efficiently train network architectures for estimating the relative camera pose in multi-view scenarios. The network architectures are fed by a pair of simultaneously acquired images, hence in order to improve the accuracy of the solutions, and due to the lack of large datasets with pairs of overlapped images, a domain adaptation strategy is proposed. The domain adaptation strategy consists on transferring the knowledge learned from synthetic images to real-world scenarios. For this, the networks are firstly trained using pairs of synthetic images, which are captured at the same time by a pair of cameras in a virtual environment; and then, the learned weights of the networks are transferred to the real-world case, where the networks are retrained with a few real images. Different virtual 3D scenarios are generated to evaluate the relationship between the accuracy on the result and the similarity between virtual and real scenarios—similarity on both geometry of the objects contained in the scene as well as relative pose between camera and objects in the scene. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing that the accuracy of all the evaluated networks for estimating the camera pose improves when the proposed domain adaptation strategy is used, highlighting the importance on the similarity between virtual-real scenarios.

Abstract: This paper presents a full pipeline to classify sample sets of corn kernels. The proposed approach follows a segmentation-classification scheme. The image segmentation is performed through a well known deep learningbased approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, while the classification is performed hrough a novel-lightweight network specially designed for this task—good corn kernel, defective corn kernel and impurity categories are considered. As a second contribution, a carefully annotated multitouching corn kernel dataset has been generated. This dataset has been used for training the segmentation and the classification modules. Quantitative evaluations have been
performed and comparisons with other approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed pipeline.

Abstract: This manuscript presents a comprehensive survey on recent computer vision based food grain classification techniques. It includes state-of-the-art approaches intended for different grain varieties. The approaches proposed in the literature are analyzed according to the processing stages considered in the classification pipeline, making it easier to identify common techniques and comparisons. Additionally, the type of images considered by each approach (i.e., images from the: visible, infrared, multispectral, hyperspectral bands) together with the strategy used to generate ground truth data (i.e., real and synthetic images) are reviewed. Finally, conclusions highlighting future needs and challenges are presented.