Abstract: This paper presents an effective unsupervised sparse feature learning algorithm to train deep convolutional networks on hyperspectral images. Deep convolutional hierarchical representations are learned and then used for pixel classification. Features in lower layers present less abstract representations of data, while higher layers represent more abstract and complex characteristics. We successfully illustrate the performance of the extracted representations in a challenging AVIRIS hyperspectral image classification problem, compared to standard dimensionality reduction methods like principal component analysis (PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA). The proposed method largely outperforms the previous state-ofthe-art results on the same experimental setting. Results show that single layer networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels. Regarding the deep architecture, we can conclude that: (1) additional layers in a deep architecture significantly improve the performance w.r.t. single layer variants; (2) the max-pooling step in each layer is mandatory to achieve satisfactory results; and (3) the performance gain w.r.t. the number of layers is upper bounded, since the spatial resolution is reduced at each pooling, resulting in too spatially coarse output features.

Abstract: Learning to count is a learning strategy that has been recently proposed in the literature for dealing with problems where estimating the number of object instances in a scene is the final objective. In this framework, the task of learning to detect and localize individual object instances is seen as a harder task that can be evaded by casting the problem as that of computing a regression value from hand-crafted image features. In this paper we explore the features that are learned when training a counting convolutional neural
network in order to understand their underlying representation.
To this end we define a counting problem for MNIST data and show that the internal representation of the network is able to classify digits in spite of the fact that no direct supervision was provided for them during training.
We also present preliminary results about a deep network that is able to count the number of pedestrians in a scene.

Abstract: Procrustes Analysis (PA) has been a popular technique to align and build 2-D statistical models of shapes. Given a set of 2-D shapes PA is applied to remove rigid transformations. Then, a non-rigid 2-D model is computed by modeling (e.g., PCA) the residual. Although PA has been widely used, it has several limitations for modeling 2-D shapes: occluded landmarks and missing data can result in local minima solutions, and there is no guarantee that the 2-D shapes provide a uniform sampling of the 3-D space of rotations for the object. To address previous issues, this paper proposes Subspace PA (SPA). Given several
instances of a 3-D object, SPA computes the mean and a 2-D subspace that can simultaneously model all rigid and non-rigid deformations of the 3-D object. We propose a discrete (DSPA) and continuous (CSPA) formulation for SPA, assuming that 3-D samples of an object are provided. DSPA extends the traditional PA, and produces unbiased 2-D models by uniformly sampling different views of the 3-D object. CSPA provides a continuous approach to uniformly sample the space of 3-D rotations, being more efficient in space and time. Experiments using SPA to learn 2-D models of bodies from motion capture data illustrate the benefits of our approach.

Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 2.286 2009 24/103
JCR Impact Factor 2010: 1.851
A major task of research in conversational recommender systems is personalization. Critiquing is a common and powerful form of feedback, where a user can express her feature preferences by applying a series of directional critiques over the recommendations instead of providing specific preference values. Incremental Critiquing is a conversational recommender system that uses critiquing as a feedback to efficiently personalize products. The expectation is that in each cycle the system retrieves the products that best satisfy the user’s soft product preferences from a minimal information input. In this paper, we present a novel technique that increases retrieval quality based on a combination of compatibility and similarity scores. Under the hypothesis that a user learns Turing the recommendation process, we propose two novel exponential reinforcement learning approaches for compatibility that take into account both the instant at which the user makes a critique and the number of satisfied critiques. Moreover, we consider that the impact of features on the similarity differs according to the preferences manifested by the user. We propose a global weighting approach that uses a common weight for nearest cases in order to focus on groups of relevant products. We show that our methodology significantly improves recommendation efficiency in four data sets of different sizes in terms of session length in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our recommender shows higher robustness against noisy user data when compared to classical approaches

Abstract: IF JCR 1.455 2010 25/99
In volume visualization, the definition of the regions of interest is inherently an iterative trial-and-error process finding out the best parameters to classify and render the final image. Generally, the user requires a lot of expertise to analyze and edit these parameters through multi-dimensional transfer functions. In this paper, we present a framework of intelligent methods to label on-demand multiple regions of interest. These methods can be split into a two-level GPU-based labelling algorithm that computes in time of rendering a set of labelled structures using the Machine Learning Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In a pre-processing step, ECOC trains a set of Adaboost binary classifiers from a reduced pre-labelled data set. Then, at the testing stage, each classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabelled samples and combined to perform multi-class labelling. We also propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allows to highly parallelize the testing stage. To exploit that parallelism we implemented the testing stage in GPU-OpenCL. The empirical results on different data sets for several volume structures shows high computational performance and classification accuracy.

Abstract: Pose Recovery (PR) and Human Behavior Analysis (HBA) have been a main focus of interest from the beginnings of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. PR and HBA were originally addressed by the analysis of still images and image sequences. More recent strategies consisted of Motion Capture technology (MOCAP), based on the synchronization of multiple cameras in controlled environments; and the analysis of depth maps from Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology, based on range image recording from distance sensor measurements. Recently, with the appearance of the multi-modal RGBD information provided by the low cost Kinect \textsfTM sensor (from RGB and Depth, respectively), classical methods for PR and HBA have been redefined, and new strategies have been proposed. In this paper, the recent contributions and future trends of multi-modal RGBD data analysis for PR and HBA are reviewed and discussed.