Hugo Jair Escalante, Jose Martinez, Sergio Escalera, Victor Ponce, & Xavier Baro. (2015). Improving Bag of Visual Words Representations with Genetic Programming. In IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IJCNN2015.
Abstract: The bag of visual words is a well established representation in diverse computer vision problems. Taking inspiration from the fields of text mining and retrieval, this representation has proved to be very effective in a large number of domains.
In most cases, a standard term-frequency weighting scheme is considered for representing images and videos in computer vision. This is somewhat surprising, as there are many alternative ways of generating bag of words representations within the text processing community. This paper explores the use of alternative weighting schemes for landmark tasks in computer vision: image
categorization and gesture recognition. We study the suitability of using well-known supervised and unsupervised weighting schemes for such tasks. More importantly, we devise a genetic program that learns new ways of representing images and videos under the bag of visual words representation. The proposed method learns to combine term-weighting primitives trying to maximize the classification performance. Experimental results are reported in standard image and video data sets showing the effectiveness of the proposed evolutionary algorithm.
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Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera, P. Rasti, Gholamreza Anbarjafari, Xavier Baro, Hugo Jair Escalante, et al. (2015). Deep Learning based Super-Resolution for Improved Action Recognition. In 5th International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications IPTA2015 (pp. 67–72).
Abstract: Action recognition systems mostly work with videos of proper quality and resolution. Even most challenging benchmark databases for action recognition, hardly include videos of low-resolution from, e.g., surveillance cameras. In videos recorded by such cameras, due to the distance between people and cameras, people are pictured very small and hence challenge action recognition algorithms. Simple upsampling methods, like bicubic interpolation, cannot retrieve all the detailed information that can help the recognition. To deal with this problem, in this paper we combine results of bicubic interpolation with results of a state-ofthe-art deep learning-based super-resolution algorithm, through an alpha-blending approach. The experimental results obtained on down-sampled version of a large subset of Hoolywood2 benchmark database show the importance of the proposed system in increasing the recognition rate of a state-of-the-art action recognition system for handling low-resolution videos.
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Xavier Baro, Jordi Gonzalez, Junior Fabian, Miguel Angel Bautista, Marc Oliu, Hugo Jair Escalante, et al. (2015). ChaLearn Looking at People 2015 challenges: action spotting and cultural event recognition. In 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Worshops (CVPRW) (pp. 1–9).
Abstract: Following previous series on Looking at People (LAP) challenges [6, 5, 4], ChaLearn ran two competitions to be presented at CVPR 2015: action/interaction spotting and cultural event recognition in RGB data. We ran a second round on human activity recognition on RGB data sequences. In terms of cultural event recognition, tens of categories have to be recognized. This involves scene understanding and human analysis. This paper summarizes the two performed challenges and obtained results. Details of the ChaLearn LAP competitions can be found at http://gesture.chalearn.org/.
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Victor Ponce, Hugo Jair Escalante, Sergio Escalera, & Xavier Baro. (2015). Gesture and Action Recognition by Evolved Dynamic Subgestures. In 26th British Machine Vision Conference (129.pp. 1–129.13).
Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for gesture and action recognition based on the evolution of temporal gesture primitives, or subgestures. Our work is inspired on the principle of producing genetic variations within a population of gesture subsequences, with the goal of obtaining a set of gesture units that enhance the generalization capability of standard gesture recognition approaches. In our context, gesture primitives are evolved over time using dynamic programming and generative models in order to recognize complex actions. In few generations, the proposed subgesture-based representation
of actions and gestures outperforms the state of the art results on the MSRDaily3D and MSRAction3D datasets.
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Frederic Sampedro, Anna Domenech, Sergio Escalera, & Ignasi Carrio. (2017). Computing quantitative indicators of structural renal damage in pediatric DMSA scans. REMNIM - Revista Española de Medicina Nuclear e Imagen Molecular, 36(2), 72–77.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
The proposal and implementation of a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from 99mTc-dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) scans. The aim of this work is to propose, implement, and validate a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from DMSA scans and in an observer-independent manner.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
From a set of 16 pediatric DMSA-positive scans and 16 matched controls and using both expert-guided and automatic approaches, a set of image-derived quantitative indicators was computed based on the relative size, intensity and histogram distribution of the lesion. A correlation analysis was conducted in order to investigate the association of these indicators with other clinical data of interest in this scenario, including C-reactive protein (CRP), white cell count, vesicoureteral reflux, fever, relative perfusion, and the presence of renal sequelae in a 6-month follow-up DMSA scan.
RESULTS:
A fully automatic lesion detection and segmentation system was able to successfully classify DMSA-positive from negative scans (AUC=0.92, sensitivity=81% and specificity=94%). The image-computed relative size of the lesion correlated with the presence of fever and CRP levels (p<0.05), and a measurement derived from the distribution histogram of the lesion obtained significant performance results in the detection of permanent renal damage (AUC=0.86, sensitivity=100% and specificity=75%).
CONCLUSIONS:
The proposal and implementation of a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from DMSA scans showed a promising potential to complement visual diagnosis and non-imaging indicators.
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Jose Garcia-Rodriguez, Isabelle Guyon, Sergio Escalera, Alexandra Psarrou, Andrew Lewis, & Miguel Cazorla. (2017). Editorial: Special Issue on Computational Intelligence for Vision and Robotics. Neural Computing and Applications - Neural Computing and Applications, 28(5), 853–854.
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Cristina Palmero, Jordi Esquirol, Vanessa Bayo, Miquel Angel Cos, Pouya Ahmadmonfared, Joan Salabert, et al. (2017). Automatic Sleep System Recommendation by Multi-modal RBG-Depth-Pressure Anthropometric Analysis. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 122(2), 212–227.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel system for automatic sleep system recommendation using RGB, depth and pressure information. It consists of a validated clinical knowledge-based model that, along with a set of prescription variables extracted automatically, obtains a personalized bed design recommendation. The automatic process starts by performing multi-part human body RGB-D segmentation combining GrabCut, 3D Shape Context descriptor and Thin Plate Splines, to then extract a set of anthropometric landmark points by applying orthogonal plates to the segmented human body. The extracted variables are introduced to the computerized clinical model to calculate body circumferences, weight, morphotype and Body Mass Index categorization. Furthermore, pressure image analysis is performed to extract pressure values and at-risk points, which are also introduced to the model to eventually obtain the final prescription of mattress, topper, and pillow. We validate the complete system in a set of 200 subjects, showing accurate category classification and high correlation results with respect to manual measures.
Keywords: Sleep system recommendation; RGB-Depth data Pressure imaging; Anthropometric landmark extraction; Multi-part human body segmentation
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Ciprian Corneanu, Marc Oliu, Jeffrey F. Cohn, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28(8), 1548–1568.
Abstract: Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.
Keywords: Facial expression; affect; emotion recognition; RGB; 3D; thermal; multimodal
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Antonio Hernandez, Sergio Escalera, & Stan Sclaroff. (2016). Poselet-basedContextual Rescoring for Human Pose Estimation via Pictorial Structures. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 118(1), 49–64.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a contextual rescoring method for predicting the position of body parts in a human pose estimation framework. A set of poselets is incorporated in the model, and their detections are used to extract spatial and score-related features relative to other body part hypotheses. A method is proposed for the automatic discovery of a compact subset of poselets that covers the different poses in a set of validation images while maximizing precision. A rescoring mechanism is defined as a set-based boosting classifier that computes a new score for each body joint detection, given its relationship to detections of other body joints and mid-level parts in the image. This new score is incorporated in the pictorial structure model as an additional unary potential, following the recent work of Pishchulin et al. Experiments on two benchmarks show comparable results to Pishchulin et al. while reducing the size of the mid-level representation by an order of magnitude, reducing the execution time by 68 % accordingly.
Keywords: Contextual rescoring; Poselets; Human pose estimation
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Egils Avots, M. Daneshmanda, Andres Traumann, Sergio Escalera, & G. Anbarjafaria. (2016). Automatic garment retexturing based on infrared information. CG - Computers & Graphics, 59, 28–38.
Abstract: This paper introduces a new automatic technique for garment retexturing using a single static image along with the depth and infrared information obtained using the Microsoft Kinect II as the RGB-D acquisition device. First, the garment is segmented out from the image using either the Breadth-First Search algorithm or the semi-automatic procedure provided by the GrabCut method. Then texture domain coordinates are computed for each pixel belonging to the garment using normalised 3D information. Afterwards, shading is applied to the new colours from the texture image. As the main contribution of the proposed method, the latter information is obtained based on extracting a linear map transforming the colour present on the infrared image to that of the RGB colour channels. One of the most important impacts of this strategy is that the resulting retexturing algorithm is colour-, pattern- and lighting-invariant. The experimental results show that it can be used to produce realistic representations, which is substantiated through implementing it under various experimentation scenarios, involving varying lighting intensities and directions. Successful results are accomplished also on video sequences, as well as on images of subjects taking different poses. Based on the Mean Opinion Score analysis conducted on many randomly chosen users, it has been shown to produce more realistic-looking results compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods suggested in the literature. From a wide perspective, the proposed method can be used for retexturing all sorts of segmented surfaces, although the focus of this study is on garment retexturing, and the investigation of the configurations is steered accordingly, since the experiments target an application in the context of virtual fitting rooms.
Keywords: Garment Retexturing; Texture Mapping; Infrared Images; RGB-D Acquisition Devices; Shading
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Marc Oliu, Ciprian Corneanu, Laszlo A. Jeni, Jeffrey F. Cohn, Takeo Kanade, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Continuous Supervised Descent Method for Facial Landmark Localisation. In 13th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 10112, pp. 121–135). LNCS.
Abstract: Recent methods for facial landmark location perform well on close-to-frontal faces but have problems in generalising to large head rotations. In order to address this issue we propose a second order linear regression method that is both compact and robust against strong rotations. We provide a closed form solution, making the method fast to train. We test the method’s performance on two challenging datasets. The first has been intensely used by the community. The second has been specially generated from a well known 3D face dataset. It is considerably more challenging, including a high diversity of rotations and more samples than any other existing public dataset. The proposed method is compared against state-of-the-art approaches, including RCPR, CGPRT, LBF, CFSS, and GSDM. Results upon both datasets show that the proposed method offers state-of-the-art performance on near frontal view data, improves state-of-the-art methods on more challenging head rotation problems and keeps a compact model size.
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Sergio Escalera, Vassilis Athitsos, & Isabelle Guyon. (2016). Challenges in multimodal gesture recognition. JMLR - Journal of Machine Learning Research, 17, 1–54.
Abstract: This paper surveys the state of the art on multimodal gesture recognition and introduces the JMLR special topic on gesture recognition 2011-2015. We began right at the start of the KinectTMrevolution when inexpensive infrared cameras providing image depth recordings became available. We published papers using this technology and other more conventional methods, including regular video cameras, to record data, thus providing a good overview of uses of machine learning and computer vision using multimodal data in this area of application. Notably, we organized a series of challenges and made available several datasets we recorded for that purpose, including tens of thousands
of videos, which are available to conduct further research. We also overview recent state of the art works on gesture recognition based on a proposed taxonomy for gesture recognition, discussing challenges and future lines of research.
Keywords: Gesture Recognition; Time Series Analysis; Multimodal Data Analysis; Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition; Wearable sensors; Infrared Cameras; KinectTM
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Pejman Rasti, Salma Samiei, Mary Agoyi, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2016). Robust non-blind color video watermarking using QR decomposition and entropy analysis. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 38, 838–847.
Abstract: Issues such as content identification, document and image security, audience measurement, ownership and copyright among others can be settled by the use of digital watermarking. Many recent video watermarking methods show drops in visual quality of the sequences. The present work addresses the aforementioned issue by introducing a robust and imperceptible non-blind color video frame watermarking algorithm. The method divides frames into moving and non-moving parts. The non-moving part of each color channel is processed separately using a block-based watermarking scheme. Blocks with an entropy lower than the average entropy of all blocks are subject to a further process for embedding the watermark image. Finally a watermarked frame is generated by adding moving parts to it. Several signal processing attacks are applied to each watermarked frame in order to perform experiments and are compared with some recent algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust against common signal processing attacks.
Keywords: Video watermarking; QR decomposition; Discrete Wavelet Transformation; Chirp Z-transform; Singular value decomposition; Orthogonal–triangular decomposition
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Cristina Palmero, Albert Clapes, Chris Bahnsen, Andreas Møgelmose, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Multi-modal RGB-Depth-Thermal Human Body Segmentation. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 118(2), 217–239.
Abstract: This work addresses the problem of human body segmentation from multi-modal visual cues as a first stage of automatic human behavior analysis. We propose a novel RGB–depth–thermal dataset along with a multi-modal segmentation baseline. The several modalities are registered using a calibration device and a registration algorithm. Our baseline extracts regions of interest using background subtraction, defines a partitioning of the foreground regions into cells, computes a set of image features on those cells using different state-of-the-art feature extractions, and models the distribution of the descriptors per cell using probabilistic models. A supervised learning algorithm then fuses the output likelihoods over cells in a stacked feature vector representation. The baseline, using Gaussian mixture models for the probabilistic modeling and Random Forest for the stacked learning, is superior to other state-of-the-art methods, obtaining an overlap above 75 % on the novel dataset when compared to the manually annotated ground-truth of human segmentations.
Keywords: Human body segmentation; RGB ; Depth Thermal
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Gerard Canal, Sergio Escalera, & Cecilio Angulo. (2016). A Real-time Human-Robot Interaction system based on gestures for assistive scenarios. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 149, 65–77.
Abstract: Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.
Keywords: Gesture recognition; Human Robot Interaction; Dynamic Time Warping; Pointing location estimation
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