Abstract: Our demo focuses on showing the extraordinary performance of our novel 3D pedestrian detector along with its simplicity and real-time capabilities. This detector has been designed for autonomous driving applications, but it can also be applied in other scenarios that cover both outdoor and indoor applications.
Our pedestrian detector is based on the combination of a random forest classifier with HOG-LBP features and the inclusion of a preprocessing stage based on 3D scene information in order to precisely determinate the image regions where the detector should search for pedestrians. This approach ends up in a high accurate system that runs real-time as it is required by many computer vision and robotics applications.

Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary study on the registration and fusion of cross-spectral imaging. The objective is to evaluate the validity of widely used computer vision approaches when they are applied at different
spectral bands. In particular, we are interested in merging images from the infrared (both long wave infrared: LWIR and near infrared: NIR) and visible spectrum (VS). Experimental results with different data sets are presented.

Abstract: On-board pedestrian detection is crucial for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
(ADAS). An accurate classication is fundamental for vision-based pedestrian detection.
The underlying assumption for learning classiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classiers. However, in practice, there are dierent reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain) is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this thesis we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for pedestrian detection. As a prof of concept, we use a computer graphic based synthetic dataset, i.e. a virtual world, as the source domain, and adapt the virtual-world trained DPM detector to various real-world dataset.
We start by exploiting the maximum detection accuracy of the virtual-world
trained DPM. Even though, when operating in various real-world datasets, the virtualworld trained detector still suer from accuracy degradation due to the domain gap of virtual and real worlds. We then focus on domain adaptation of DPM. At the rst step, we consider single source and single target domain adaptation and propose two batch learning methods, namely A-SSVM and SA-SSVM. Later, we further consider leveraging multiple target (sub-)domains for progressive domain adaptation and propose a hierarchical adaptive structured SVM (HA-SSVM) for optimization. Finally, we extend HA-SSVM for the challenging online domain adaptation problem, aiming at making the detector to automatically adapt to the target domain online, without any human intervention. All of the proposed methods in this thesis do not require
revisiting source domain data. The evaluations are done on the Caltech pedestrian detection benchmark. Results show that SA-SSVM slightly outperforms A-SSVM and avoids accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing with a non-adapted detector. The hierarchical model learned by HA-SSVM further boosts the domain adaptation performance. Finally, the online domain adaptation method has demonstrated that it can achieve comparable accuracy to the batch learned models while not requiring manually label target domain examples. Domain adaptation for pedestrian detection is of paramount importance and a relatively unexplored area. We humbly hope the work in this thesis could provide foundations for future work in this area.

Abstract: In open-ended domains, robots must continuously learn new object categories. When the training sets are created offline, it is not possible to ensure their representativeness with respect to the object categories and features the system will find when operating online. In the Bag of Words model, visual codebooks are constructed from training sets created offline. This might lead to non-discriminative visual words and, as a consequence, to poor recognition performance. This paper proposes a visual object recognition system which concurrently learns in an incremental and online fashion both the visual object category representations as well as the codebook words used to encode them. The codebook is defined using Gaussian Mixture Models which are updated using new object views. The approach contains similarities with the human visual object recognition system: evidence suggests that the development of recognition capabilities occurs on multiple levels and is sustained over large periods of time. Results show that the proposed system with concurrent learning of object categories and codebooks is capable of learning more categories, requiring less examples, and with similar accuracies, when compared to the classical Bag of Words approach using offline constructed codebooks.

Abstract: We present a method for the cost estimation of custom hoses from CAD models. They can come in two formats, which are easy to generate: a STL file or the image of a CAD drawing showing several orthogonal projections. The challenges in either cases are, first, to obtain from them a high level 3D description of the shape, and second, to learn a regression function for the prediction of the manufacturing time, based on geometric features of the reconstructed shape. The chosen description is the 3D line along the medial axis of the tube and the diameter of the circular sections along it. In order to extract it from STL files, we have adapted RANSAC, a robust parametric fitting algorithm. As for CAD drawing images, we propose a new technique for 3D reconstruction from data entered on any number of orthogonal projections. The regression function is a Gaussian process, which does not constrain the function to adopt any specific form and is governed by just two parameters. We assess the accuracy of the manufacturing time estimation by k-fold cross validation on 171 STL file models for which the time is provided by an expert. The results show the feasibility of the method, whereby the relative error for 80% of the testing samples is below 15%.

Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications. Most promising detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with annotated samples. However, the annotation step is a human intensive and subjective task worth to be minimized. By using virtual worlds we can automatically obtain precise and rich annotations. Thus, we face the question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in realistic virtual worlds work successfully for pedestrian detection in realworld images?. Conducted experiments show that virtual-world based training can provide excellent testing accuracy in real world, but it can also suffer the dataset shift problem as real-world based training does. Accordingly, we have designed a domain adaptation framework, V-AYLA, in which we have tested different techniques to collect a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combine them with the many examples of the source domain (virtual world) in order to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifier that will operate in the target domain. V-AYLA reports the same detection accuracy than when training with many human-provided pedestrian annotations and testing with real-world images of the same domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector.