Abstract: Pedestrian detection is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, and has received a lot of attention in the last years. Recently, some authors have shown the advantages of using combinations of part/patch-based detectors in order to cope with the large variability of poses and the existence of partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian detection method that efficiently combines multiple local experts by means of a Random Forest ensemble. The proposed method works with rich block-based representations such as HOG and LBP, in such a way that the same features are reused by the multiple local experts, so that no extra computational cost is needed with respect to a holistic method. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to integrate the proposed approach with a cascaded architecture in order to achieve not only high accuracy but also an acceptable efficiency. In particular, the resulting detector operates at five frames per second using a laptop machine. We tested the proposed method with well-known challenging datasets such as Caltech, ETH, Daimler, and INRIA. The method proposed in this work consistently ranks among the top performers in all the datasets, being either the best method or having a small difference with the best one.

Abstract: Most MAP inference algorithms for CRFs optimize an energy function knowing all the potentials. In this paper, we focus on CRFs where the computational cost of instantiating the potentials is orders of magnitude higher than MAP inference. This is often the case in semantic image segmentation, where most potentials are instantiated by slow classifiers fed with costly features. We introduce Active MAP inference 1) to on-the-fly select a subset of potentials to be instantiated in the energy function, leaving the rest of the parameters of the potentials unknown, and 2) to estimate the MAP labeling from such incomplete energy function. Results for semantic segmentation benchmarks, namely PASCAL VOC 2010 [5] and MSRC-21 [19], show that Active MAP inference achieves similar levels of accuracy but with major efficiency gains.

Abstract: In this paper we present a non-invasive ambient intelligence framework for the analysis of non-verbal communication applied to conversational settings. In particular, we apply feature extraction techniques to multi-modal audio-RGB-depth data. We compute a set of behavioral indicators that define communicative cues coming from the fields of psychology and observational methodology. We test our methodology over data captured in victim-offender mediation scenarios. Using different state-of-the-art classification approaches, our system achieve upon 75% of recognition predicting agreement among the parts involved in the conversations, using as ground truth the experts opinions.

Abstract: Small bowel motility dysfunctions are a widespread functional disorder characterized by abdominal pain and altered bowel habits in the absence of specific and unique organic pathology. Current methods of diagnosis are complex and can only be conducted at some highly specialized referral centers. Wireless Video Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) could be an interesting diagnostic alternative that presents excellent clinical advantages, since it is non-invasive and can be conducted by non specialists. The purpose of this work is to present a new method for the detection of wrinkle frames in WCE, a critical characteristic to detect one of the main motility events: contractions. The method goes beyond the use of one of the classical image feature, the Histogram

Abstract: This paper deals with a subgraph matching problem in Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. RAG is a very important, efficient and natural way of representing graphical information with a graph but this is limited to cases where the information is well defined with perfectly delineated regions. What if the information we are interested in is not confined within well defined regions? This paper addresses this particular problem and solves it by defining near convex grouping of oriented line segments which results in near convex regions. Pure convexity imposes hard constraints and can not handle all the cases efficiently. Hence to solve this problem we have defined a new type of convexity of regions, which allows convex regions to have concavity to some extend. We call this kind of regions Near Convex Regions (NCRs). These NCRs are then used to create the Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph (NCRAG) and with this representation we have formulated the problem of symbol spotting in graphical documents as a subgraph matching problem. For subgraph matching we have used the Approximate Edit Distance Algorithm (AEDA) on the neighborhood string, which starts working after finding a key node in the input or target graph and iteratively identifies similar nodes of the query graph in the neighborhood of the key node. The experiments are performed on artificial, real and distorted datasets.

Abstract: In this paper we present an incremental framework aimed at extracting field information from administrative document images in the context of a Digital Mail-room scenario. Given a single training sample in which the user has marked which fields have to be extracted from a particular document class, a document model representing structural relationships among words is built. This model is incrementally refined as the system processes more and more documents from the same class. A reformulation of the tf-idf statistic scheme allows to adjust the importance weights of the structural relationships among words. We report in the experimental section our results obtained with a large dataset of real invoices.

Abstract: Recent HMM-based approaches to handwritten word spotting require large amounts of learning samples and mostly rely on a prior segmentation of the document. We propose to use Bag-of-Features HMMs in a patch-based segmentation-free framework that are estimated by a single sample. Bag-of-Features HMMs use statistics of local image feature representatives. Therefore they can be considered as a variant of discrete HMMs allowing to model the observation of a number of features at a point in time. The discrete nature enables us to estimate a query model with only a single example of the query provided by the user. This makes our method very flexible with respect to the availability of training data. Furthermore, we are able to outperform state-of-the-art results on the George Washington dataset.