Abstract: Common techniques for pedestrian candidates generation (e.g., sliding window approaches) are based on an exhaustive search over the image. This implies that the number of windows produced is huge, which translates into a significant time consumption in the classification stage. In this paper, we propose a method that significantly reduces the number of windows to be considered by a classifier. Our method is a monocular one that exploits geometric and depth information available on single images. Both representations of the world are fused together to generate pedestrian candidates based on an underlying model which is focused only on objects standing vertically on the ground plane and having certain height, according with their depths on the scene. We evaluate our algorithm on a challenging dataset and demonstrate its application for pedestrian detection, where a considerable reduction in the number of candidate windows is reached.

Abstract: The current paper proposes a novel color correction approach for onboard multi-camera systems. It works by segmenting the given images into several regions. A probabilistic segmentation framework, using 3D Gaussian Mixture Models, is proposed. Regions are used to compute local color correction functions, which are then combined to obtain the final corrected image. An image data set of road scenarios is used to establish a performance comparison of the proposed method with other seven well known color correction algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is the highest scoring color correction method. Also, the proposed single step 3D color space probabilistic segmentation reduces processing time over similar approaches.

Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, pedestrian detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities and a strong multi-view classifier that accounts for different pedestrian views and poses. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multi-cue, multimodality and strong multi-view classifier) affect performance both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition LIDAR, a type of modality that is only recently starting to receive attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the performance, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient. These simple blocks can be easily replaced with more sophisticated ones recently proposed, such as the use of convolutional neural networks for feature representation, to further improve the accuracy.

Abstract: Due to the increasing demand for game-streaming services, efficient compression of computer-generated video is more critical than ever, especially when the available bandwidth is low. This paper proposes a super-resolution framework that improves the coding efficiency of computer-generated gaming videos at low bitrates. Most state-of-the-art super-resolution networks generalize over a variety of RGB inputs and use a unified network architecture for frames of different levels of degradation, leading to high complexity and redundancy. Since games usually consist of a limited number of fixed scenarios, we specialize one model for each scenario and assign appropriate network capacities for different QPs to perform super-resolution under the guidance of reconstructed high-quality luma components. Experimental results show that our framework achieves a superior quality-complexity trade-off compared to the ESRnet baseline, saving at most 93.59% parameters while maintaining comparable performance. The compression efficiency compared to HEVC is also improved by more than 17% BD-rate gain.

Abstract: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is to recognize human emotions in a natural verbal interaction scenario with machines, which is considered as a challenging problem due to the ambiguous human emotions. Despite the recent progress in SER, state-of-the-art models struggle to achieve a satisfactory performance. We propose a self-attention based method with combined use of label-adaptive mixup and center loss. By adapting label probabilities in mixup and fitting center loss to the mixup training scheme, our proposed method achieves a superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Optical flow is a valuable tool for motion analysis in autonomous navigation systems. A reliable application requires determining the accuracy of the computed optical flow. This is a main challenge given the absence of ground truth in real world sequences. This paper introduces a measure of optical flow accuracy for Lucas-Kanade based flows in terms of the numerical stability of the data-term. We call this measure optical flow condition number. A statistical analysis over ground-truth data show a good statistical correlation between the condition number and optical flow error. Experiments on driving sequences illustrate its potential for autonomous navigation systems.