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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Felipe Lumbreras, Antonio Lopez, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Understanding Road Scenes using Visual Cues.
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Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, Thierry Brouard, Jean-Yves Ramel, & Josep Llados. (2012). Recherche de sous-graphes par encapsulation floue des cliques d'ordre 2: Application à la localisation de contenu dans les images de documents graphiques. In Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document (pp. 149–162).
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R. de Nijs, Sebastian Ramos, Gemma Roig, Xavier Boix, Luc Van Gool, & K. Kühnlenz. (2012). On-line Semantic Perception Using Uncertainty. In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp. 4185–4191).
Abstract: Visual perception capabilities are still highly unreliable in unconstrained settings, and solutions might not beaccurate in all regions of an image. Awareness of the uncertainty of perception is a fundamental requirement for proper high level decision making in a robotic system. Yet, the uncertainty measure is often sacrificed to account for dependencies between object/region classifiers. This is the case of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), the success of which stems from their ability to infer the most likely world configuration, but they do not directly allow to estimate the uncertainty of the solution. In this paper, we consider the setting of assigning semantic labels to the pixels of an image sequence. Instead of using a CRF, we employ a Perturb-and-MAP Random Field, a recently introduced probabilistic model that allows performing fast approximate sampling from its probability density function. This allows to effectively compute the uncertainty of the solution, indicating the reliability of the most likely labeling in each region of the image. We report results on the CamVid dataset, a standard benchmark for semantic labeling of urban image sequences. In our experiments, we show the benefits of exploiting the uncertainty by putting more computational effort on the regions of the image that are less reliable, and use more efficient techniques for other regions, showing little decrease of performance
Keywords: Semantic Segmentation
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Xavier Boix, Josep M. Gonfaus, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Harmony Potentials: Fusing Global and Local Scale for Semantic Image Segmentation. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 96(1), 83–102.
Abstract: The Hierarchical Conditional Random Field(HCRF) model have been successfully applied to a number of image labeling problems, including image segmentation. However, existing HCRF models of image segmentation do not allow multiple classes to be assigned to a single region, which limits their ability to incorporate contextual information across multiple scales.
At higher scales in the image, this representation yields an oversimpli ed model since multiple classes can be reasonably expected to appear within large regions. This simpli ed model particularly limits the impact of information at higher scales. Since class-label information at these scales is usually more reliable than at lower, noisier scales, neglecting this information is undesirable. To
address these issues, we propose a new consistency potential for image labeling problems, which we call the harmony potential. It can encode any possible combi-
nation of labels, penalizing only unlikely combinations of classes. We also propose an e ective sampling strategy over this expanded label set that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging, standard benchmark datasets for semantic image segmentation: PASCAL VOC 2010, and MSRC-21.
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Noha Elfiky, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Discriminative Compact Pyramids for Object and Scene Recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(4), 1627–1636.
Abstract: Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporating spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. In this paper, we present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. First, we investigate the usage of the divisive information theoretic feature clustering (DITC) algorithm in creating a compact pyramid representation. In many cases this method allows us to reduce the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation up to an order of magnitude with little or no loss in accuracy. Furthermore, comparison to clustering based on agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) shows that our method obtains superior results at significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, we investigate the optimal combination of multiple features in the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, experiments show that the method can obtain state-of-the-art results on several challenging data sets.
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Susana Alvarez, Anna Salvatella, Maria Vanrell, & Xavier Otazu. (2012). Low-dimensional and Comprehensive Color Texture Description. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(I), 54–67.
Abstract: Image retrieval can be dealt by combining standard descriptors, such as those of MPEG-7, which are defined independently for each visual cue (e.g. SCD or CLD for Color, HTD for texture or EHD for edges).
A common problem is to combine similarities coming from descriptors representing different concepts in different spaces. In this paper we propose a color texture description that bypasses this problem from its inherent definition. It is based on a low dimensional space with 6 perceptual axes. Texture is described in a 3D space derived from a direct implementation of the original Julesz’s Texton theory and color is described in a 3D perceptual space. This early fusion through the blob concept in these two bounded spaces avoids the problem and allows us to derive a sparse color-texture descriptor that achieves similar performance compared to MPEG-7 in image retrieval. Moreover, our descriptor presents comprehensive qualities since it can also be applied either in segmentation or browsing: (a) a dense image representation is defined from the descriptor showing a reasonable performance in locating texture patterns included in complex images; and (b) a vocabulary of basic terms is derived to build an intermediate level descriptor in natural language improving browsing by bridging semantic gap
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Antonio Lopez, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2012). Multilocal Creaseness Measure. IJ - The Insight Journal.
Abstract: This document describes the implementation using the Insight Toolkit of an algorithm for detecting creases (ridges and valleys) in N-dimensional images, based on the Local Structure Tensor of the image. In addition to the filter used to calculate the creaseness image, a filter for the computation of the structure tensor is also included in this submission.
Keywords: Ridges, Valley, Creaseness, Structure Tensor, Skeleton,
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Michal Drozdzal, Petia Radeva, Santiago Segui, Laura Igual, Carolina Malagelada, Fernando Azpiroz, et al. (2012). System and Method for Improving a Discriminative Model.
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Naveen Onkarappa, Sujay M. Veerabhadrappa, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Optical Flow in Onboard Applications: A Study on the Relationship Between Accuracy and Scene Texture. In 4th International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (Vol. 221, pp. 257–267).
Abstract: Optical flow has got a major role in making advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) a reality. ADAS applications are expected to perform efficiently in all kinds of environments, those are highly probable, that one can drive the vehicle in different kinds of roads, times and seasons. In this work, we study the relationship of optical flow with different roads, that is by analyzing optical flow accuracy on different road textures. Texture measures such as TeX , TeX and TeX are evaluated for this purpose. Further, the relation of regularization weight to the flow accuracy in the presence of different textures is also analyzed. Additionally, we present a framework to generate synthetic sequences of different textures in ADAS scenarios with ground-truth optical flow.
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Mohammad Rouhani, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Implicit Polynomial Representation through a Fast Fitting Error Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(4), 2089–2098.
Abstract: Impact Factor
This paper presents a simple distance estimation for implicit polynomial fitting. It is computed as the height of a simplex built between the point and the surface (i.e., a triangle in 2-D or a tetrahedron in 3-D), which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the orthogonal distance. The proposed distance can be described as a function of the coefficients of the implicit polynomial. Moreover, it is differentiable and has a smooth behavior . Hence, it can be used in any gradient-based optimization. In this paper, its use in a Levenberg-Marquardt framework is shown, which is particularly devoted for nonlinear least squares problems. The proposed estimation is a generalization of the gradient-based distance estimation, which is widely used in the literature. Experimental results, both in 2-D and 3-D data sets, are provided. Comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques are presented, showing the advantages of the proposed approach.
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J. Stöttinger, A. Hanbury, N. Sebe, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Spars Color Interest Points for Image Retrieval and Object Categorization. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(5), 2681–2692.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
IF 2011/2012?: 3.32
Interest point detection is an important research area in the field of image processing and computer vision. In particular, image retrieval and object categorization heavily rely on interest point detection from which local image descriptors are computed for image matching. In general, interest points are based on luminance, and color has been largely ignored. However, the use of color increases the distinctiveness of interest points. The use of color may therefore provide selective search reducing the total number of interest points used for image matching. This paper proposes color interest points for sparse image representation. To reduce the sensitivity to varying imaging conditions, light-invariant interest points are introduced. Color statistics based on occurrence probability lead to color boosted points, which are obtained through saliency-based feature selection. Furthermore, a principal component analysis-based scale selection method is proposed, which gives a robust scale estimation per interest point. From large-scale experiments, it is shown that the proposed color interest point detector has higher repeatability than a luminance-based one. Furthermore, in the context of image retrieval, a reduced and predictable number of color features show an increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art interest points. Finally, in the context of object recognition, for the Pascal VOC 2007 challenge, our method gives comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods using only a small fraction of the features, reducing the computing time considerably.
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R. Valenti, N. Sebe, & Theo Gevers. (2012). What are you looking at? Improving Visual gaze Estimation by Saliency. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(3), 324–334.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 5.15
Impact factor 2011/12?: 5.36
In this paper we present a novel mechanism to obtain enhanced gaze estimation for subjects looking at a scene or an image. The system makes use of prior knowledge about the scene (e.g. an image on a computer screen), to define a probability map of the scene the subject is gazing at, in order to find the most probable location. The proposed system helps in correcting the fixations which are erroneously estimated by the gaze estimation device by employing a saliency framework to adjust the resulting gaze point vector. The system is tested on three scenarios: using eye tracking data, enhancing a low accuracy webcam based eye tracker, and using a head pose tracker. The correlation between the subjects in the commercial eye tracking data is improved by an average of 13.91%. The correlation on the low accuracy eye gaze tracker is improved by 59.85%, and for the head pose tracker we obtain an improvement of 10.23%. These results show the potential of the system as a way to enhance and self-calibrate different visual gaze estimation systems.
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R. Valenti, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Accurate Eye Center Location through Invariant Isocentric Patterns. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(9), 1785–1798.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 5.308
Impact factor 2011/12?: 5.96
Locating the center of the eyes allows for valuable information to be captured and used in a wide range of applications. Accurate eye center location can be determined using commercial eye-gaze trackers, but additional constraints and expensive hardware make these existing solutions unattractive and impossible to use on standard (i.e., visible wavelength), low-resolution images of eyes. Systems based solely on appearance are proposed in the literature, but their accuracy does not allow us to accurately locate and distinguish eye centers movements in these low-resolution settings. Our aim is to bridge this gap by locating the center of the eye within the area of the pupil on low-resolution images taken from a webcam or a similar device. The proposed method makes use of isophote properties to gain invariance to linear lighting changes (contrast and brightness), to achieve in-plane rotational invariance, and to keep low-computational costs. To further gain scale invariance, the approach is applied to a scale space pyramid. In this paper, we extensively test our approach for its robustness to changes in illumination, head pose, scale, occlusion, and eye rotation. We demonstrate that our system can achieve a significant improvement in accuracy over state-of-the-art techniques for eye center location in standard low-resolution imagery.
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Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2012). Improving Color Constancy by Photometric Edge Weighting. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(5), 918–929.
Abstract: : Edge-based color constancy methods make use of image derivatives to estimate the illuminant. However, different edge types exist in real-world images such as material, shadow and highlight edges. These different edge types may have a distinctive influence on the performance of the illuminant estimation. Therefore, in this paper, an extensive analysis is provided of different edge types on the performance of edge-based color constancy methods. First, an edge-based taxonomy is presented classifying edge types based on their photometric properties (e.g. material, shadow-geometry and highlights). Then, a performance evaluation of edge-based color constancy is provided using these different edge types. From this performance evaluation it is derived that specular and shadow edge types are more valuable than material edges for the estimation of the illuminant. To this end, the (iterative) weighted Grey-Edge algorithm is proposed in which these edge types are more emphasized for the estimation of the illuminant. Images that are recorded under controlled circumstances demonstrate that the proposed iterative weighted Grey-Edge algorithm based on highlights reduces the median angular error with approximately $25\%$. In an uncontrolled environment, improvements in angular error up to $11\%$ are obtained with respect to regular edge-based color constancy.
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R. Valenti, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Combining Head Pose and Eye Location Information for Gaze Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 802–815.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/12?: 3.32
Head pose and eye location for gaze estimation have been separately studied in numerous works in the literature. Previous research shows that satisfactory accuracy in head pose and eye location estimation can be achieved in constrained settings. However, in the presence of nonfrontal faces, eye locators are not adequate to accurately locate the center of the eyes. On the other hand, head pose estimation techniques are able to deal with these conditions; hence, they may be suited to enhance the accuracy of eye localization. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to combine head pose and eye location information to obtain enhanced gaze estimation. To this end, the transformation matrix obtained from the head pose is used to normalize the eye regions, and in turn, the transformation matrix generated by the found eye location is used to correct the pose estimation procedure. The scheme is designed to enhance the accuracy of eye location estimations, particularly in low-resolution videos, to extend the operative range of the eye locators, and to improve the accuracy of the head pose tracker. These enhanced estimations are then combined to obtain a novel visual gaze estimation system, which uses both eye location and head information to refine the gaze estimates. From the experimental results, it can be derived that the proposed unified scheme improves the accuracy of eye estimations by 16% to 23%. Furthermore, it considerably extends its operating range by more than 15° by overcoming the problems introduced by extreme head poses. Moreover, the accuracy of the head pose tracker is improved by 12% to 24%. Finally, the experimentation on the proposed combined gaze estimation system shows that it is accurate (with a mean error between 2° and 5°) and that it can be used in cases where classic approaches would fail without imposing restraints on the position of the head.
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