Abstract: Interest in automatic action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last few years. This is due in part to the large number of application domains for this type of technology. As in many other computer vision areas, deep learning based methods have quickly become a reference methodology for obtaining state-of-the-art performance in both tasks. This chapter is a survey of current deep learning based methodologies for action and gesture recognition in sequences of images. The survey reviews both fundamental and cutting edge methodologies reported in the last few years. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning for approaching both tasks. Details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions are reviewed. Also, we summarize and discuss the main works proposed so far with particular interest on how they treat the temporal dimension of data, their highlighting features, and opportunities and challenges for future research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first survey in the topic. We foresee this survey will become a reference in this ever dynamic field of research.

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 Kinect TMTM revolution 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.

Abstract: Simulation can enable several developments in the field of intelligent vehicles. This chapter is divided into three main subsections. The first one deals with driving simulators. The continuous improvement of hardware performance is a well-known fact that is allowing the development of more complex driving simulators. The immersion in the simulation scene is increased by high fidelity feedback to the driver. In the second subsection, traffic simulation is explained as well as how it can be used for intelligent transport systems. Finally, it is rather clear that sensor-based perception and action must be based on data-driven algorithms. Simulation could provide data to train and test algorithms that are afterwards implemented in vehicles. These tools are explained in the third subsection.

Abstract: Over the past few decades human-computer interaction has become more important in our daily lives and research has developed in many directions: memory research, depression detection, and behavioural deficiency detection, lie detection, (hidden) emotion recognition etc. Because of that, the number of generic emotion and face databases or those tailored to specific needs have grown immensely large. Thus, a comprehensive yet compact guide is needed to help researchers find the most suitable database and understand what types of databases already exist. In this paper, different elicitation methods are discussed and the databases are primarily organized into neat and informative tables based on the format.

Abstract: Self-Supervised learning from multimodal image and text data allows deep neural networks to learn powerful features with no need of human annotated data. Web and Social Media platforms provide a virtually unlimited amount of this multimodal data. In this work we propose to exploit this free available data to learn a multimodal image and text embedding, aiming to leverage the semantic knowledge learnt in the text domain and transfer it to a visual model for semantic image retrieval. We demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can learn from images with associated text without supervision and analyze the semantic structure of the learnt joint image and text embeddingspace. Weperformathoroughanalysisandperformancecomparisonoffivedifferentstateof the art text embeddings in three different benchmarks. We show that the embeddings learnt with Web and Social Media data have competitive performances over supervised methods in the text basedimageretrievaltask,andweclearlyoutperformstateoftheartintheMIRFlickrdatasetwhen training in the target data. Further, we demonstrate how semantic multimodal image retrieval can be performed using the learnt embeddings, going beyond classical instance-level retrieval problems. Finally, we present a new dataset, InstaCities1M, composed by Instagram images and their associated texts that can be used for fair comparison of image-text embeddings.

Abstract: The Baix Llobregat (BALL) Demographic Database is an ongoing database project containing individual census data from the Catalan region of Baix Llobregat (Spain) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The BALL Database is built within the project ‘NETWORKS: Technology and citizen innovation for building historical social networks to understand the demographic past’ directed by Alícia Fornés from the Center for Computer Vision and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora from the Center for Demographic Studies, both at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, funded by the Recercaixa program (2017–2019).
Its webpage is http://dag.cvc.uab.es/xarxes/.The aim of the project is to develop technologies facilitating massive digitalization of demographic sources, and more specifically the padrones (local censuses), in order to reconstruct historical ‘social’ networks employing computer vision technology. Such virtual networks can be created thanks to the linkage of nominative records compiled in the local censuses across time and space. Thus, digitized versions of individual and family lifespans are established, and individuals and families can be located spatially.

Abstract: In recent years, the security of face recognition systems has been increasingly threatened. Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems primarily from various attacks. In order to attract researchers and push forward the state of the art in Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD), we organized three editions of Face Anti-spoofing Workshop and Competition at CVPR 2019, CVPR 2020, and ICCV 2021, which have attracted more than 800 teams from academia and industry, and greatly promoted the algorithms to overcome many challenging problems. In this chapter, we introduce the detailed competition process, including the challenge phases, timeline and evaluation metrics. Along with the workshop, we will introduce the corresponding dataset for each competition including data acquisition details, data processing, statistics, and evaluation protocol. Finally, we provide the available link to download the datasets used in the challenges.

Abstract: With the ubiquity of facial authentication systems and the prevalence of security cameras around the world, the impact that facial presentation attack techniques may have is huge. However, research progress in this field has been slowed by a number of factors, including the lack of appropriate and realistic datasets, ethical and privacy issues that prevent the recording and distribution of facial images, the little attention that the community has given to potential ethnic biases among others. This chapter provides an overview of contributions derived from the organization of academic challenges in the context of face anti-spoofing detection. Specifically, we discuss the limitations of benchmarks and summarize our efforts in trying to boost research by the community via the participation in academic challenges