Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 1.14 / 3rd (Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence)
We introduce a model of attentional eye guidance based on the rationale that the deployment of gaze is to be considered in the context of a general action-perception loop relying on two strictly intertwined processes: sensory processing, depending on current gaze position, identifies sources of information that are most valuable under the given task; motor processing links such information with the oculomotor act by sampling the next gaze position and thus performing the gaze shift. In such a framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the payoff of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects. The different levels of the action-perception loop are represented in probabilistic form and eventually give rise to a stochastic process that generates the gaze sequence. This way the model also accounts for statistical properties of gaze shifts such as individual scan path variability. Results of the simulations are compared either with experimental data derived from publicly available datasets and from our own experiments.

Abstract: The amount of multimedia data collected in museum databases is growing fast, while the capacity of museums to display information to visitors is acutely limited by physical space. Museums must seek the perfect balance of information given on individual pieces in order to provide sufficient information to aid visitor understanding while maintaining sparse usage of the walls and guaranteeing high appreciation of the exhibit. Moreover, museums often target the interests of average visitors instead of the entire spectrum of different interests each individual visitor might have. Finally, visiting a museum should not be an experience contained in the physical space of the museum but a door opened onto a broader context of related artworks, authors, artistic trends, etc. In this paper we describe the MNEMOSYNE system that attempts to address these issues through a new multimedia museum experience. Based on passive observation, the system builds a profile of the artworks of interest for each visitor. These profiles of interest are then used to drive an interactive table that personalizes multimedia content delivery. The natural user interface on the interactive table uses the visitor’s profile, an ontology of museum content and a recommendation system to personalize exploration of multimedia content. At the end of their visit, the visitor can take home a personalized summary of their visit on a custom mobile application. In this article we describe in detail each component of our approach as well as the first field trials of our prototype system built and deployed at our permanent exhibition space at LeMurate (http://www.lemurate.comune.fi.it/lemurate/) in Florence together with the first results of the evaluation process during the official installation in the National Museum of Bargello (http://www.uffizi.firenze.it/musei/?m=bargello).

Abstract: A key topic in classification is the accuracy loss produced when the data distribution in the training (source) domain differs from that in the testing (target) domain. This is being recognized as a very relevant problem for many
computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and object category recognition. In this paper, we present a novel domain adaptation method that leverages multiple target domains (or sub-domains) in a hierarchical adaptation tree. The core idea is to exploit the commonalities and differences of the jointly considered target domains.
Given the relevance of structural SVM (SSVM) classifiers, we apply our idea to the adaptive SSVM (A-SSVM), which only requires the target domain samples together with the existing source-domain classifier for performing the desired adaptation. Altogether, we term our proposal as hierarchical A-SSVM (HA-SSVM).
As proof of concept we use HA-SSVM for pedestrian detection, object category recognition and face recognition. In the former we apply HA-SSVM to the deformable partbased model (DPM) while in the rest HA-SSVM is applied to multi-category classifiers. We will show how HA-SSVM is effective in increasing the detection/recognition accuracy with respect to adaptation strategies that ignore the structure of the target data. Since, the sub-domains of the target data are not always known a priori, we shown how HA-SSVM can incorporate sub-domain discovery for object category recognition.

Abstract: This work addresses the problem of human body segmentation from multi-modal visual cues as a first stage of automatic human behavior analysis. We propose a novel RGB–depth–thermal dataset along with a multi-modal segmentation baseline. The several modalities are registered using a calibration device and a registration algorithm. Our baseline extracts regions of interest using background subtraction, defines a partitioning of the foreground regions into cells, computes a set of image features on those cells using different state-of-the-art feature extractions, and models the distribution of the descriptors per cell using probabilistic models. A supervised learning algorithm then fuses the output likelihoods over cells in a stacked feature vector representation. The baseline, using Gaussian mixture models for the probabilistic modeling and Random Forest for the stacked learning, is superior to other state-of-the-art methods, obtaining an overlap above 75 % on the novel dataset when compared to the manually annotated ground-truth of human segmentations.

Abstract: Ability to recognize patterns is among the most crucial capabilities of human beings for their survival, which enables them to employ their sophisticated neural and cognitive systems [1], for processing complex audio, visual, smell, touch, and taste signals. Man is the most complex and the best existing system of pattern recognition. Without any explicit thinking, we continuously compare, classify, and identify huge amount of signal data everyday [2], starting from the time we get up in the morning till the last second we fall asleep. This includes recognizing the face of a friend in a crowd, a spoken word embedded in noise, the proper key to lock the door, smell of coffee, the voice of a favorite singer, the recognition of alphabetic characters, and millions of more tasks that we perform on regular basis.

Abstract: Following their success in image processing (see Chapter Local Smoothing Neighborhood Filters), neighborhood filters have been extended to 3D surface processing. This adaptation is not straightforward. It has led to several variants for surfaces depending on whether the surface is defined as a mesh, or as a raw data point set. The image gray level in the bilateral similarity measure is replaced by a geometric information such as the normal or the curvature. The first section of this chapter reviews the variants of 3D mesh bilateral filters and compares them to the simplest possible isotropic filter, the mean curvature motion.In a second part, this chapter reviews applications of the bilateral filter to a data composed of a sparse depth map (or of depth cues) and of the image on which they have been computed. Such sparse depth cues can be obtained by stereovision or by psychophysical techniques. The underlying assumption to these applications is that pixels with similar intensity around a region are likely to have similar depths. Therefore, when diffusing depth information with a bilateral filter based on locality and color similarity, the discontinuities in depth are assured to be consistent with the color discontinuities, which is generally a desirable property. In the reviewed applications, this ends up with the reconstruction of a dense perceptual depth map from the joint data of an image and of depth cues.

Abstract: Biologically inspired homing methods, such as the Average Landmark Vector, are an interesting solution for local navigation due to its simplicity. However, usually they require a modification of the environment by placing artificial landmarks in order to work reliably. In this paper we combine the Average Landmark Vector with invariant feature points automatically detected in panoramic images to overcome this limitation. The proposed approach has been evaluated first in simulation and, as promising results are found, also in two data sets of panoramas from real world environments.

Abstract: The increasing ubiquitousness of digital information in our daily lives has positioned video as a favored information vehicle, and given rise to an astonishing generation of social media and surveillance footage. This raises a series of technological demands for automatic video understanding and management, which together with the compromising attentional limitations of human operators, have motivated the research community to guide its steps towards a better attainment of such capabilities. As a result, current trends on cognitive vision promise to recognize complex events and self-adapt to different environments, while managing and integrating several types of knowledge. Future directions suggest to reinforce the multi-modal fusion of information sources and the communication with end-users.