Abstract: Part detection is an important aspect of object recognition. Most approaches apply object proposals to generate hundreds of possible part bounding box candidates which are then evaluated by part classifiers. Recently several methods have investigated directly regressing to a limited set of bounding boxes from deep neural network representation. However, for object parts such methods may be unfeasible due to their relatively small size with respect to the image. We propose a hierarchical method for object and part detection. In a single network we first detect the object and then regress to part location proposals based only on the feature representation inside the object. Experiments show that our hierarchical approach outperforms a network which directly regresses the part locations. We also show that our approach obtains part detection accuracy comparable or better than state-of-the-art on the CUB-200 bird and Fashionista clothing item datasets with only a fraction of the number of part proposals.

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 KinectTMrevolution 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: Issues such as content identification, document and image security, audience measurement, ownership and copyright among others can be settled by the use of digital watermarking. Many recent video watermarking methods show drops in visual quality of the sequences. The present work addresses the aforementioned issue by introducing a robust and imperceptible non-blind color video frame watermarking algorithm. The method divides frames into moving and non-moving parts. The non-moving part of each color channel is processed separately using a block-based watermarking scheme. Blocks with an entropy lower than the average entropy of all blocks are subject to a further process for embedding the watermark image. Finally a watermarked frame is generated by adding moving parts to it. Several signal processing attacks are applied to each watermarked frame in order to perform experiments and are compared with some recent algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust against common signal processing attacks.

Abstract: Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.

Abstract: In the context of human action recognition using skeleton data, the 3D trajectories of joint points may be considered as multi-dimensional time series. The traditional recognition technique in the literature is based on time series dis(similarity) measures (such as Dynamic Time Warping). For these general dis(similarity) measures, k-nearest neighbor algorithms are a natural choice. However, k-NN classifiers are known to be sensitive to noise and outliers. In this paper, a new class of Support Vector Machine that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating an efficient time-series distances measure into the kernel function. More specifically, the derivative of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure is employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite (PSD) kernels in the SVM formulation. The recognition results of the proposed technique on two action recognition datasets demonstrates the ourperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, we obtained 89 % accuracy on the well-known MSRAction3D dataset using only 3D trajectories of body joints obtained by Kinect

Abstract: The big data transformation currently revolutionizing science and industry forges novel possibilities in multimodal analysis scarcely imaginable only a decade ago. One of the important economic and industrial problems that stand to benefit from the recent expansion of data availability and computational prowess is the prediction of electricity demand and renewable energy generation. Both are correlates of human activity: spatiotemporal energy consumption patterns in society are a factor of both demand (weather dependent) and supply, which determine cost – a relation expected to strengthen along with increasing renewable energy dependence. One of the main drivers of European weather patterns is the activity of the Atlantic Ocean and in particular its dominant Northern Hemisphere current: the Gulf Stream. We choose this particular current as a test case in part due to larger amount of relevant data and scientific literature available for refinement of analysis techniques.
This data richness is due not only to its economic importance but also to its size being clearly visible in radar and infrared satellite imagery, which makes it easier to detect using Computer Vision (CV). The power of CV techniques makes basic analysis thus developed scalable to other smaller and less known, but still influential, currents, which are not just curves on a map, but complex, evolving, moving branching trees in 3D projected onto a 2D image.
We investigate means of extracting, from several image modalities (including recently available Copernicus radar and earlier Infrared satellites), a parameterized presentation of the state of the Gulf Stream and its environment that is useful as feature space representation in a machine learning context, in this case with the EC’s H2020-sponsored ‘See.4C’ project, in the context of which data scientists may find novel predictors of spatiotemporal energy flow. Although automated extractors of Gulf Stream position exist, they differ in methodology and result. We shall attempt to extract more complex feature representation including branching points, eddies and parameterized changes in transport and velocity. Other related predictive features will be similarly developed, such as inference of deep water flux long the current path and wider spatial scale features such as Hough transform, surface turbulence indicators and temperature gradient indexes along with multi-time scale analysis of ocean height and temperature dynamics. The geospatial imaging and ML community may therefore benefit from a baseline of open-source techniques useful and expandable to other related prediction and/or scientific analysis tasks.

Abstract: Medial surfaces are powerful tools for shape description, but their use has been limited due to the sensibility existing methods to branching artifacts. Medial branching artifacts are associated to perturbations of the object boundary rather than to geometric features. Such instability is a main obstacle for a condent application in shape recognition and description. Medial branches correspond to singularities of the medial surface and, thus, they are problematic for existing morphological and energy-based algorithms. In this paper, we use algebraic geometry concepts in an energy-based approach to compute a medial surface presenting a stable branching topology. We also present an ecient GPU-CPU implementation using standard image processing tools. We show the method computational eciency and quality on a custom made synthetic database. Finally, we present some results on a medical imaging application for localization of abdominal pathologies.