Abstract: It has recently been demonstrated that local feature descriptors based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) can significantly improve the matching performance. Previous work on learning such descriptors has focused on exploiting pairs of positive and negative patches to learn discriminative CNN representations. In this work, we propose to utilize triplets of training samples, together with in-triplet mining of hard negatives.
We show that our method achieves state of the art results, without the computational overhead typically associated with mining of negatives and with lower complexity of the network architecture. We compare our approach to recently introduced convolutional local feature descriptors, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods in terms of performance and speed. We also examine different loss functions associated with triplets.

Abstract: Automated video and image analysis can be a very efficient tool to analyze
animal behavior based on sociality, especially in hard access environments
for researchers. The understanding of this social behavior can play a key role in the sustainable design of capture policies of many species. This paper proposes the use of computer vision algorithms to identify and track a specific specie, the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus, a burrowing decapod with relevant commercial value which is captured by trawling. These animals can only be captured when are engaged in seabed excursions, which are strongly related with their social behavior.
This emergent behavior is modulated by the day-night cycle, but their social
interactions remain unknown to the scientific community. The paper introduces an identification scheme made of four distinguishable black and white tags (geometric shapes). The project has recorded 15-day experiments in laboratory pools, under monochromatic blue light (472 nm.) and darkness conditions (recorded using Infra Red light). Using this massive image set, we propose a comparative of state-ofthe-art computer vision algorithms to distinguish and track the different animals’ movements. We evaluate the robustness to the high noise presence in the infrared video signals and free out-of-plane rotations due to animal movement. The experiments show promising accuracies under a cross-validation protocol, being adaptable to the automation and analysis of large scale data. In a second contribution, we created an extensive dataset of shapes (46027 different shapes) from four daily experimental video recordings, which will be available to the community.

Abstract: The representation (or feature) learning has been an emerging concept in the last years, since it collects a set of techniques that are present in any theoretical or practical methodology referring to artificial intelligence. In computer vision, a very common representation has adopted the form of the well-known Bag of Visual Words. This representation appears implicitly in most approaches where images are described, and is also present in a huge number of areas and domains: image content retrieval, pedestrian detection, human-computer interaction, surveillance, e-health, and social computing, amongst others. The early stages of this dissertation provide an approach for learning visual representations inside evolutionary algorithms, which consists of evolving weighting schemes to improve the BoVW representations for the task of recognizing categories of videos and images. Thus, we demonstrate the applicability of the most common weighting schemes, which are often used in text mining but are less frequently found in computer vision tasks. Beyond learning these visual representations, we provide an approach based on fusion strategies for learning spatiotemporal representations, from multimodal data obtained by depth sensors. Besides, we specially aim at the evolutionary and dynamic modelling, where the temporal factor is present in the nature of the data, such as video sequences of gestures and actions. Indeed, we explore the effects of probabilistic modelling for those approaches based on dynamic programming, so as to handle the temporal deformation and variance amongst video sequences of different categories. Finally, we integrate dynamic programming and generative models into an evolutionary computation framework, with the aim of learning Bags of SubGestures (BoSG) representations and hence to improve the generalization capability of standard gesture recognition approaches. The results obtained in the experimentation demonstrate, first, that evolutionary algorithms are useful for improving the representation of BoVW approaches in several datasets for recognizing categories in still images and video sequences. On the other hand, our experimentation reveals that both, the use of dynamic programming and generative models to align video sequences, and the representations obtained from applying fusion strategies in multimodal data, entail an enhancement on the performance when recognizing some gesture categories. Furthermore, the combination of evolutionary algorithms with models based on dynamic programming and generative approaches results, when aiming at the classification of video categories on large video datasets, in a considerable improvement over standard gesture and action recognition approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the applications of these representations in several domains for human analysis: classification of images where humans may be present, action and gesture recognition for general applications, and in particular for conversational settings within the field of restorative justice

Abstract: The Stixel World is a medium-level, compact representation of road scenes that abstracts millions of disparity pixels into hundreds or thousands of stixels. The goal of this work is to implement and evaluate a complete multi-stixel estimation pipeline on an embedded, energyefficient, GPU-accelerated device. This work presents a full GPU-accelerated implementation of stixel estimation that produces reliable results at 26 frames per second (real-time) on the Tegra X1 for disparity images of 1024×440 pixels and stixel widths of 5 pixels, and achieves more than 400 frames per second on a high-end Titan X GPU card.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, object 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 multiview (MV) classifier that accounts for different object views and poses. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multicue, multimodality, and strong MV classifier) affect accuracy both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component, we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition light detection and ranging, a type of modality that is starting to receive increasing attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the accuracy, 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.

Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR).