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Author Onur Ferhat edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Analysis of Head-Pose Invariant, Natural Light Gaze Estimation Methods Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Eye tracker devices have traditionally been only used inside laboratories, requiring trained professionals and elaborate setup mechanisms. However, in the recent years the scientific work on easier–to–use eye trackers which require no special hardware—other than the omnipresent front facing cameras in computers, tablets, and mobiles—is aiming at making this technology common–place. These types of trackers have several extra challenges that make the problem harder, such as low resolution images provided by a regular webcam, the changing ambient lighting conditions, personal appearance differences, changes in head pose, and so on. Recent research in the field has focused on all these challenges in order to provide better gaze estimation performances in a real world setup.

In this work, we aim at tackling the gaze tracking problem in a single camera setup. We first analyze all the previous work in the field, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each tried idea. We start our work on the gaze tracker with an appearance–based gaze estimation method, which is the simplest idea that creates a direct mapping between a rectangular image patch extracted around the eye in a camera image, and the gaze point (or gaze direction). Here, we do an extensive analysis of the factors that affect the performance of this tracker in several experimental setups, in order to address these problems in future works. In the second part of our work, we propose a feature–based gaze estimation method, which encodes the eye region image into a compact representation. We argue that this type of representation is better suited to dealing with head pose and lighting condition changes, as it both reduces the dimensionality of the input (i.e. eye image) and breaks the direct connection between image pixel intensities and the gaze estimation. Lastly, we use a face alignment algorithm to have robust face pose estimation, using a 3D model customized to the subject using the tracker. We combine this with a convolutional neural network trained on a large dataset of images to build a face pose invariant gaze tracker.
 
  Address September 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Fernando Vilariño  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-5-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes MV Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Fer2017 Serial (up) 3018  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Arash Akbarinia edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Computational Model of Visual Perception: From Colour to Form Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract The original idea of this project was to study the role of colour in the challenging task of object recognition. We started by extending previous research on colour naming showing that it is feasible to capture colour terms through parsimonious ellipsoids. Although, the results of our model exceeded state-of-the-art in two benchmark datasets, we realised that the two phenomena of metameric lights and colour constancy must be addressed prior to any further colour processing. Our investigation of metameric pairs reached the conclusion that they are infrequent in real world scenarios. Contrary to that, the illumination of a scene often changes dramatically. We addressed this issue by proposing a colour constancy model inspired by the dynamical centre-surround adaptation of neurons in the visual cortex. This was implemented through two overlapping asymmetric Gaussians whose variances and heights are adjusted according to the local contrast of pixels. We complemented this model with a generic contrast-variant pooling mechanism that inversely connect the percentage of pooled signal to the local contrast of a region. The results of our experiments on four benchmark datasets were indeed promising: the proposed model, although simple, outperformed even learning-based approaches in many cases. Encouraged by the success of our contrast-variant surround modulation, we extended this approach to detect boundaries of objects. We proposed an edge detection model based on the first derivative of the Gaussian kernel. We incorporated four types of surround: full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation. Furthermore, we accounted for the pooling mechanism at higher cortical areas and the shape feedback sent to lower areas. Our results in three benchmark datasets showed significant improvement over non-learning algorithms.
To summarise, we demonstrated that biologically-inspired models offer promising solutions to computer vision problems, such as, colour naming, colour constancy and edge detection. We believe that the greatest contribution of this Ph.D dissertation is modelling the concept of dynamic surround modulation that shows the significance of contrast-variant surround integration. The models proposed here are grounded on only a portion of what we know about the human visual system. Therefore, it is only natural to complement them accordingly in future works.
 
  Address October 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor C. Alejandro Parraga  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-4-9 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes NEUROBIT Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Akb2017 Serial (up) 3019  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Cristhian Aguilera edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Local feature description in cross-spectral imagery Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Over the last few years, the number of consumer computer vision applications has increased dramatically. Today, computer vision solutions can be found in video game consoles, smartphone applications, driving assistance – just to name a few. Ideally, we require the performance of those applications, particularly those that are safety critical to remain constant under any external environment factors, such as changes in illumination or weather conditions. However, this is not always possible or very difficult to obtain by only using visible imagery, due to the inherent limitations of the images from that spectral band. For that reason, the use of images from different or multiple spectral bands is becoming more appealing.
The aforementioned possible advantages of using images from multiples spectral bands on various vision applications make multi-spectral image processing a relevant topic for research and development. Like in visible image processing, multi-spectral image processing needs tools and algorithms to handle information from various spectral bands. Furthermore, traditional tools such as local feature detection, which is the basis of many vision tasks such as visual odometry, image registration, or structure from motion, must be adjusted or reformulated to operate under new conditions. Traditional feature detection, description, and matching methods tend to underperform in multi-spectral settings, in comparison to mono-spectral settings, due to the natural differences between each spectral band.
The work in this thesis is focused on the local feature description problem when cross-spectral images are considered. In this context, this dissertation has three main contributions. Firstly, the work starts by proposing the usage of a combination of frequency and spatial information, in a multi-scale scheme, as feature description. Evaluations of this proposal, based on classical hand-made feature descriptors, and comparisons with state of the art cross-spectral approaches help to find and understand limitations of such strategy. Secondly, different convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures are evaluated when used to describe cross-spectral image patches. Results showed that CNN-based methods, designed to work with visible monocular images, could be successfully applied to the description of images from two different spectral bands, with just minor modifications. In this framework, a novel CNN-based network model, specifically intended to describe image patches from two different spectral bands, is proposed. This network, referred to as Q-Net, outperforms state of the art in the cross-spectral domain, including both previous hand-made solutions as well as L2 CNN-based architectures. The third contribution of this dissertation is in the cross-spectral feature description application domain. The multispectral odometry problem is tackled showing a real application of cross-spectral descriptors
In addition to the three main contributions mentioned above, in this dissertation, two different multi-spectral datasets are generated and shared with the community to be used as benchmarks for further studies.
 
  Address October 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-6-3 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Agu2017 Serial (up) 3020  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Laura Igual; Santiago Segui edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Introduction to Data Science – A Python Approach to Concepts, Techniques and Applications. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages 1-215  
  Keywords  
  Abstract  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher 978-3-319-50016-4 Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-3-319-50016-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes MILAB Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ IgS2017 Serial (up) 3027  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Antonio Lopez; Atsushi Imiya; Tomas Pajdla; Jose Manuel Alvarez edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air Type Book Whole
  Year Publication Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract A unified view of the use of computer vision technology for different types of vehicles

Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology focuses on computer vision as on-board technology, bringing together fields of research where computer vision is progressively penetrating: the automotive sector, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles. It also serves as a reference for researchers of current developments and challenges in areas of the application of computer vision, involving vehicles such as advanced driver assistance (pedestrian detection, lane departure warning, traffic sign recognition), autonomous driving and robot navigation (with visual simultaneous localization and mapping) or unmanned aerial vehicles (obstacle avoidance, landscape classification and mapping, fire risk assessment).

The overall role of computer vision for the navigation of different vehicles, as well as technology to address on-board applications, is analysed.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-1-118-86807-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ LIP2017b Serial (up) 3049  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ivet Rafegas edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Color in Visual Recognition: from flat to deep representations and some biological parallelisms Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.

Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.

Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.
 
  Address November 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-7-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Raf2017 Serial (up) 3100  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Cesar de Souza edit  openurl
  Title Action Recognition in Videos: Data-efficient approaches for supervised learning of human action classification models for video Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this dissertation, we explore different ways to perform human action recognition in video clips. We focus on data efficiency, proposing new approaches that alleviate the need for laborious and time-consuming manual data annotation. In the first part of this dissertation, we start by analyzing previous state-of-the-art models, comparing their differences and similarities in order to pinpoint where their real strengths come from. Leveraging this information, we then proceed to boost the classification accuracy of shallow models to levels that rival deep neural networks. We introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of handcrafted spatiotemporal features classified by supervised deep networks. We show in our experiments that our hybrid model combine the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10,000 short clips) and yet improved significantly on the state of the art, including deep models trained on millions of manually labeled images and videos. In the second part of this research, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We then introduce deep multi-task representation learning architectures to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.  
  Address April 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Naila Murray  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Sou2018 Serial (up) 3127  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Alicia Fornes; Bart Lamiroy edit  url
isbn  openurl
  Title Graphics Recognition, Current Trends and Evolutions Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication Graphics Recognition, Current Trends and Evolutions Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 11009 Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC 2017, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2017.
The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. They contain both classical and emerging topics of graphics rcognition, namely analysis and detection of diagrams, search and classification, optical music recognition, interpretation of engineering drawings and maps.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Springer International Publishing Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-3-030-02283-9 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ FoL2018 Serial (up) 3171  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Gholamreza Anbarjafari; Sergio Escalera edit  url
isbn  openurl
  Title Human-Robot Interaction: Theory and Application Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication Human-Robot Interaction: Theory and Application Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-1-78923-316-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes HUPBA Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ AnE2018 Serial (up) 3216  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Suman Ghosh edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Word Spotting and Recognition in Images from Heterogeneous Sources A Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Text is the most common way of information sharing from ages. With recent development of personal images databases and handwritten historic manuscripts the demand for algorithms to make these databases accessible for browsing and indexing are in rise. Enabling search or understanding large collection of manuscripts or image databases needs fast and robust methods. Researchers have found different ways to represent cropped words for understanding and matching, which works well when words are already segmented. However there is no trivial way to extend these for non-segmented documents. In this thesis we explore different methods for text retrieval and recognition from unsegmented document and scene images. Two different ways of representation exist in literature, one uses a fixed length representation learned from cropped words and another a sequence of features of variable length. Throughout this thesis, we have studied both these representation for their suitability in segmentation free understanding of text. In the first part we are focused on segmentation free word spotting using a fixed length representation. We extended the use of the successful PHOC (Pyramidal Histogram of Character) representation to segmentation free retrieval. In the second part of the thesis, we explore sequence based features and finally, we propose a unified solution where the same framework can generate both kind of representations.  
  Address November 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-0-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gho2018 Serial (up) 3217  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Aymen Azaza edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Context, Motion and Semantic Information for Computational Saliency Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract The main objective of this thesis is to highlight the salient object in an image or in a video sequence. We address three important—but in our opinion
insufficiently investigated—aspects of saliency detection. Firstly, we start
by extending previous research on saliency which explicitly models the information provided from the context. Then, we show the importance of
explicit context modelling for saliency estimation. Several important works
in saliency are based on the usage of object proposals. However, these methods
focus on the saliency of the object proposal itself and ignore the context.
To introduce context in such saliency approaches, we couple every object
proposal with its direct context. This allows us to evaluate the importance
of the immediate surround (context) for its saliency. We propose several
saliency features which are computed from the context proposals including
features based on omni-directional and horizontal context continuity. Secondly,
we investigate the usage of top-downmethods (high-level semantic
information) for the task of saliency prediction since most computational
methods are bottom-up or only include few semantic classes. We propose
to consider a wider group of object classes. These objects represent important
semantic information which we will exploit in our saliency prediction
approach. Thirdly, we develop a method to detect video saliency by computing
saliency from supervoxels and optical flow. In addition, we apply the
context features developed in this thesis for video saliency detection. The
method combines shape and motion features with our proposed context
features. To summarize, we prove that extending object proposals with their
direct context improves the task of saliency detection in both image and
video data. Also the importance of the semantic information in saliency
estimation is evaluated. Finally, we propose a newmotion feature to detect
saliency in video data. The three proposed novelties are evaluated on standard
saliency benchmark datasets and are shown to improve with respect to
state-of-the-art.
 
  Address October 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Ali Douik  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-9-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes LAMP; 600.120 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Aza2018 Serial (up) 3218  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Albert Clapes edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Learning to recognize human actions: from hand-crafted to deep-learning based visual representations Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Action recognition is a very challenging and important problem in computer vi­sion. Researchers working on this field aspire to provide computers with the abil­ ity to visually perceive human actions – that is, to observe, interpret, and under­ stand human-related events that occur in the physical environment merely from visual data. The applications of this technology are numerous: human-machine interaction, e-health, monitoring/surveillance, and content-based video retrieval, among others. Hand-crafted methods dominated the field until the apparition of the first successful deep learning-based action recognition works. Although ear­ lier deep-based methods underperformed with respect to hand-crafted approaches, these slowly but steadily improved to become state-of-the-art, eventually achieving better results than hand-crafted ones. Still, hand-crafted approaches can be advan­ tageous in certain scenarios, specially when not enough data is available to train very large deep models or simply to be combined with deep-based methods to fur­ ther boost the performance. Hence, showing how hand-crafted features can provide extra knowledge the deep networks are notable to easily learn about human actions.
This Thesis concurs in time with this change of paradigm and, hence, reflects it into two distinguished parts. In the first part, we focus on improving current suc­ cessful hand-crafted approaches for action recognition and we do so from three dif­ ferent perspectives. Using the dense trajectories framework as a backbone: first, we explore the use of multi-modal and multi-view input
data to enrich the trajectory de­ scriptors. Second, we focus on the classification part of action recognition pipelines and propose an ensemble learning approach, where each classifier leams from a dif­ferent set of local spatiotemporal features to then combine their outputs following an strategy based on the Dempster-Shaffer Theory. And third, we propose a novel hand-crafted feature extraction method that constructs a rnid-level feature descrip­ tion to better modellong-term spatiotemporal dynarnics within action videos. Moving to the second part of the Thesis, we start with a comprehensive study of the current deep-learning based action recognition methods. We review both fun­ damental and cutting edge methodologies reported during the last few years and introduce a taxonomy of deep-leaming methods dedicated to action recognition. In particular, we analyze and discuss how these handle
the temporal dimension of data. Last but not least, we propose a residual recurrent network for action recogni­ tion that naturally integrates all our previous findings in a powerful and prornising framework.
 
  Address January 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Sergio Escalera  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-2-8 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes HUPBA Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Cla2019 Serial (up) 3219  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Dena Bazazian edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Fully Convolutional Networks for Text Understanding in Scene Images Type Book Whole
  Year 2018 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.
 
  Address November 2018  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas;Andrew Bagdanov  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-1-1 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Baz2018 Serial (up) 3220  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Pau Rodriguez edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Towards Robust Neural Models for Fine-Grained Image Recognition Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Fine-grained recognition, i.e. identifying similar subcategories of the same superclass, is central to human activity. Recognizing a friend, finding bacteria in microscopic imagery, or discovering a new kind of galaxy, are just but few examples. However, fine-grained image recognition is still a challenging computer vision task since the differences between two images of the same category can overwhelm the differences between two images of different fine-grained categories. In this regime, where the difference between two categories resides on subtle input changes, excessively invariant CNNs discard those details that help to discriminate between categories and focus on more obvious changes, yielding poor classification performance.
On the other hand, CNNs with too much capacity tend to memorize instance-specific details, thus causing overfitting. In this thesis,motivated by the
potential impact of automatic fine-grained image recognition, we tackle the previous challenges and demonstrate that proper alignment of the inputs, multiple levels of attention, regularization, and explicitmodeling of the output space, results inmore accurate fine-grained recognitionmodels, that generalize better, and are more robust to intra-class variation. Concretely, we study the different stages of the neural network pipeline: input pre-processing, attention to regions, feature activations, and the label space. In each stage, we address different issues that hinder the recognition performance on various fine-grained tasks, and devise solutions in each chapter: i)We deal with the sensitivity to input alignment on fine-grained human facial motion such as pain. ii) We introduce an attention mechanism to allow CNNs to choose and process in detail the most discriminate regions of the image. iii)We further extend attention mechanisms to act on the network activations,
thus allowing them to correct their predictions by looking back at certain
regions, at different levels of abstraction. iv) We propose a regularization loss to prevent high-capacity neural networks to memorize instance details by means of almost-identical feature detectors. v)We finally study the advantages of explicitly modeling the output space within the error-correcting framework. As a result, in this thesis we demonstrate that attention and regularization seem promising directions to overcome the problems of fine-grained image recognition, as well as proper treatment of the input and the output space.
 
  Address March 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Josep M. Gonfaus;Xavier Roca  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-3-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ISE; 600.119 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rod2019 Serial (up) 3258  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Xim Cerda-Company edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Understanding color vision: from psychophysics to computational modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this PhD we have approached the human color vision from two different points of view: psychophysics and computational modeling. First, we have evaluated 15 different tone-mapping operators (TMOs). We have conducted two experiments that
consider two different criteria: the first one evaluates the local relationships among intensity levels and the second one evaluates the global appearance of the tonemapped imagesw.r.t. the physical one (presented side by side). We conclude that the rankings depend on the criterion and they are not correlated. Considering both criteria, the best TMOs are KimKautz (Kim and Kautz, 2008) and Krawczyk (Krawczyk, Myszkowski, and Seidel, 2005). Another conclusion is that a more standardized evaluation criteria is needed to do a fair comparison among TMOs.
Secondly, we have conducted several psychophysical experiments to study the
color induction. We have studied two different properties of the visual stimuli: temporal frequency and luminance spatial distribution. To study the temporal frequency we defined equiluminant stimuli composed by both uniform and striped surrounds and we flashed them varying the flash duration. For uniform surrounds, the results show that color induction depends on both the flash duration and inducer’s chromaticity. As expected, in all chromatic conditions color contrast was induced. In contrast, for striped surrounds, we expected to induce color assimilation, but we observed color contrast or no induction. Since similar but not equiluminant striped stimuli induce color assimilation, we concluded that luminance differences could be a key factor to induce color assimilation. Thus, in a subsequent study, we have studied the luminance differences’ effect on color assimilation. We varied the luminance difference between the target region and its inducers and we observed that color assimilation depends on both this difference and the inducer’s chromaticity. For red-green condition (where the first inducer is red and the second one is green), color assimilation occurs in almost all luminance conditions.
Instead, for green-red condition, color assimilation never occurs. Purple-lime
and lime-purple chromatic conditions show that luminance difference is a key factor to induce color assimilation. When the target is darker than its surround, color assimilation is stronger in purple-lime, while when the target is brighter, color assimilation is stronger in lime-purple (’mirroring’ effect). Moreover, we evaluated whether color assimilation is due to luminance or brightness differences. Similarly to equiluminance condition, when the stimuli are equibrightness no color assimilation is induced. Our results support the hypothesis that mutual-inhibition plays a major role in color perception, or at least in color induction.
Finally, we have defined a new firing rate model of color processing in the V1
parvocellular pathway. We have modeled two different layers of this cortical area: layers 4Cb and 2/3. Our model is a recurrent dynamic computational model that considers both excitatory and inhibitory cells and their lateral connections. Moreover, it considers the existent laminar differences and the cells’ variety. Thus, we have modeled both single- and double-opponent simple cells and complex cells, which are a pool of double-opponent simple cells. A set of sinusoidal drifting gratings have been used to test the architecture. In these gratings we have varied several spatial properties such as temporal and spatial frequencies, grating’s area and orientation. To reproduce the electrophysiological observations, the architecture has to consider the existence of non-oriented double-opponent cells in layer 4Cb and the lack of lateral connections between single-opponent cells. Moreover, we have tested our lateral connections simulating the center-surround modulation and we have reproduced physiological measurements where for high contrast stimulus, the
result of the lateral connections is inhibitory, while it is facilitatory for low contrast stimulus.
 
  Address March 2019  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-4-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes NEUROBIT Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Cer2019 Serial (up) 3259  
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