Abstract: Color description is one of the fundamental problems of image understanding. One of the popular ways to represent colors is by means of color names. Most existing work on color names focuses on only the eleven basic color terms of the English language. This could be limiting the discriminative power of these representations, and representations based on more color names are expected to perform better. However, there exists no clear strategy to choose additional color names. We collect a dataset of 28 additional color names. To ensure that the resulting color representation has high discriminative power we propose a method to order the additional color names according to their complementary nature with the basic color names. This allows us to compute color name representations with high discriminative power of arbitrary length. In the experiments we show that these new color name descriptors outperform the existing color name descriptor on the task of visual tracking, person re-identification and image classification.

Abstract: Many algorithms formulate graph matching as an optimization of an objective function of pairwise quantification of nodes and edges of two graphs to be matched. Pairwise measurements usually consider local attributes but disregard contextual information involved in graph structures. We address this issue by proposing contextual similarities between pairs of nodes. This is done by considering the tensor product graph (TPG) of two graphs to be matched, where each node is an ordered pair of nodes of the operand graphs. Contextual similarities between a pair of nodes are computed by accumulating weighted walks (normalized pairwise similarities) terminating at the corresponding paired node in TPG. Once the contextual similarities are obtained, we formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in TPG. We use contextual similarities to construct an objective function and optimize it with a linear programming approach. Since random walk formulation through TPG takes into account higher order information, it is not a surprise that we obtain more reliable similarities and better discrimination among the nodes and edges. Experimental results shown on synthetic as well as real benchmarks illustrate that higher order contextual similarities increase discriminating power and allow one to find approximate solutions to the subgraph matching problem.

Abstract: Transfer learning aims at adapting a model learned from source dataset to target dataset. It is a beneficial approach especially when annotating on the target dataset is expensive or infeasible. Transfer learning has demonstrated its powerful learning capabilities in various vision tasks. Despite transfer learning being a promising approach, it is still an open question how to adapt the model learned from the source dataset to the target dataset. One big challenge is to prevent the impact of category bias on classification performance. Dataset bias exists when two images from the same category, but from different datasets, are not classified as the same. To address this problem, a transfer learning algorithm has been proposed, called negative back-dropout transfer learning (NB-TL), which utilizes images that have been misclassified and further performs back-dropout strategy on them to penalize errors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In particular, the authors evaluate the performance of the proposed NB-TL algorithm on UCF 101 action recognition dataset, achieving 88.9% recognition rate.

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: Endoscopic estimation of the degree of stenosis in central airway obstruction is subjective and highly variable. Objective: To determine the benefits of using SENSA (System for Endoscopic Stenosis Assessment), an image-based computational software, for obtaining objective stenosis index (SI) measurements among a group of expert bronchoscopists and general pulmonologists. Methods: A total of 7 expert bronchoscopists and 7 general pulmonologists were enrolled to validate SENSA usage. The SI obtained by the physicians and by SENSA were compared with a reference SI to set their precision in SI computation. We used SENSA to efficiently obtain this reference SI in 11 selected cases of benign stenosis. A Web platform with three user-friendly microtasks was designed to gather the data. The users had to visually estimate the SI from videos with and without contours of the normal and the obstructed area provided by SENSA. The users were able to modify the SENSA contours to define the reference SI using morphometric bronchoscopy. Results: Visual SI estimation accuracy was associated with neither bronchoscopic experience (p = 0.71) nor the contours of the normal and the obstructed area provided by the system (p = 0.13). The precision of the SI by SENSA was 97.7% (95% CI: 92.4-103.7), which is significantly better than the precision of the SI by visual estimation (p < 0.001), with an improvement by at least 15%. Conclusion: SENSA provides objective SI measurements with a precision of up to 99.5%, which can be calculated from any bronchoscope using an affordable scalable interface. Providing normal and obstructed contours on bronchoscopic videos does not improve physicians' visual estimation of the SI.

Abstract: Following the increasingly popular trend of social interaction analysis in egocentric vision, this article presents a comprehensive pipeline for automatic social pattern characterization of a wearable photo-camera user. The proposed framework relies merely on the visual analysis of egocentric photo-streams and consists of three major steps. The first step is to detect social interactions of the user where the impact of several social signals on the task is explored. The detected social events are inspected in the second step for categorization into different social meetings. These two steps act at event-level where each potential social event is modeled as a multi-dimensional time-series, whose dimensions correspond to a set of relevant features for each task; finally, LSTM is employed to classify the time-series. The last step of the framework is to characterize social patterns of the user. Our goal is to quantify the duration, the diversity and the frequency of the user social relations in various social situations. This goal is achieved by the discovery of recurrences of the same people across the whole set of social events related to the user. Experimental evaluation over EgoSocialStyle – the proposed dataset in this work, and EGO-GROUP demonstrates promising results on the task of social pattern characterization from egocentric photo-streams.

Abstract: Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) is a successful technique in multi-class classification, which is a core problem in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. A major advantage of ECOC over other methods is that the multi- class problem is decoupled into a set of binary problems that are solved independently. However, literature defines a general error-correcting capability for ECOCs without analyzing how it distributes among classes, hindering a deeper analysis of pair-wise error-correction. To address these limitations this paper proposes an Error-Correcting Factorization (ECF) method, our contribution is three fold: (I) We propose a novel representation of the error-correction capability, called the design matrix, that enables us to build an ECOC on the basis of allocating correction to pairs of classes. (II) We derive the optimal code length of an ECOC using rank properties of the design matrix. (III) ECF is formulated as a discrete optimization problem, and a relaxed solution is found using an efficient constrained block coordinate descent approach. (IV) Enabled by the flexibility introduced with the design matrix we propose to allocate the error-correction on classes that are prone to confusion. Experimental results in several databases show that when allocating the error-correction to confusable classes ECF outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.