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Author Fernando Barrera edit  openurl
  Title Multimodal Stereo from Thermal Infrared and Visible Spectrum Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Recent advances in thermal infrared imaging (LWIR) has allowed its use in applications beyond of the military domain. Nowadays, this new family of sensors is included in different technical and scientific applications. They offer features that facilitate tasks, such as detection of pedestrians, hot spots, differences in temperature, among others, which can significantly improve the performance of a system where the persons are expected to play the principal role. For instance, video surveillance applications, monitoring, and pedestrian detection.
During this dissertation the next question is stated: Could a couple of sensors measuring different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as the visible and thermal infrared, be used to extract depth information? Although it is a complex question, we shows that a system of these characteristics is possible as well as their advantages, drawbacks, and potential opportunities.
The matching and fusion of data coming from different sensors, as the emissions registered at visible and infrared bands, represents a special challenge, because it has been showed that theses signals are weak correlated. Therefore, many traditional techniques of image processing and computer vision are not helpful, requiring adjustments for their correct performance in every modality.
In this research an experimental study that compares different cost functions and matching approaches is performed, in order to build a multimodal stereovision system. Furthermore, the common problems in infrared/visible stereo, specially in the outdoor scenes are identified. Our framework summarizes the architecture of a generic stereo algorithm, at different levels: computational, functional, and structural, which can be extended toward high-level fusion (semantic) and high-order (prior).The proposed framework is intended to explore novel multimodal stereo matching approaches, going from sparse to dense representations (both disparity and depth maps). Moreover, context information is added in form of priors and assumptions. Finally, this dissertation shows a promissory way toward the integration of multiple sensors for recovering three-dimensional information.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Felipe Lumbreras;Angel Sappa  
  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 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Bar2012 Serial (up) 2209  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Diego Alejandro Cheda edit  openurl
  Title Monocular Depth Cues in Computer Vision Applications Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.

In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.

In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Daniel Ponsa;Antonio Lopez  
  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 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Che2012 Serial (up) 2210  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jorge Bernal edit  openurl
  Title Polyp Localization and Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images by Means of a Model of Appearance for Polyps Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer death worldwide and its survival rate depends on the stage in which it is detected on hence the necessity for an early colon screening. There are several screening techniques but colonoscopy is still nowadays the gold standard, although it has some drawbacks such as the miss rate. Our contribution, in the field of intelligent systems for colonoscopy, aims at providing a polyp localization and a polyp segmentation system based on a model of appearance for polyps. To develop both methods we define a model of appearance for polyps, which describes a polyp as enclosed by intensity valleys. The novelty of our contribution resides on the fact that we include in our model aspects of the image formation and we also consider the presence of other elements from the endoluminal scene such as specular highlights and blood vessels, which have an impact on the performance of our methods. In order to develop our polyp localization method we accumulate valley information in order to generate energy maps, which are also used to guide the polyp segmentation. Our methods achieve promising results in polyp localization and segmentation. As we want to explore the usability of our methods we present a comparative analysis between physicians fixations obtained via an eye tracking device and our polyp localization method. The results show that our method is indistinguishable to novice physicians although it is far from expert physicians.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor F. Javier Sanchez;Fernando Vilariño  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area 800 Expedition Conference  
  Notes MV Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Ber2012 Serial (up) 2211  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Naila Murray edit  openurl
  Title Predicting Saliency and Aesthetics in Images: A Bottom-up Perspective Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.

In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.

Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.

As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu;Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mur2012 Serial (up) 2212  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Marina Alberti edit  openurl
  Title Detection and Alignment of Vascular Structures in Intravascular Ultrasound using Pattern Recognition Techniques Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this thesis, several methods for the automatic analysis of Intravascular Ultrasound
(IVUS) sequences are presented, aimed at assisting physicians in the diagnosis, the assessment of the intervention and the monitoring of the patients with coronary disease.
The basis for the developed frameworks are machine learning, pattern recognition and
image processing techniques.
First, a novel approach for the automatic detection of vascular bifurcations in
IVUS is presented. The task is addressed as a binary classication problem (identifying bifurcation and non-bifurcation angular sectors in the sequence images). The
multiscale stacked sequential learning algorithm is applied, to take into account the
spatial and temporal context in IVUS sequences, and the results are rened using
a-priori information about branching dimensions and geometry. The achieved performance is comparable to intra- and inter-observer variability.
Then, we propose a novel method for the automatic non-rigid alignment of IVUS
sequences of the same patient, acquired at dierent moments (before and after percutaneous coronary intervention, or at baseline and follow-up examinations). The
method is based on the description of the morphological content of the vessel, obtained by extracting temporal morphological proles from the IVUS acquisitions, by
means of methods for segmentation, characterization and detection in IVUS. A technique for non-rigid sequence alignment – the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm -
is applied to the proles and adapted to the specic clinical problem. Two dierent robust strategies are proposed to address the partial overlapping between frames
of corresponding sequences, and a regularization term is introduced to compensate
for possible errors in the prole extraction. The benets of the proposed strategy
are demonstrated by extensive validation on synthetic and in-vivo data. The results
show the interest of the proposed non-linear alignment and the clinical value of the
method.
Finally, a novel automatic approach for the extraction of the luminal border in
IVUS images is presented. The method applies the multiscale stacked sequential
learning algorithm and extends it to 2-D+T, in a rst classication phase (the identi-
cation of lumen and non-lumen regions of the images), while an active contour model
is used in a second phase, to identify the lumen contour. The method is extended
to the longitudinal dimension of the sequences and it is validated on a challenging
data-set.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Simone Balocco;Petia Radeva  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes MILAB Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Alb2013 Serial (up) 2215  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Susana Alvarez edit  openurl
  Title Revisión de la teoría de los Textons Enfoque computacional en color Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract El color y la textura son dos estímulos visuales importantes para la interpretación de las imágenes. La definición de descriptores computacionales que combinan estas dos características es aún un problema abierto. La dificultad se deriva esencialmente de la propia naturaleza de ambas, mientras que la textura es una propiedad de una región, el color es una propiedad de un punto.

Hasta ahora se han utilizado tres los tipos de aproximaciones para la combinación, (a) se describe la textura directamente en cada uno de los canales color, (b) se describen textura y color por separado y se combinan al final, y (c) la combinación se realiza con técnicas de aprendizaje automático. Considerando que este problema se resuelve en el sistema visual humano en niveles muy tempranos, en esta tesis se propone estudiar el problema a partir de la implementación directa de una teoría perceptual, la teoría de los textons, y explorar así su extensión a color.

Puesto que la teoría de los textons se basa en la descripción de la textura a partir de las densidades de los atributos locales, esto se adapta perfectamente al marco de trabajo de los descriptores holísticos (bag-of-words). Se han estudiado diversos descriptores basados en diferentes espacios de textons, y diferentes representaciones de las imágenes. Asimismo se ha estudiado la viabilidad de estos descriptores en una representación conceptual de nivel intermedio.

Los descriptores propuestos han demostrado ser muy eficientes en aplicaciones de recuperación y clasificación de imágenes, presentando ventajas en la generación de vocabularios. Los vocabularios se obtienen cuantificando directamente espacios de baja dimensión y la perceptualidad de estos espacios permite asociar semántica de bajo nivel a las palabras visuales. El estudio de los resultados permite concluir que si bien la aproximación holística es muy eficiente, la introducción de co-ocurrencia espacial de las propiedades de forma y color de los blobs de la imagen es un elemento clave para su combinación, hecho que no contradice las evidencias en percepción
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Alv2012b Serial (up) 2216  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Sergio Escalera edit  openurl
  Title Coding and Decoding Design of ECOCs for Multi-class Pattern and Object Recognition A Type Book Whole
  Year 2008 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Many real problems require multi-class decisions. In the Pattern Recognition field,
many techniques have been proposed to deal with the binary problem. However,
the extension of many 2-class classifiers to the multi-class case is a hard task. In
this sense, Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) demonstrated to be a powerful
tool to combine any number of binary classifiers to model multi-class problems. But
there are still many open issues about the capabilities of the ECOC framework. In
this thesis, the two main stages of an ECOC design are analyzed: the coding and
the decoding steps. We present different problem-dependent designs. These designs
take advantage of the knowledge of the problem domain to minimize the number
of classifiers, obtaining a high classification performance. On the other hand, we
analyze the ECOC codification in order to define new decoding rules that take full
benefit from the information provided at the coding step. Moreover, as a successful
classification requires a rich feature set, new feature detection/extraction techniques
are presented and evaluated on the new ECOC designs. The evaluation of the new
methodology is performed on different real and synthetic data sets: UCI Machine
Learning Repository, handwriting symbols, traffic signs from a Mobile Mapping System, Intravascular Ultrasound images, Caltech Repository data set or Chaga’s disease
data set. The results of this thesis show that significant performance improvements
are obtained on both traditional coding and decoding ECOC designs when the new
coding and decoding rules are taken into account.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Petia Radeva;Oriol Pujol  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes MILAB; HuPBA Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Esc2008b Serial (up) 2217  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Shida Beigpour edit  openurl
  Title Illumination and object reflectance modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Bei2013 Serial (up) 2267  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author David Vazquez edit   pdf
isbn  openurl
  Title Domain Adaptation of Virtual and Real Worlds for Pedestrian Detection Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 1 Issue 1 Pages 1-105  
  Keywords Pedestrian Detection; Domain Adaptation  
  Abstract Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications, e.g. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Intelligent Video Surveillance and Multimedia systems. Most promising pedestrian detectors rely on appearance-based classifiers trained with annotated data. However, the required annotation step represents an intensive and subjective task for humans, what makes worth to minimize their intervention in this process by using computational tools like realistic virtual worlds. The reason to use these kind of tools relies in the fact that they allow the automatic generation of precise and rich annotations of visual information. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of data comes with the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt with virtual-world data work successfully for pedestrian detection in real-world scenarios?. To answer this question, we conduct different experiments that suggest a positive answer. However, the pedestrian classifiers trained with virtual-world data can suffer the so called dataset shift problem as real-world based classifiers does. Accordingly, we have designed different domain adaptation techniques to face this problem, all of them integrated in a same framework (V-AYLA). We have explored different methods to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifiers by collecting a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combining them with many samples of the source domain (virtual world). The extensive experiments we present show that pedestrian detectors developed within the V-AYLA framework do achieve domain adaptation. Ideally, we would like to adapt our system without any human intervention. Therefore, as a first proof of concept we also propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that avoids human intervention during the adaptation process. To the best of our knowledge, this Thesis work is the first demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector. Last but not least, we also assessed a different strategy to avoid the dataset shift that consists in collecting real-world samples and retrain with them in such a way that no bounding boxes of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. We show that the generated classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating pedestrian bounding boxes. The results presented on this Thesis not only end with a proposal for adapting a virtual-world pedestrian detector to the real world, but also it goes further by pointing out a new methodology that would allow the system to adapt to different situations, which we hope will provide the foundations for future research in this unexplored area.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Barcelona Editor Antonio Lopez;Daniel Ponsa  
  Language English Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-940530-1-6 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes adas Approved yes  
  Call Number ADAS @ adas @ Vaz2013 Serial (up) 2276  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Albert Gordo edit  openurl
  Title Document Image Representation, Classification and Retrieval in Large-Scale Domains Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Despite the “paperless office” ideal that started in the decade of the seventies, businesses still strive against an increasing amount of paper documentation. Companies still receive huge amounts of paper documentation that need to be analyzed and processed, mostly in a manual way. A solution for this task consists in, first, automatically scanning the incoming documents. Then, document images can be analyzed and information can be extracted from the data. Documents can also be automatically dispatched to the appropriate workflows, used to retrieve similar documents in the dataset to transfer information, etc.

Due to the nature of this “digital mailroom”, we need document representation methods to be general, i.e., able to cope with very different types of documents. We need the methods to be sound, i.e., able to cope with unexpected types of documents, noise, etc. And, we need to methods to be scalable, i.e., able to cope with thousands or millions of documents that need to be processed, stored, and consulted. Unfortunately, current techniques of document representation, classification and retrieval are not apt for this digital mailroom framework, since they do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.

Through this thesis we focus on the problem of document representation aimed at classification and retrieval tasks under this digital mailroom framework. We first propose a novel document representation based on runlength histograms, and extend it to cope with more complex documents such as multiple-page documents, or documents that contain more sources of information such as extracted OCR text. Then we focus on the scalability requirements and propose a novel binarization method which we dubbed PCAE, as well as two general asymmetric distances between binary embeddings that can significantly improve the retrieval results at a minimal extra computational cost. Finally, we note the importance of supervised learning when performing large-scale retrieval, and study several approaches that can significantly boost the results at no extra cost at query time.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Ernest Valveny;Florent Perronnin  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gor2013 Serial (up) 2277  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Murad Al Haj edit  openurl
  Title Looking at Faces: Detection, Tracking and Pose Estimation Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Humans can effortlessly perceive faces, follow them over space and time, and decode their rich content, such as pose, identity and expression. However, despite many decades of research on automatic facial perception in areas like face detection, expression recognition, pose estimation and face recognition, and despite many successes, a complete solution remains elusive. This thesis is dedicated to three problems in automatic face perception, namely face detection, face tracking and pose estimation.

In face detection, an initial simple model is presented that uses pixel-based heuristics to segment skin locations and hand-crafted rules to determine the locations of the faces present in an image. Different colorspaces are studied to judge whether a colorspace transformation can aid skin color detection. The output of this study is used in the design of a more complex face detector that is able to successfully generalize to different scenarios.

In face tracking, a framework that combines estimation and control in a joint scheme is presented to track a face with a single pan-tilt-zoom camera. While this work is mainly motivated by tracking faces, it can be easily applied atop of any detector to track different objects. The applicability of this method is demonstrated on simulated as well as real-life scenarios.

The last and most important part of this thesis is dedicate to monocular head pose estimation. In this part, a method based on partial least squares (PLS) regression is proposed to estimate pose and solve the alignment problem simultaneously. The contributions of this work are two-fold: 1) demonstrating that the proposed method achieves better than state-of-the-art results on the estimation problem and 2) developing a technique to reduce misalignment based on the learned PLS factors that outperform multiple instance learning (MIL) without the need for any re-training or the inclusion of misaligned samples in the training process, as normally done in MIL.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ISE Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Haj2013 Serial (up) 2278  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Wenjuan Gong edit  openurl
  Title 3D Motion Data aided Human Action Recognition and Pose Estimation Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this work, we explore human action recognition and pose estimation prob-
lems. Different from traditional works of learning from 2D images or video
sequences and their annotated output, we seek to solve the problems with ad-
ditional 3D motion capture information, which helps to fill the gap between 2D
image features and human interpretations.
We first compare two different schools of approaches commonly used for 3D
pose estimation from 2D pose configuration: modeling and learning methods.
By looking into experiments results and considering our problems, we fixed a
learning method as the following approaches to do pose estimation. We then
establish a framework by adding a module of detecting 2D pose configuration
from images with varied background, which widely extend the application of
the approach. We also seek to directly estimate 3D poses from image features,
instead of estimating 2D poses as a intermediate module. We explore a robust
input feature, which combined with the proposed distance measure, provides
a solution for noisy or corrupted inputs. We further utilize the above method
to estimate weak poses,which is a concise representation of the original poses
by using dimension deduction technologies, from image features. Weak pose
space is where we calculate vocabulary and label action types using a bog of
words pipeline. Temporal information of an action is taken into consideration by
considering several consecutive frames as a single unit for computing vocabulary
and histogram assignments.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ISE Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gon2013 Serial (up) 2279  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Javier Marin edit  openurl
  Title Pedestrian Detection Based on Local Experts Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract During the last decade vision-based human detection systems have started to play a key rolein multiple applications linked to driver assistance, surveillance, robot sensing and home automation.
Detecting humans is by far one of the most challenging tasks in Computer Vision.
This is mainly due to the high degree of variability in the human appearanceassociated to
the clothing, pose, shape and size. Besides, other factors such as cluttered scenarios, partial occlusions, or environmental conditions can make the detection task even harder.
Most promising methods of the state-of-the-art rely on discriminative learning paradigms which are fed with positive and negative examples. The training data is one of the most
relevant elements in order to build a robust detector as it has to cope the large variability of the target. In order to create this dataset human supervision is required. The drawback at this point is the arduous effort of annotating as well as looking for such claimed variability.
In this PhD thesis we address two recurrent problems in the literature. In the first stage,we aim to reduce the consuming task of annotating, namely, by using computer graphics.
More concretely, we develop a virtual urban scenario for later generating a pedestrian dataset.
Then, we train a detector using this dataset, and finally we assess if this detector can be successfully applied in a real scenario.
In the second stage, we focus on increasing the robustness of our pedestrian detectors
under partial occlusions. In particular, we present a novel occlusion handling approach to increase the performance of block-based holistic methods under partial occlusions. For this purpose, we make use of local experts via a RandomSubspaceMethod (RSM) to handle these cases. If the method infers a possible partial occlusion, then the RSM, based on performance statistics obtained from partially occluded data, is applied. The last objective of this thesis
is to propose a robust pedestrian detector based on an ensemble of local experts. To achieve this goal, we use the random forest paradigm, where the trees act as ensembles an their nodesare the local experts. In particular, each expert focus on performing a robust classification ofa pedestrian body patch. This approach offers computational efficiency and far less design complexity when compared to other state-of-the-artmethods, while reaching better accuracy
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Jaume Amores  
  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 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mar2013 Serial (up) 2280  
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Author Muhammad Anwer Rao edit  openurl
  Title Color for Object Detection and Action Recognition Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Recognizing object categories in real world images is a challenging problem in computer vision. The deformable part based framework is currently the most successful approach for object detection. Generally, HOG are used for image representation within the part-based framework. For action recognition, the bag-of-word framework has shown to provide promising results. Within the bag-of-words framework, local image patches are described by SIFT descriptor. Contrary to object detection and action recognition, combining color and shape has shown to provide the best performance for object and scene recognition.

In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the problem of person detection in still images. Standard person detection approaches rely on intensity based features for image representation while ignoring the color. Channel based descriptors is one of the most commonly used approaches in object recognition. This inspires us to evaluate incorporating color information using the channel based fusion approach for the task of person detection.

In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of object detection in still images. Due to high dimensionality, channel based fusion increases the computational cost. Moreover, channel based fusion has been found to obtain inferior results for object category where one of the visual varies significantly. On the other hand, late fusion is known to provide improved results for a wide range of object categories. A consequence of late fusion strategy is the need of a pure color descriptor. Therefore, we propose to use Color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact and computationally efficient. Consequently color attributes are combined with traditional shape features providing excellent results for object detection task.

Finally, we focus on the problem of action detection and classification in still images. We investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in still images. We also evaluate different fusion approaches for combining color and shape information for action recognition. Additionally, an analysis is performed to validate the contribution of color for action recognition. Our results clearly demonstrate that combining color and shape information significantly improve the performance of both action classification and detection in still images.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;Joost Van de Weijer  
  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 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Rao2013 Serial (up) 2281  
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Author David Geronimo; Antonio Lopez edit  doi
isbn  openurl
  Title Vision-based Pedestrian Protection Systems for Intelligent Vehicles Type Book Whole
  Year 2014 Publication SpringerBriefs in Computer Science Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages 1-114  
  Keywords Computer Vision; Driver Assistance Systems; Intelligent Vehicles; Pedestrian Detection; Vulnerable Road Users  
  Abstract Pedestrian Protection Systems (PPSs) are on-board systems aimed at detecting and tracking people in the surroundings of a vehicle in order to avoid potentially dangerous situations. These systems, together with other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane departure warning or adaptive cruise control, are one of the most promising ways to improve traffic safety. By the use of computer vision, cameras working either in the visible or infra-red spectra have been demonstrated as a reliable sensor to perform this task. Nevertheless, the variability of human’s appearance, not only in terms of clothing and sizes but also as a result of their dynamic shape, makes pedestrians one of the most complex classes even for computer vision. Moreover, the unstructured changing and unpredictable environment in which such on-board systems must work makes detection a difficult task to be carried out with the demanded robustness. In this brief, the state of the art in PPSs is introduced through the review of the most relevant papers of the last decade. A common computational architecture is presented as a framework to organize each method according to its main contribution. More than 300 papers are referenced, most of them addressing pedestrian detection and others corresponding to the descriptors (features), pedestrian models, and learning machines used. In addition, an overview of topics such as real-time aspects, systems benchmarking and future challenges of this research area are presented.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis  
  Publisher Springer Briefs in Computer Vision Place of Publication Editor  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-1-4614-7986-4 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes ADAS; 600.076 Approved no  
  Call Number GeL2014 Serial (up) 2325  
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