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Author Murad Al Haj
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 (up) 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 2278
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Author Albert Gordo
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 (up) 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 2277
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Author David Vazquez
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 (up) 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 2276
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Author Shida Beigpour
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 (up) 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 2267
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Author Marina Alberti
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 (up) 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 2215
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Author Ferran Poveda
Title Computer Graphics and Vision Techniques for the Study of the Muscular Fiber Architecture of the Myocardium Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis (up) Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor Debora Gil;Enric Marti
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Pov2013 Serial 2417
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Author Naveen Onkarappa
Title Optical Flow in Driver Assistance Systems Type Book Whole
Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Motion perception is one of the most important attributes of the human brain. Visual motion perception consists in inferring speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual inputs. Analogously, computer vision is assisted by motion cues in the scene. Motion detection in computer vision is useful in solving problems such as segmentation, depth from motion, structure from motion, compression, navigation and many others. These problems are common in several applications, for instance, video surveillance, robot navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the most widely used techniques for motion detection is the optical flow estimation. The work in this thesis attempts to make optical flow suitable for the requirements and conditions of driving scenarios. In this context, a novel space-variant representation called reverse log-polar representation is proposed that is shown to be better than the traditional log-polar space-variant representation for ADAS. The space-variant representations reduce the amount of data to be processed. Another major contribution in this research is related to the analysis of the influence of specific characteristics from driving scenarios on the optical flow accuracy. Characteristics such as vehicle speed and
road texture are considered in the aforementioned analysis. From this study, it is inferred that the regularization weight has to be adapted according to the required error measure and for different speeds and road textures. It is also shown that polar represented optical flow suits driving scenarios where predominant motion is translation. Due to the requirements of such a study and by the lack of needed datasets a new synthetic dataset is presented; it contains: i) sequences of different speeds and road textures in an urban scenario; ii) sequences with complex motion of an on-board camera; and iii) sequences with additional moving vehicles in the scene. The ground-truth optical flow is generated by the ray-tracing technique. Further, few applications of optical flow in ADAS are shown. Firstly, a robust RANSAC based technique to estimate horizon line is proposed. Then, an egomotion estimation is presented to compare the proposed space-variant representation with the classical one. As a final contribution, a modification in the regularization term is proposed that notably improves the results
in the ADAS applications. This adaptation is evaluated using a state of the art optical flow technique. The experiments on a public dataset (KITTI) validate the advantages of using the proposed modification.
Address Bellaterra
Corporate Author Thesis (up) 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 978-84-940902-1-9 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Nav2013 Serial 2447
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