Abstract: Best student paper award.
Pain detection using facial images is of critical importance in many Health applications. Since pain is a spatiotemporal process, recent works on this topic employ facial spatiotemporal features to detect pain. These systems extract such features from the entire area of the face. In this paper, we show that by employing super-pixels we can divide the face into three regions, in a way that only one of these regions (about one third of the face) contributes to the pain estimation and the other two regions can be discarded. The experimental results on the UNBCMcMaster database show that the proposed system using this single region outperforms state-of-the-art systems in detecting no-pain scenarios, while it reaches comparable results in detecting weak and severe pain scenarios.

Abstract: We present the 2016 ChaLearn Looking at People and Faces of the World Challenge and Workshop, which ran three competitions on the common theme of face analysis from still images. The first one, Looking at People, addressed age estimation, while the second and third competitions, Faces of the World, addressed accessory classification and smile and gender classification, respectively. We present two crowd-sourcing methodologies used to collect manual annotations. A custom-build application was used to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). For the Faces of the World data, the citizen-science Zooniverse platform was used. This paper summarizes the three challenges and the data used, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competitions. Details of the ChaLearn LAP FotW competitions can be found at http://gesture.chalearn.org.

Abstract: The sixteen papers in this special section focus on human pose recovery and behavior analysis (HuPBA). This is one of the most challenging topics in computer vision, pattern analysis, and machine learning. It is of critical importance for application areas that include gaming, computer interaction, human robot interaction, security, commerce, assistive technologies and rehabilitation, sports, sign language recognition, and driver assistance technology, to mention just a few. In essence, HuPBA requires dealing with the articulated nature of the human body, changes in appearance due to clothing, and the inherent problems of clutter scenes, such as background artifacts, occlusions, and illumination changes. These papers represent the most recent research in this field, including new methods considering still images, image sequences, depth data, stereo vision, 3D vision, audio, and IMUs, among others.

Abstract: Poster

Abstract: The human visual system and most digital cameras sample the continuous spectral power distribution through three classes of receptors. This implies that two distinct spectral reflectances can result in identical tristimulus values under one illuminant and differ under another – the problem of metamer mismatching. It is still debated how frequent this issue arises in the real world, using naturally occurring reflectance functions and common illuminants.
We gathered more than ten thousand spectral reflectance samples from various sources, covering a wide range of environments (e.g., flowers, plants, Munsell chips) and evaluated their responses under a number of natural and artificial source of lights. For each pair of reflectance functions, we estimated the perceived difference using the CIE-defined distance ΔE2000 metric in Lab color space.
The degree of metamer mismatching depended on the lower threshold value l when two samples would be considered to lead to equal sensor excitations (ΔE < l), and on the higher threshold value h when they would be considered different. For example, for l=h=1, we found that 43.129 comparisons out of a total of 6×107 pairs would be considered metameric (1 in 104). For l=1 and h=5, this number reduced to 705 metameric pairs (2 in 106). Extreme metamers, for instance l=1 and h=10, were rare (22 pairs or 6 in 108), as were instances where the two members of a metameric pair would be assigned to different color categories. Not unexpectedly, we observed variations among different reflectance databases and illuminant spectra with more frequency under artificial illuminants than natural ones.
Overall, our numbers are not very different from those obtained earlier (Foster et al, JOSA A, 2006). However, our results also show that the degree of metamerism is typically not very strong and that category switches hardly ever occur.

Abstract: This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition, and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for scene text images. We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploits the discriminative power of small stroke-parts, in a fine-grained classification framework. In addition, we propose a new public benchmark dataset for the evaluation of joint text detection and script identification in natural scenes. Experiments done in this new dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields state of the art results, while it generalizes well to different datasets and variable number of scripts. The evidence provided shows that multi-lingual scene text recognition in the wild is a viable proposition. Source code of the proposed method is made available online.