Abstract: Human motion recognition is one of the most important branches of human-centered research activities. In recent years, motion recognition based on RGB-D data has attracted much attention. Along with the development in artificial intelligence, deep learning techniques have gained remarkable success in computer vision. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved great success for image-based tasks, and recurrent neural networks (RNN) are renowned for sequence-based problems. Specifically, deep learning methods based on the CNN and RNN architectures have been adopted for motion recognition using RGB-D data. In this paper, a detailed overview of recent advances in RGB-D-based motion recognition is presented. The reviewed methods are broadly categorized into four groups, depending on the modality adopted for recognition: RGB-based, depth-based, skeleton-based and RGB+D-based. As a survey focused on the application of deep learning to RGB-D-based motion recognition, we explicitly discuss the advantages and limitations of existing techniques. Particularly, we highlighted the methods of encoding spatial-temporal-structural information inherent in video sequence, and discuss potential directions for future research.

Abstract: Scene image or video understanding is a challenging task especially when number of video types increases drastically with high variations in background and foreground. This paper proposes a new method for categorizing scene videos into different classes, namely, Animation, Outlet, Sports, e-Learning, Medical, Weather, Defense, Economics, Animal Planet and Technology, for the performance improvement of text detection and recognition, which is an effective approach for scene image or video understanding. For this purpose, at first, we present a new combination of rough and fuzzy concept to study irregular shapes of edge components in input scene videos, which helps to classify edge components into several groups. Next, the proposed method explores gradient direction information of each pixel in each edge component group to extract stroke based features by dividing each group into several intra and inter planes. We further extract correlation and covariance features to encode semantic features located inside planes or between planes. Features of intra and inter planes of groups are then concatenated to get a feature matrix. Finally, the feature matrix is verified with temporal frames and fed to a neural network for categorization. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, at the same time, the performances of text detection and recognition methods are also improved significantly due to categorization.

Abstract: The visual enrichment of digital terrain models with plausible synthetic detail requires the segmentation of aerial images into a suitable collection of categories. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for segmenting high-resolution aerial images into a user-defined set of categories distinguishing e.g. terrain, sand, snow, water, and different types of vegetation. This segmentation-for-synthesis problem implies that per-pixel categories must be established according to the algorithms chosen for rendering the synthetic detail. This precludes the definition of a universal set of labels and hinders the construction of large training sets. Since artists might choose to add new categories on the fly, the whole pipeline must be robust against unbalanced datasets, and fast on both training and inference. Under these constraints, we analyze the contribution of common per-pixel descriptors, and compare the performance of state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms. We report the findings of two user studies. The first one was conducted to analyze human accuracy when manually labeling aerial images. The second user study compares detailed terrains built using different segmentation strategies, including official land cover maps. These studies demonstrate that our approach can be used to turn digital elevation models into fully-featured, detailed terrains with minimal authoring efforts.

Abstract: Textual information found in scene images provides high level semantic information about the image and its context and it can be leveraged for better scene understanding. In this paper we address the problem of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system must return all images containing the queried text. The novelty of the proposed model consists in the usage of a single shot CNN architecture that predicts at the same time bounding boxes and a compact text representation of the words in them. In this way, the text based image retrieval task can be casted as a simple nearest neighbor search of the query text representation over the outputs of the CNN over the entire image
database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture
outperforms previous state-of-the-art while it offers a significant increase
in processing speed.

Abstract: Word spotting in natural scene images has many applications in scene understanding and visual assistance. We propose Soft-PHOC, an intermediate representation of images based on character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of the 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 show how to use our descriptors for word spotting tasks in egocentric camera streams through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. This is based on the Hough Transform over character attribute maps followed by scoring using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). We evaluate our results on ICDAR 2015 Challenge 4 dataset of incidental scene text captured by an egocentric camera.

Abstract: In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate the role of contextualization. Few days after the Dress had appeared on the Internet, we projected it to 240 students on two large screens in the classroom. Participants reported seeing the Dress in B&B (48%), W&G (38%), or blue and brown (B&Br; 7%). Amongst numerous socio-demographic variables, we only observed that W&G viewers were most likely to have always seen the Dress as W&G. In the laboratory, we tested how much contextual information is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. Fifty-seven participants selected colours most precisely matching predominant colours of parts or the full Dress. We presented, in this order, small squares (a), vertical strips (b), and the full Dress (c). We found that (1) B&B, B&Br, and W&G viewers had selected colours differing in lightness and chroma levels for contextualized images only (b, c conditions) and hue for fully contextualized condition only (c) and (2) B&B viewers selected colours most closely matching displayed colours of the Dress. Thus, the Dress phenomenon emerges due to inter-individual differences in subjectively perceived lightness, chroma, and hue, at least when all aspects of the picture need to be integrated. Our results support the previous conclusions that contextual information is key to colour perception; it should be important to understand how this actually happens.

Abstract: A computer-implemented video classification method and system are disclosed. The method includes receiving an input video including a sequence of frames. At least one transformation of the input video is generated, each transformation including a sequence of frames. For the input video and each transformation, local descriptors are extracted from the respective sequence of frames. The local descriptors of the input video and each transformation are aggregated to form an aggregated feature vector with a first set of processing layers learned using unsupervised learning. An output classification value is generated for the input video, based on the aggregated feature vector with a second set of processing layers learned using supervised learning.