Antonio Hernandez. (2015). From pixels to gestures: learning visual representations for human analysis in color and depth data sequences (Sergio Escalera, & Stan Sclaroff, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The visual analysis of humans from images is an important topic of interest due to its relevance to many computer vision applications like pedestrian detection, monitoring and surveillance, human-computer interaction, e-health or content-based image retrieval, among others.
In this dissertation we are interested in learning different visual representations of the human body that are helpful for the visual analysis of humans in images and video sequences. To that end, we analyze both RGB and depth image modalities and address the problem from three different research lines, at different levels of abstraction; from pixels to gestures: human segmentation, human pose estimation and gesture recognition.
First, we show how binary segmentation (object vs. background) of the human body in image sequences is helpful to remove all the background clutter present in the scene. The presented method, based on Graph cuts optimization, enforces spatio-temporal consistency of the produced segmentation masks among consecutive frames. Secondly, we present a framework for multi-label segmentation for obtaining much more detailed segmentation masks: instead of just obtaining a binary representation separating the human body from the background, finer segmentation masks can be obtained separating the different body parts.
At a higher level of abstraction, we aim for a simpler yet descriptive representation of the human body. Human pose estimation methods usually rely on skeletal models of the human body, formed by segments (or rectangles) that represent the body limbs, appropriately connected following the kinematic constraints of the human body. In practice, such skeletal models must fulfill some constraints in order to allow for efficient inference, while actually limiting the expressiveness of the model. In order to cope with this, we introduce a top-down approach for predicting the position of the body parts in the model, using a mid-level part representation based on Poselets.
Finally, we propose a framework for gesture recognition based on the bag of visual words framework. We leverage the benefits of RGB and depth image modalities by combining modality-specific visual vocabularies in a late fusion fashion. A new rotation-variant depth descriptor is presented, yielding better results than other state-of-the-art descriptors. Moreover, spatio-temporal pyramids are used to encode rough spatial and temporal structure. In addition, we present a probabilistic reformulation of Dynamic Time Warping for gesture segmentation in video sequences. A Gaussian-based probabilistic model of a gesture is learnt, implicitly encoding possible deformations in both spatial and time domains.
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Svebor Karaman, Giuseppe Lisanti, Andrew Bagdanov, & Alberto del Bimbo. (2014). From re-identification to identity inference: Labeling consistency by local similarity constraints. In Person Re-Identification (Vol. 2, pp. 287–307). Springer London.
Abstract: In this chapter, we introduce the problem of identity inference as a generalization of person re-identification. It is most appropriate to distinguish identity inference from re-identification in situations where a large number of observations must be identified without knowing a priori that groups of test images represent the same individual. The standard single- and multishot person re-identification common in the literature are special cases of our formulation. We present an approach to solving identity inference by modeling it as a labeling problem in a Conditional Random Field (CRF). The CRF model ensures that the final labeling gives similar labels to detections that are similar in feature space. Experimental results are given on the ETHZ, i-LIDS and CAVIAR datasets. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance for multishot re-identification, and our results on the more general identity inference problem demonstrate that we are able to infer the identity of very many examples even with very few labeled images in the gallery.
Keywords: re-identification; Identity inference; Conditional random fields; Video surveillance
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Antonio Lopez, Jiaolong Xu, Jose Luis Gomez, David Vazquez, & German Ros. (2017). From Virtual to Real World Visual Perception using Domain Adaptation -- The DPM as Example. In Gabriela Csurka (Ed.), Domain Adaptation in Computer Vision Applications (pp. 243–258). Springer.
Abstract: Supervised learning tends to produce more accurate classifiers than unsupervised learning in general. This implies that training data is preferred with annotations. When addressing visual perception challenges, such as localizing certain object classes within an image, the learning of the involved classifiers turns out to be a practical bottleneck. The reason is that, at least, we have to frame object examples with bounding boxes in thousands of images. A priori, the more complex the model is regarding its number of parameters, the more annotated examples are required. This annotation task is performed by human oracles, which ends up in inaccuracies and errors in the annotations (aka ground truth) since the task is inherently very cumbersome and sometimes ambiguous. As an alternative we have pioneered the use of virtual worlds for collecting such annotations automatically and with high precision. However, since the models learned with virtual data must operate in the real world, we still need to perform domain adaptation (DA). In this chapter we revisit the DA of a deformable part-based model (DPM) as an exemplifying case of virtual- to-real-world DA. As a use case, we address the challenge of vehicle detection for driver assistance, using different publicly available virtual-world data. While doing so, we investigate questions such as: how does the domain gap behave due to virtual-vs-real data with respect to dominant object appearance per domain, as well as the role of photo-realism in the virtual world.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation
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A. Martinez, & Jordi Vitria. (1997). From Visual Scanning to Object Recognition. In (SNRFAI’97) 7th Spanish National Symposium on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis..
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A. Martinez, & Jordi Vitria. (1996). From visual scanning to object recognition.
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Utkarsh Porwal, Alicia Fornes, & Faisal Shafait (Eds.). (2022). Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. 18th International Conference, ICFHR 2022 (Vol. 13639). LNCS. Springer.
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Dena Bazazian. (2018). Fully Convolutional Networks for Text Understanding in Scene Images (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Andrew Bagdanov, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of 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 call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.
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Carolina Malagelada, F.De Lorio, Santiago Segui, S. Mendez, Michal Drozdzal, Jordi Vitria, et al. (2012). Functional gut disorders or disordered gut function? Small bowel dysmotility evidenced by an original technique. NEUMOT - Neurogastroenterology & Motility, 24(3), 223–230.
Abstract: JCR Impact Factor 2010: 3.349
Background This study aimed to determine the proportion of cases with abnormal intestinal motility among patients with functional bowel disorders. To this end, we applied an original method, previously developed in our laboratory, for analysis of endoluminal images obtained by capsule endoscopy. This novel technology is based on computer vision and machine learning techniques.
Methods The endoscopic capsule (Pillcam SB1; Given Imaging, Yokneam, Israel) was administered to 80 patients with functional bowel disorders and 70 healthy subjects. Endoluminal image analysis was performed with a computer vision program developed for the evaluation of contractile events (luminal occlusions and radial wrinkles), non-contractile patterns (open tunnel and smooth wall patterns), type of content (secretions, chyme) and motion of wall and contents. Normality range and discrimination of abnormal cases were established by a machine learning technique. Specifically, an iterative classifier (one-class support vector machine) was applied in a random population of 50 healthy subjects as a training set and the remaining subjects (20 healthy subjects and 80 patients) as a test set.
Key Results The classifier identified as abnormal 29% of patients with functional diseases of the bowel (23 of 80), and as normal 97% of healthy subjects (68 of 70) (P < 0.05 by chi-squared test). Patients identified as abnormal clustered in two groups, which exhibited either a hyper- or a hypodynamic motility pattern. The motor behavior was unrelated to clinical features.
Conclusions & Inferences With appropriate methodology, abnormal intestinal motility can be demonstrated in a significant proportion of patients with functional bowel disorders, implying a pathologic disturbance of gut physiology.
Keywords: capsule endoscopy;computer vision analysis;machine learning technique;small bowel motility
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Mariella Dimiccoli. (2016). Fundamentals of cone regression. Journal of Statistics Surveys, 53–99.
Abstract: Cone regression is a particular case of quadratic programming that minimizes a weighted sum of squared residuals under a set of linear inequality constraints. Several important statistical problems such as isotonic, concave regression or ANOVA under partial orderings, just to name a few, can be considered as particular instances of the cone regression problem. Given its relevance in Statistics, this paper aims to address the fundamentals of cone regression from a theoretical and practical point of view. Several formulations of the cone regression problem are considered and, focusing on the particular case of concave regression as an example, several algorithms are analyzed and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively through numerical simulations. Several improvements to enhance numerical stability and bound the computational cost are proposed. For each analyzed algorithm, the pseudo-code and its corresponding code in Matlab are provided. The results from this study demonstrate that the choice of the optimization approach strongly impacts the numerical performances. It is also shown that methods are not currently available to solve efficiently cone regression problems with large dimension (more than many thousands of points). We suggest further research to fill this gap by exploiting and adapting classical multi-scale strategy to compute an approximate solution.
Keywords: cone regression; linear complementarity problems; proximal operators.
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Oriol Pujol, Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2005). Fundamentals of Stop and Go active models. Image and Vision Computing, 23(8), 681–691.
Abstract: An efficient snake formulation should conform to the idea of picking the smoothest curve among all the shapes approximating an object of interest. In current geodesic snakes, the regularizing curvature also affects the convergence stage, hindering the latter at concave regions. In the present work, we make use of characteristic functions to define a novel geodesic formulation that decouples regularity and convergence. This term decoupling endows the snake with higher adaptability to non-convex shapes. Convergence is ensured by splitting the definition of the external force into an attractive vector field and a repulsive one. In our paper, we propose to use likelihood maps as approximation of characteristic functions of object appearance. The better efficiency and accuracy of our decoupled scheme are illustrated in the particular case of feature space-based segmentation.
Keywords: Deformable models; Geodesic snakes; Region-based segmentation
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S. Gonzalez, & A. Martinez. (1997). Fundamentos de la Vision aplicada a la Robotica Autonoma..
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Joost Van de Weijer, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2013). Fusing Color and Shape for Bag-of-Words Based Object Recognition. In 4th Computational Color Imaging Workshop (Vol. 7786, pp. 25–34). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this article we provide an analysis of existing methods for the incorporation of color in bag-of-words based image representations. We propose a list of desired properties on which bases fusing methods can be compared. We discuss existing methods and indicate shortcomings of the two well-known fusing methods, namely early and late fusion. Several recent works have addressed these shortcomings by exploiting top-down information in the bag-of-words pipeline: color attention which is motivated from human vision, and Portmanteau vocabularies which are based on information theoretic compression of product vocabularies. We point out several remaining challenges in cue fusion and provide directions for future research.
Keywords: Object Recognition; color features; bag-of-words; image classification
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Ivan Huerta, Ariel Amato, Jordi Gonzalez, & Juan J. Villanueva. (2008). Fusing Edge Cues to Handle Colour Problems in Image Segmentation. In Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, 5th International Conference (Vol. 5098, 279–288). LNCS.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 26(7), 763–779.
Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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O. Fors, Xavier Otazu, & J. Nuñez. (2001). Fusion Mediante Wavelets de Imagenes Spot-pan y del Satelite Tailandes TMSAT..
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