Abstract: Human pose estimation refers to the estimation of the location of body parts and how they are connected in an image. Human pose estimation from monocular images has wide applications (e.g., image indexing). Several surveys on human pose estimation can be found in the literature, but they focus on a certain category; for example, model-based approaches or human motion analysis, etc. As far as we know, an overall review of this problem domain has yet to be provided. Furthermore, recent advancements based on deep learning have brought novel algorithms for this problem. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of human pose estimation from monocular images is carried out including milestone works and recent advancements. Based on one standard pipeline for the solution of computer vision problems, this survey splits the problem into several modules: feature extraction and description, human body models, and modeling
methods. Problem modeling methods are approached based on two means of categorization in this survey. One way to categorize includes top-down and bottom-up methods, and another way includes generative and discriminative methods. Considering the fact that one direct application of human pose estimation is to provide initialization for automatic video surveillance, there are additional sections for motion-related methods in all modules: motion features, motion models, and motion-based methods. Finally, the paper also collects 26 publicly available data sets for validation and provides error measurement methods that are frequently used.

Abstract: Automatic analyzing humans in photographs or videos has great potential applications in computer vision, including medical diagnosis, sports, entertainment, movie editing and surveillance, just to name a few. Body, face and hand are the most studied components of humans. Body has many variabilities in shape and clothing along with high degrees of freedom in pose. Face has many muscles causing many visible deformity, beside variable shape and hair style. Hand is a small object, moving fast and has high degrees of freedom. Adding human characteristics to all aforementioned variabilities makes human analysis quite a challenging task.
In this thesis, we developed human segmentation in different modalities. In a first scenario, we segmented human body and hand in depth images using example-based shape warping. We developed a shape descriptor based on shape context and class probabilities of shape regions to extract nearest neighbors. We then considered rigid affine alignment vs. nonrigid iterative shape warping. In a second scenario, we segmented face in RGB images using convolutional neural networks (CNN). We modeled conditional random field with recurrent neural networks. In our model pair-wise kernels are not fixed and learned during training. We trained the network end-to-end using adversarial networks which improved hair segmentation by a high margin.
We also worked on 3D hand pose estimation in depth images. In a generative approach, we fitted a finger model separately for each finger based on our example-based rigid hand segmentation. We minimized an energy function based on overlapping area, depth discrepancy and finger collisions. We also applied linear models in joint trajectory space to refine occluded joints based on visible joints error and invisible joints trajectory smoothness. In a CNN-based approach, we developed a tree-structure network to train specific features for each finger and fused them for global pose consistency. We also formulated physical and appearance constraints as loss functions.
Finally, we developed a number of applications consisting of human soft biometrics measurement and garment retexturing. We also generated some datasets in this thesis consisting of human segmentation, synthetic hand pose, garment retexturing and Italian gestures.

Abstract: In this paper we present a hybrid language model for the recognition of handwritten historical documents with a structured syntactical layout. Using a hidden Markov model-based recognition framework, a word-based grammar with a closed dictionary is enhanced by a character sequence recognition method. This allows to recognize out-of-dictionary words in controlled parts of the recognition, while keeping a closed vocabulary restriction for other parts. While the current status is work in progress, we can report an improvement in terms of character error rate.

Abstract: During recent years, there here has been a boom in terms of deep learning use for handwriting analysis and recognition. One main application for handwriting analysis is early detection and diagnosis in the health field. Unfortunately, most real case problems still suffer a scarcity of data, which makes difficult the use of deep learning-based models. To alleviate this problem, some works resort to synthetic data generation. Lately, more works are directed towards guided data synthetic generation, a generation that uses the domain and data knowledge to generate realistic data that can be useful to train deep learning models. In this work, we combine the domain knowledge about the Alzheimer’s disease for handwriting and use it for a more guided data generation. Concretely, we have explored the use of in-air movements for synthetic data generation.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the first Challenge of ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition. Challenge 1 is focused on the extraction of text from born-digital images, specifically from images found in Web pages and emails. The challenge was organized in terms of three tasks that look at different stages of the process: text localization, text segmentation and word recognition. In this paper we present the results of the challenge for all three tasks, and make an open call for continuous participation outside the context of ICDAR 2011.