Abstract: The importance of logos and trademarks in nowadays society is indisputable, variably seen under a positive light as a valuable service for consumers or a negative one as a catalyst of ever-increasing consumerism. This chapter discusses the technical approaches for enabling machines to work with logos, looking into the latest methodologies for logo detection, localization, representation, recognition, retrieval, and spotting in a variety of media. This analysis is presented in the context of three different applications covering the complete depth and breadth of state of the art techniques. These are trademark retrieval systems, logo recognition in document images, and logo detection and removal in images and videos. This chapter, due to the very nature of logos and trademarks, brings together various facets of document image analysis spanning graphical and textual content, while it links document image analysis to other computer vision domains, especially when it comes to the analysis of real-scene videos and images.

Abstract: Best paper award
The performance of different feature extraction and shape description methods in trademark image recognition systems have been studied by several researchers. However, the potential improvement in classification through feature fusion by ensemble-based methods has remained unattended. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an ensemble of three classifiers, each trained on different feature sets. Three promising shape description techniques, including Zernike moments, generic Fourier descriptors, and shape signature are used to extract informative features from logo images, and each set of features is fed into an individual classifier. In order to reduce recognition error, a powerful combination strategy based on the Dempster-Shafer theory is utilized to fuse the three classifiers trained on different sources of information. This combination strategy can effectively make use of diversity of base learners generated with different set of features. The recognition results of the individual classifiers are compared with those obtained from fusing the classifiers’ output, showing significant performance improvements of the proposed methodology.

Abstract: Unconstrained handwritten text recognition systems maximize the combination of two separate probability scores. The first one is the observation probability that indicates how well the returned word sequence matches the input image. The second score is the probability that reflects how likely a word sequence is according to a language model. Current state-of-the-art recognition systems use statistical language models in form of bigram word probabilities. This paper proposes to model the target language by means of a recurrent neural network with long-short term memory cells. Because the network is recurrent, the considered context is not limited to a fixed size especially as the memory cells are designed to deal with long-term dependencies. In a set of experiments conducted on the IAM off-line database we show the superiority of the proposed language model over statistical n-gram models.

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.

Abstract: In this work, we improve the generative replay in a continual learning setting. We notice that in VAE-based generative replay, the generated features are quite far from the original ones when mapped to the latent space. Therefore, we propose modifications that allow the model to learn and generate complex data. More specifically, we incorporate the distillation in latent space between the current and previous models to reduce feature drift. Additionally, a latent matching for the reconstruction and original data is proposed to improve generated features alignment. Further, based on the observation that the reconstructions are better for preserving knowledge, we add the cycling of generations through the previously trained model to make them closer to the original data. Our method outperforms other generative replay methods in various scenarios.

Abstract: Despite the availability of accurate, commercial gaze tracker devices working with infrared (IR) technology, visible light gaze tracking constitutes an interesting alternative by allowing scalability and removing hardware requirements. Over the last years, this field has seen examples of research showing performance comparable to the IR alternatives. In this work, we survey the previous work on remote, visible light gaze trackers and analyze the explored techniques from various perspectives such as calibration strategies, head pose invariance, and gaze estimation techniques. We also provide information on related aspects of research such as public datasets to test against, open source projects to build upon, and gaze tracking services to directly use in applications. With all this information, we aim to provide the contemporary and future researchers with a map detailing previously explored ideas and the required tools.