Abstract: (Editorial for the Special Issue on Online pattern recognition and machine learning techniques)
In real life, visual learning is supposed to be a continuous process. This paradigm has found its way also in artificial vision systems. There is an increasing trend in pattern recognition represented by online learning approaches, which aims at continuously updating the data representation when new information arrives. Starting with a minimal dataset, the initial knowledge is expanded by incorporating incoming instances, which may have not been previously available or foreseen at the system’s design stage. An interesting characteristic of this strategy is that the train and test phases take place simultaneously. Given the increasing interest in this subject, the aim of this special issue is to be a landmark event in the development of online learning techniques and their applications with the hope that it will capture the interest of a wider audience and will attract even more researchers. We received 19 contributions, of which 9 have been accepted for publication, after having been subjected to usual peer review process.

Abstract: In this paper we present a knowledge base of architectural documents aiming at improving existing methods of floor plan classification and understanding. It consists of an ontological definition of the domain and the inclusion of real instances coming from both, automatically interpreted and manually labeled documents. The knowledge base has proven to be an effective tool to structure our knowledge and to easily maintain and upgrade it. Moreover, it is an appropriate means to automatically check the consistency of relational data and a convenient complement of hard-coded knowledge interpretation systems.

Abstract: Human detection is a key component in fields such as advanced driving assistance and video surveillance. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. Finding good features to build human models for further detection is probably one of the most important issues to face. Currently, shape, texture and motion features have deserve extensive attention in the literature. However, color-based features, which are important in other domains (e.g., image categorization), have received much less attention. In fact, the use of RGB color space has become a kind of choice by default. The focus has been put in developing first and second order features on top of RGB space (e.g., HOG and co-occurrence matrices, resp.). In this paper we evaluate the opponent colors (OPP) space as a biologically inspired alternative for human detection. In particular, by feeding OPP space in the baseline framework of Dalal et al. for human detection (based on RGB, HOG and linear SVM), we will obtain better detection performance than by using RGB space. This is a relevant result since, up to the best of our knowledge, OPP space has not been previously used for human detection. This suggests that in the future it could be worth to compute co-occurrence matrices, self-similarity features, etc., also on top of OPP space, i.e., as we have done with HOG in this paper.

Abstract: Motion perception is one of the most important attributes of the human brain. Visual motion perception consists in inferring speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual inputs. Analogously, computer vision is assisted by motion cues in the scene. Motion detection in computer vision is useful in solving problems such as segmentation, depth from motion, structure from motion, compression, navigation and many others. These problems are common in several applications, for instance, video surveillance, robot navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the most widely used techniques for motion detection is the optical flow estimation. The work in this thesis attempts to make optical flow suitable for the requirements and conditions of driving scenarios. In this context, a novel space-variant representation called reverse log-polar representation is proposed that is shown to be better than the traditional log-polar space-variant representation for ADAS. The space-variant representations reduce the amount of data to be processed. Another major contribution in this research is related to the analysis of the influence of specific characteristics from driving scenarios on the optical flow accuracy. Characteristics such as vehicle speed and
road texture are considered in the aforementioned analysis. From this study, it is inferred that the regularization weight has to be adapted according to the required error measure and for different speeds and road textures. It is also shown that polar represented optical flow suits driving scenarios where predominant motion is translation. Due to the requirements of such a study and by the lack of needed datasets a new synthetic dataset is presented; it contains: i) sequences of different speeds and road textures in an urban scenario; ii) sequences with complex motion of an on-board camera; and iii) sequences with additional moving vehicles in the scene. The ground-truth optical flow is generated by the ray-tracing technique. Further, few applications of optical flow in ADAS are shown. Firstly, a robust RANSAC based technique to estimate horizon line is proposed. Then, an egomotion estimation is presented to compare the proposed space-variant representation with the classical one. As a final contribution, a modification in the regularization term is proposed that notably improves the results
in the ADAS applications. This adaptation is evaluated using a state of the art optical flow technique. The experiments on a public dataset (KITTI) validate the advantages of using the proposed modification.

Abstract: Optical Music Recognition refers to the task of transcribing the image of a music score into a machine-readable format. Many music scores are written in a single staff, and therefore, they could be treated as a sequence. Therefore, this work explores the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks for reading the music score sequentially, where the LSTM helps in keeping the context. For training, we have used a synthetic dataset of more than 40000 images, labeled at primitive level. The experimental results are promising, showing the benefits of our approach.