Abstract: Head pose estimation is a critical problem in many computer vision applications. These include human computer interaction, video surveillance, face and expression recognition. In most prior work on heads pose estimation, the positions of the faces on which the pose is to be estimated are specified manually. Therefore, the results are reported without studying the effect of misalignment. We propose a method based on partial least squares (PLS) regression to estimate pose and solve the alignment problem simultaneously. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: 1) we show that the kernel version of PLS (kPLS) achieves better than state-of-the-art results on the estimation problem and 2) we develop a technique to reduce misalignment based on the learned PLS factors.

Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%

Abstract: This paper is focused on the automatic recognition of human events in static images. Popular techniques use knowledge of the human pose for inferring the action, and the most recent approaches tend to combine pose information with either knowledge of the scene or of the objects with which the human interacts. Our approach makes a step forward in this direction by combining the human pose with the scene in which the human is placed, together with the spatial relationships between humans and objects. Based on standard, simple descriptors like HOG and SIFT, recognition performance is enhanced when these three types of knowledge are taken into account. Results obtained in the PASCAL 2010 Action Recognition Dataset demonstrate that our technique reaches state-of-the-art results using simple descriptors and classifiers.

Abstract: Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to discriminate images from unseen classes by exploiting relations to seen classes via their attribute-based descriptions. Since attributes are often related to specific parts of objects, many recent works focus on discovering discriminative regions. However, these methods usually require additional complex part detection modules or attention mechanisms. In this paper, 1) we show that common ZSL backbones (without explicit attention nor part detection) can implicitly localize attributes, yet this property is not exploited. 2) Exploiting it, we then propose SELAR, a simple method that further encourages attribute localization, surprisingly achieving very competitive generalized ZSL (GZSL) performance when compared with more complex state-of-the-art methods. Our findings provide useful insight for designing future GZSL methods, and SELAR provides an easy to implement yet strong baseline.

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.

Abstract: This paper presents the design and implementation details of a system build-up by using off-the-shelf algorithms for urban video analytics. The system allows the connection to
public video surveillance camera networks to obtain the necessary information to generate statistics from urban scenarios (e.g., amount of vehicles, type of cars, direction, numbers of persons, etc.). The obtained information could be used not only for traffic management but also to estimate the carbon footprint of urban scenarios. As a case study, a university campus is selected to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The system is implemented in a modular way so that it is being used as a testbed to evaluate different algorithms. Implementation results are provided showing the validity and utility of the proposed approach.