Abstract: In handball videos recorded during the training, multiple players are present in the scene at the same time. Although they all might move and interact, not all players contribute to the currently relevant exercise nor practice the given handball techniques. The goal of this experiment is to automatically determine players on training footage that perform given handball techniques and are therefore considered active. It is a very challenging task for which a precise object detector is needed that can handle cluttered scenes with poor illumination, with many players present in different sizes and distances from the camera, partially occluded, moving fast. To determine which of the detected players are active, additional information is needed about the level of player activity. Since many handball actions are characterized by considerable changes in speed, position, and variations in the player's appearance, we propose using spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and optical flow (OF). Therefore, we propose an active player detection method combining the YOLO object detector and two activity measures based on STIPs and OF. The performance of the proposed method and activity measures are evaluated on a custom handball video dataset acquired during handball training lessons.

Abstract: The cost of drawing object bounding boxes (ie labeling) for millions of images is prohibitively high. For instance, labeling pedestrians in a regular urban image could take 35 seconds on average. Active learning aims to reduce the cost of labeling by selecting only those images that are informative to improve the detection network accuracy. In this paper, we propose a method to perform active learning of object detectors based on convolutional neural networks. We propose a new image-level scoring process to rank unlabeled images for their automatic selection, which clearly outperforms classical scores. The proposed method can be applied to videos and sets of still images. In the former case, temporal selection rules can complement our scoring process. As a relevant use case, we extensively study the performance of our method on the task of pedestrian detection. Overall, the experiments show that the proposed method performs better than random selection.

Abstract: Every day, lifelogging devices, available for recording different aspects of our daily life, increase in number, quality and functions, just like the multiple applications that we give to them. Applying wearable devices to analyse the nutritional habits of people is a challenging application based on acquiring and analyzing life records in long periods of time. However, to extract the information of interest related to the eating patterns of people, we need automatic methods to process large amount of life-logging data (e.g. recognition of food-related objects). Creating a rich set of manually labeled samples to train the algorithms is slow, tedious and subjective. To address this problem, we propose a novel method in the framework of Active Labeling for construct- ing a training set of thousands of images. Inspired by the hierarchical sampling method for active learning [6], we propose an Active forest that organizes hierarchically the data for easy and fast labeling. Moreover, introducing a classifier into the hierarchical structures, as well as transforming the feature space for better data clustering, additionally im- prove the algorithm. Our method is successfully tested to label 89.700 food-related objects and achieves significant reduction in expert time labelling.
Active labeling application applied to food-related object recognition ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/262252017Activelabelingapplicationappliedtofood-relatedobjectrecognition [accessed Jul 14, 2015].

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new framework for image segmentation based on parametrized active contours. The contour and the points of the image space are parametrized using a set of reduced control points that have to form a closed polygon in two dimensional problems and a closed surface in three dimensional problems. By moving the control points, the active contour evolves. We use mean value coordinates as the parametrization tool for the interface, which allows to parametrize any point of the space, inside or outside the closed polygon
or surface. Region-based energies such as the one proposed by Chan and Vese can be easily implemented in both two and three dimensional segmentation problems. We show the usefulness of our approach with several experiments.

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to reconstruct the 3D motion parameters of a human body
model from the known 2D positions of a reduced set of joints in the image plane.
Towards this end, an action-specific motion model is trained from a database of real
motion-captured performances. The learnt motion model is used within a particle
filtering framework as a priori knowledge on human motion. First, our dynamic
model guides the particles according to similar situations previously learnt. Then, the solution space is constrained so only feasible human postures are accepted as valid solutions at each time step. As a result, we are able to track the 3D configuration of the full human body from several cycles of walking motion sequences using only the 2D positions of a very reduced set of joints from lateral or frontal viewpoints.

Abstract: In this dissertation, we explore different ways to perform human action recognition in video clips. We focus on data efficiency, proposing new approaches that alleviate the need for laborious and time-consuming manual data annotation. In the first part of this dissertation, we start by analyzing previous state-of-the-art models, comparing their differences and similarities in order to pinpoint where their real strengths come from. Leveraging this information, we then proceed to boost the classification accuracy of shallow models to levels that rival deep neural networks. We introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of handcrafted spatiotemporal features classified by supervised deep networks. We show in our experiments that our hybrid model combine the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10,000 short clips) and yet improved significantly on the state of the art, including deep models trained on millions of manually labeled images and videos. In the second part of this research, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We then introduce deep multi-task representation learning architectures to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.