Abstract: This paper addresses the static and dynamic recognition of basic facial expressions. It has two main contributions. First, we introduce a view- and texture-independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. We represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Second, we compare this dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that the former performs better than the latter. We provide evaluations of performance using three subspace learning techniques: linear discriminant analysis, non-parametric discriminant analysis and support vector machines.

Abstract: Deformable models have received much popularity due to their ability to include high-level knowledge on the application domain into low-level image processing. Still, most proposed active contour models do not sufficiently profit from the application information and they are too generalized, leading to non-optimal final results of segmentation, tracking or 3D reconstruction processes. In this paper we propose a new deformable model defined in a statistical framework to segment objects of natural scenes. We perform a supervised learning of local appearance of the textured objects and construct a feature space using a set of co-occurrence matrix measures. Linear Discriminant Analysis allows us to obtain an optimal reduced feature space where a mixture model is applied to construct a likelihood map. Instead of using a heuristic potential field, our active model is deformed on a regularized version of the likelihood map in order to segment objects characterized by the same texture pattern. Different tests on synthetic images, natural scene and medical images show the advantages of our statistic deformable model.

Abstract: Several studies have recorded color emotions in subjects viewing uniform color (UC) samples. We conduct an experiment to measure and model how these color emotions change when texture is added to the color samples. Using a computer monitor, our subjects arrange samples along four scales: warm–cool, masculine–feminine, hard–soft, and heavy–light. Three sample types of increasing visual complexity are used: UC, grayscale textures, and color textures (CTs). To assess the intraobserver variability, the experiment is repeated after 1 week. Our results show that texture fully determines the responses on the Hard-Soft scale, and plays a role of decreasing weight for the masculine–feminine, heavy–light, and warm–cool scales. Using some 25,000 observer responses, we derive color emotion functions that predict the group-averaged scale responses from the samples' color and texture parameters. For UC samples, the accuracy of our functions is significantly higher (average R2 = 0.88) than that of previously reported functions applied to our data. The functions derived for CT samples have an accuracy of R2 = 0.80. We conclude that when textured samples are used in color emotion studies, the psychological responses may be strongly affected by texture. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2010

Abstract: This paper presents a first approach to build colour and structural descriptors for information retrieval on a people database. Queries are formulated in terms of their appearance that allows to seek people wearing specific clothes of a given colour name or texture. Descriptors are automatically computed by following three essential steps. A colour naming labelling from pixel properties. A region seg- mentation step based on colour properties of pixels combined with edge information. And a high level step that models the region arrangements in order to build clothes structure. Results are tested on large set of images from real scenes taken at the entrance desk of a building

Abstract: Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way (Goel et al., 2013; Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) object proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we introduce a novel object proposals method that is specifically designed for text. We rely on a similarity based region grouping algorithm that generates a hierarchy of word hypotheses. Over the nodes of this hierarchy it is possible to apply a holistic word recognition method in an efficient way.
Our experiments demonstrate that the presented method is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals when compared with class-independent algorithms. We show impressive recall rates with a few thousand proposals in different standard benchmarks, including focused or incidental text datasets, and multi-language scenarios. Moreover, the combination of our object proposals with existing whole-word recognizers (Almazán et al., 2014; Jaderberg et al., 2016) shows competitive performance in end-to-end word spotting, and, in some benchmarks, outperforms previously published results. Concretely, in the challenging ICDAR2015 Incidental Text dataset, we overcome in more than 10% F-score the best-performing method in the last ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (Karatzas, 2015). Source code of the complete end-to-end system is available at https://github.com/lluisgomez/TextProposals.