Abstract: In this work, a new one-class classification ensemble strategy called approximate polytope ensemble is presented. The main contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the geometrical concept of convex hull is used to define the boundary of the target class defining the problem. Expansions and contractions of this geometrical structure are introduced in order to avoid over-fitting. Second, the decision whether a point belongs to the convex hull model in high dimensional spaces is approximated by means of random projections and an ensemble decision process. Finally, a tiling strategy is proposed in order to model non-convex structures. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy is significantly better than state of the art one-class classification methods on over 200 datasets.

Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the behavior of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in images from long-wave infrared spectral band and compare them with the results obtained in the visible spectrum. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are analyzed using a state of the art framework. Experimental results using a cross-spectral outdoor image data set are presented and conclusions from these experiments are given.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images. Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding-window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the Exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Then, we use a more discriminative representation based on Fisher Vector to rerank the best regions retrieved, and the most promising ones are used to expand the Exemplar SVM training set and improve the query representation. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.

Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.

Abstract: Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigated two major aspects of person description: 1) gender and 2) action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part, such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is suboptimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body, and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pretrained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box, which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body, and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large data sets namely: 1) human attribute; 2) head-shoulder; and 3) proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four data sets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: 1) Sports; 2) Willow; 3) PASCAL VOC 2010; and 4) Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.

Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a page classification application in a banking workflow. The proposed architecture represents administrative document images by merging visual and textual descriptions. The visual description is based on a hierarchical representation of the pixel intensity distribution. The textual description uses latent semantic analysis to represent document content as a mixture of topics. Several off-the-shelf classifiers and different strategies for combining visual and textual cues have been evaluated. A final step uses an n-gram model of the page stream allowing a finer-grained classification of pages. The proposed method has been tested in a real large-scale environment and we report results on a dataset of 70,000 pages.

Abstract: The aim of color constancy is to remove the effect of the color of the light source. As color constancy is inherently an ill-posed problem, most of the existing color constancy algorithms are based on specific imaging assumptions (e.g. grey-world and white patch assumption).
In this paper, 3D geometry models are used to determine which color constancy method to use for the different geometrical regions (depth/layer) found
in images. The aim is to classify images into stages (rough 3D geometry models). According to stage models; images are divided into stage regions using hard and soft segmentation. After that, the best color constancy methods is selected for each geometry depth. To this end, we propose a method to combine color constancy algorithms by investigating the relation between depth, local image statistics and color constancy. Image statistics are then exploited per depth to select the proper color constancy method. Our approach opens the possibility to estimate multiple illuminations by distinguishing
nearby light source from distant illuminations. Experiments on state-of-the-art data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art
single color constancy algorithms with an improvement of almost 50% of median angular error. When using a perfect classifier (i.e, all of the test images are correctly classified into stages); the performance of the proposed method achieves an improvement of 52% of the median angular error compared to the best-performing single color constancy algorithm.