Wenjuan Gong, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2012). Human Action Recognition based on Estimated Weak Poses. EURASIPJ - EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, .
Abstract: We present a novel method for human action recognition (HAR) based on estimated poses from image sequences. We use 3D human pose data as additional information and propose a compact human pose representation, called a weak pose, in a low-dimensional space while still keeping the most discriminative information for a given pose. With predicted poses from image features, we map the problem from image feature space to pose space, where a Bag of Poses (BOP) model is learned for the final goal of HAR. The BOP model is a modified version of the classical bag of words pipeline by building the vocabulary based on the most representative weak poses for a given action. Compared with the standard k-means clustering, our vocabulary selection criteria is proven to be more efficient and robust against the inherent challenges of action recognition. Moreover, since for action recognition the ordering of the poses is discriminative, the BOP model incorporates temporal information: in essence, groups of consecutive poses are considered together when computing the vocabulary and assignment. We tested our method on two well-known datasets: HumanEva and IXMAS, to demonstrate that weak poses aid to improve action recognition accuracies. The proposed method is scene-independent and is comparable with the state-of-art method.
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Noha Elfiky, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2012). Compact and Adaptive Spatial Pyramids for Scene Recognition. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 30(8), 492–500.
Abstract: Most successful approaches on scenerecognition tend to efficiently combine global image features with spatial local appearance and shape cues. On the other hand, less attention has been devoted for studying spatial texture features within scenes. Our method is based on the insight that scenes can be seen as a composition of micro-texture patterns. This paper analyzes the role of texture along with its spatial layout for scenerecognition. However, one main drawback of the resulting spatial representation is its huge dimensionality. Hence, we propose a technique that addresses this problem by presenting a compactSpatialPyramid (SP) representation. The basis of our compact representation, namely, CompactAdaptiveSpatialPyramid (CASP) consists of a two-stages compression strategy. This strategy is based on the Agglomerative Information Bottleneck (AIB) theory for (i) compressing the least informative SP features, and, (ii) automatically learning the most appropriate shape for each category. Our method exceeds the state-of-the-art results on several challenging scenerecognition data sets.
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Jordi Gonzalez, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Liang Wang. (2012). Semantic Understanding of Human Behaviors in Image Sequences: From video-surveillance to video-hermeneutics. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 305–306.
Abstract: Purpose: Atheromatic plaque progression is affected, among others phenomena, by biomechanical, biochemical, and physiological factors. In this paper, the authors introduce a novel framework able to provide both morphological (vessel radius, plaque thickness, and type) and biomechanical (wall shear stress and Von Mises stress) indices of coronary arteries.Methods: First, the approach reconstructs the three-dimensional morphology of the vessel from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and Angiographic sequences, requiring minimal user interaction. Then, a computational pipeline allows to automatically assess fluid-dynamic and mechanical indices. Ten coronary arteries are analyzed illustrating the capabilities of the tool and confirming previous technical and clinical observations.Results: The relations between the arterial indices obtained by IVUS measurement and simulations have been quantitatively analyzed along the whole surface of the artery, extending the analysis of the coronary arteries shown in previous state of the art studies. Additionally, for the first time in the literature, the framework allows the computation of the membrane stresses using a simplified mechanical model of the arterial wall.Conclusions: Circumferentially (within a given frame), statistical analysis shows an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque thickness. At the global level (comparing a frame within the entire vessel), it is observed that heavy plaque accumulations are in general calcified and are located in the areas of the vessel having high wall shear stress. Finally, in their experiments the inverse proportionality between fluid and structural stresses is observed.
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Antonio Hernandez, Nadezhda Zlateva, Alexander Marinov, Miguel Reyes, Petia Radeva, Dimo Dimov, et al. (2012). Human Limb Segmentation in Depth Maps based on Spatio-Temporal Graph Cuts Optimization. JAISE - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, 4(6), 535–546.
Abstract: We present a framework for object segmentation using depth maps based on Random Forest and Graph-cuts theory, and apply it to the segmentation of human limbs. First, from a set of random depth features, Random Forest is used to infer a set of label probabilities for each data sample. This vector of probabilities is used as unary term in α−β swap Graph-cuts algorithm. Moreover, depth values of spatio-temporal neighboring data points are used as boundary potentials. Results on a new multi-label human depth data set show high performance in terms of segmentation overlapping of the novel methodology compared to classical approaches.
Keywords: Multi-modal vision processing; Random Forest; Graph-cuts; multi-label segmentation; human body segmentation
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Sophie Wuerger, Kaida Xiao, Dimitris Mylonas, Q. Huang, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Galina Paramei. (2012). Blue green color categorization in mandarin english speakers. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 29(2), A102–A1207.
Abstract: Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF.
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Yunchao Gong, Svetlana Lazebnik, Albert Gordo, & Florent Perronnin. (2012). Iterative quantization: A procrustean approach to learning binary codes for Large-Scale Image Retrieval. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 35(12), 2916–2929.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of learning similarity-preserving binary codes for efficient similarity search in large-scale image collections. We formulate this problem in terms of finding a rotation of zero-centered data so as to minimize the quantization error of mapping this data to the vertices of a zero-centered binary hypercube, and propose a simple and efficient alternating minimization algorithm to accomplish this task. This algorithm, dubbed iterative quantization (ITQ), has connections to multi-class spectral clustering and to the orthogonal Procrustes problem, and it can be used both with unsupervised data embeddings such as PCA and supervised embeddings such as canonical correlation analysis (CCA). The resulting binary codes significantly outperform several other state-of-the-art methods. We also show that further performance improvements can result from transforming the data with a nonlinear kernel mapping prior to PCA or CCA. Finally, we demonstrate an application of ITQ to learning binary attributes or “classemes” on the ImageNet dataset.
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Santiago Segui, Laura Igual, & Jordi Vitria. (2013). Bagged One Class Classifiers in the Presence of Outliers. IJPRAI - International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 27(5), 1350014–1350035.
Abstract: The problem of training classifiers only with target data arises in many applications where non-target data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Several one-class classification methods have been presented to solve this problem, but most of the methods are highly sensitive to the presence of outliers in the target class. Ensemble methods have therefore been proposed as a powerful way to improve the classification performance of binary/multi-class learning algorithms by introducing diversity into classifiers.
However, their application to one-class classification has been rather limited. In
this paper, we present a new ensemble method based on a non-parametric weighted bagging strategy for one-class classification, to improve accuracy in the presence of outliers. While the standard bagging strategy assumes a uniform data distribution, the method we propose here estimates a probability density based on a forest structure of the data. This assumption allows the estimation of data distribution from the computation of simple univariate and bivariate kernel densities. Experiments using original and noisy versions of 20 different datasets show that bagging ensemble methods applied to different one-class classifiers outperform base one-class classification methods. Moreover, we show that, in noisy versions of the datasets, the non-parametric weighted bagging strategy we propose outperforms the classical bagging strategy in a statistically significant way.
Keywords: One-class Classifier; Ensemble Methods; Bagging and Outliers
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, & Oriol Pujol. (2014). On the Design of an ECOC-Compliant Genetic Algorithm. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(2), 865–884.
Abstract: Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
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Miguel Reyes, Albert Clapes, Jose Ramirez, Juan R Revilla, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). Automatic Digital Biometry Analysis based on Depth Maps. COMPUTIND - Computers in Industry, 64(9), 1316–1325.
Abstract: World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world population is affected by back-related disorders during his life. Current practices to analyze musculo-skeletal disorders (MSDs) are expensive, subjective, and invasive. In this work, we propose a tool for static body posture analysis and dynamic range of movement estimation of the skeleton joints based on 3D anthropometric information from multi-modal data. Given a set of keypoints, RGB and depth data are aligned, depth surface is reconstructed, keypoints are matched, and accurate measurements about posture and spinal curvature are computed. Given a set of joints, range of movement measurements is also obtained. Moreover, gesture recognition based on joint movements is performed to look for the correctness in the development of physical exercises. The system shows high precision and reliable measurements, being useful for posture reeducation purposes to prevent MSDs, as well as tracking the posture evolution of patients in rehabilitation treatments.
Keywords: Multi-modal data fusion; Depth maps; Posture analysis; Anthropometric data; Musculo-skeletal disorders; Gesture analysis
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Eloi Puertas, Sergio Escalera, & Oriol Pujol. (2015). Generalized Multi-scale Stacked Sequential Learning for Multi-class Classification. PAA - Pattern Analysis and Applications, 18(2), 247–261.
Abstract: In many classification problems, neighbor data labels have inherent sequential relationships. Sequential learning algorithms take benefit of these relationships in order to improve generalization. In this paper, we revise the multi-scale sequential learning approach (MSSL) for applying it in the multi-class case (MMSSL). We introduce the error-correcting output codesframework in the MSSL classifiers and propose a formulation for calculating confidence maps from the margins of the base classifiers. In addition, we propose a MMSSL compression approach which reduces the number of features in the extended data set without a loss in performance. The proposed methods are tested on several databases, showing significant performance improvement compared to classical approaches.
Keywords: Stacked sequential learning; Multi-scale; Error-correct output codes (ECOC); Contextual classification
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Albert Clapes, Miguel Reyes, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). Multi-modal User Identification and Object Recognition Surveillance System. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 34(7), 799–808.
Abstract: We propose an automatic surveillance system for user identification and object recognition based on multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis. We model a RGBD environment learning a pixel-based background Gaussian distribution. Then, user and object candidate regions are detected and recognized using robust statistical approaches. The system robustly recognizes users and updates the system in an online way, identifying and detecting new actors in the scene. Moreover, segmented objects are described, matched, recognized, and updated online using view-point 3D descriptions, being robust to partial occlusions and local 3D viewpoint rotations. Finally, the system saves the historic of user–object assignments, being specially useful for surveillance scenarios. The system has been evaluated on a novel data set containing different indoor/outdoor scenarios, objects, and users, showing accurate recognition and better performance than standard state-of-the-art approaches.
Keywords: Multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis; User identification; Object recognition; Intelligent surveillance; Visual features; Statistical learning
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). A Genetic-based Subspace Analysis Method for Improving Error-Correcting Output Coding. PR - Pattern Recognition, 46(10), 2830–2839.
Abstract: Two key factors affecting the performance of Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in multiclass classification problems are the independence of binary classifiers and the problem-dependent coding design. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm-based approach to the design of an application-dependent codematrix in the ECOC framework. The central idea of this work is to design a three-dimensional codematrix, where the third dimension is the feature space of the problem domain. In order to do that, we consider the feature space in the design process of the codematrix with the aim of improving the independence and accuracy of binary classifiers. The proposed method takes advantage of some basic concepts of ensemble classification, such as diversity of classifiers, and also benefits from the evolutionary approach for optimizing the three-dimensional codematrix, taking into account the problem domain. We provide a set of experimental results using a set of benchmark datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, as well as two real multiclass Computer Vision problems. Both sets of experiments are conducted using two different base learners: Neural Networks and Decision Trees. The results show that the proposed method increases the classification accuracy in comparison with the state-of-the-art ECOC coding techniques.
Keywords: Error Correcting Output Codes; Evolutionary computation; Multiclass classification; Feature subspace; Ensemble classification
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Fernando Barrera, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2013). Multispectral Piecewise Planar Stereo using Manhattan-World Assumption. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 34(1), 52–61.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for extracting dense disparity maps from a multispectral stereo rig. The system is constructed with an infrared and a color camera. It is intended to explore novel multispectral stereo matching approaches that will allow further extraction of semantic information. The proposed framework consists of three stages. Firstly, an initial sparse disparity map is generated by using a cost function based on feature matching in a multiresolution scheme. Then, by looking at the color image, a set of planar hypotheses is defined to describe the surfaces on the scene. Finally, the previous stages are combined by reformulating the disparity computation as a global minimization problem. The paper has two main contributions. The first contribution combines mutual information with a shape descriptor based on gradient in a multiresolution scheme. The second contribution, which is based on the Manhattan-world assumption, extracts a dense disparity representation using the graph cut algorithm. Experimental results in outdoor scenarios are provided showing the validity of the proposed framework.
Keywords: Multispectral stereo rig; Dense disparity maps from multispectral stereo; Color and infrared images
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Naveen Onkarappa, & Angel Sappa. (2013). A Novel Space Variant Image Representation. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 47(1-2), 48–59.
Abstract: Traditionally, in machine vision images are represented using cartesian coordinates with uniform sampling along the axes. On the contrary, biological vision systems represent images using polar coordinates with non-uniform sampling. For various advantages provided by space-variant representations many researchers are interested in space-variant computer vision. In this direction the current work proposes a novel and simple space variant representation of images. The proposed representation is compared with the classical log-polar mapping. The log-polar representation is motivated by biological vision having the characteristic of higher resolution at the fovea and reduced resolution at the periphery. On the contrary to the log-polar, the proposed new representation has higher resolution at the periphery and lower resolution at the fovea. Our proposal is proved to be a better representation in navigational scenarios such as driver assistance systems and robotics. The experimental results involve analysis of optical flow fields computed on both proposed and log-polar representations. Additionally, an egomotion estimation application is also shown as an illustrative example. The experimental analysis comprises results from synthetic as well as real sequences.
Keywords: Space-variant representation; Log-polar mapping; Onboard vision applications
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Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, & Laura Dempere-Marco. (2013). A Neurodynamical Model of Brightness Induction in V1. Plos - PloS ONE, 8(5), e64086.
Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that brightness information might be explicitly represented in V1, in contrast to the more common assumption that the striate cortex is an area mostly responsive to sensory information. Here we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such phenomenon. To this end, a neurodynamical model which is based on neurophysiological evidence and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences is presented. The proposed computational model successfully accounts for well known psychophysical effects for static contexts and also for brightness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. This work suggests that intra-cortical interactions in V1 could, at least partially, explain brightness induction effects and reveals how a common general architecture may account for several different fundamental processes, such as visual saliency and brightness induction, which emerge early in the visual processing pathway.
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