Abstract: The recognition of abnormal behaviors in video sequences has raised as a hot topic in video understanding research. Particularly, an important challenge resides on automatically detecting abnormality. However, there is no convention about the types of anomalies that training data should derive. In surveillance, these are typically detected when new observations differ substantially from observed, previously learned behavior models, which represent normality. This paper focuses on properly defining anomalies within trajectory analysis: we propose a hierarchical representation conformed by Soft, Intermediate, and Hard Anomaly, which are identified from the extent and nature of deviation from learned models. Towards this end, a novel Gaussian Mixture Model representation of learned route patterns creates a probabilistic map of the image plane, which is applied to detect and classify anomalies in real-time. Our method overcomes limitations of similar existing approaches, and performs correctly even when the tracking is affected by different sources of noise. The reliability of our approach is demonstrated experimentally.

Abstract: DEMO

Abstract: Visual perception capabilities are still highly unreliable in unconstrained settings, and solutions might not beaccurate in all regions of an image. Awareness of the uncertainty of perception is a fundamental requirement for proper high level decision making in a robotic system. Yet, the uncertainty measure is often sacrificed to account for dependencies between object/region classifiers. This is the case of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), the success of which stems from their ability to infer the most likely world configuration, but they do not directly allow to estimate the uncertainty of the solution. In this paper, we consider the setting of assigning semantic labels to the pixels of an image sequence. Instead of using a CRF, we employ a Perturb-and-MAP Random Field, a recently introduced probabilistic model that allows performing fast approximate sampling from its probability density function. This allows to effectively compute the uncertainty of the solution, indicating the reliability of the most likely labeling in each region of the image. We report results on the CamVid dataset, a standard benchmark for semantic labeling of urban image sequences. In our experiments, we show the benefits of exploiting the uncertainty by putting more computational effort on the regions of the image that are less reliable, and use more efficient techniques for other regions, showing little decrease of performance

Abstract: Multi-person tracking can be exploited in applications such as driver assistance, surveillance, multimedia and human-robot interaction. With the help of human detectors, particle filters offer a robust method able to filter noisy detections and provide temporal coherence. However, some traditional problems such as occlusions with other targets or the scene, temporal drifting or even the lost targets detection are rarely considered, making the systems performance decrease. Some authors propose to overcome these problems using heuristics not explained
and formalized in the papers, for instance by defining exceptions to the model updating depending on tracks overlapping. In this paper we propose to formalize these events by the use of a state-graph, defining the current state of the track (e.g., potential , tracked, occluded or lost) and the transitions between states in an explicit way. This approach has the advantage of linking track actions such as the online underlying models updating, which gives flexibility to the system. It provides an explicit representation to adapt the multiple parallel trackers depending on the context, i.e., each track can make use of a specific filtering strategy, dynamic model, number of particles, etc. depending on its state. We implement this technique in a single-camera multi-person tracker and test
it in public video sequences.

Abstract: Poster

Abstract: Vision-based object detectors are crucial for different applications. They rely on learnt object models. Ideally, we would like to deploy our vision system in the scenario where it must operate, and lead it to self-learn how to distinguish the objects of interest, i.e., without human intervention. However, the learning of each object model requires labelled samples collected through a tiresome manual process. For instance, we are interested in exploring the self-training of a pedestrian detector for driver assistance systems. Our first approach to avoid manual labelling consisted in the use of samples coming from realistic computer graphics, so that their labels are automatically available [12]. This would make possible the desired self-training of our pedestrian detector. However, as we showed in [14], between virtual and real worlds it may be a dataset shift. In order to overcome it, we propose the use of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques that avoid human intervention during the adaptation process. In particular, this paper explores the use of the transductive SVM (T-SVM) learning algorithm in order to adapt virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection (Fig. 1).