Abstract: We present a semantic part detection approach that effectively leverages object information. We use the object appearance and its class as indicators of what parts to expect. We also model the expected relative location of parts inside the objects based on their appearance. We achieve this with a new network module, called OffsetNet, that efficiently predicts a variable number of part locations within a given object. Our model incorporates all these cues to
detect parts in the context of their objects. This leads to considerably higher performance for the challenging task of part detection compared to using part appearance alone (+5 mAP on the PASCAL-Part dataset). We also compare
to other part detection methods on both PASCAL-Part and CUB200-2011 datasets.

Abstract: In this paper, we strive to answer two questions: What is the current state of 3D hand pose estimation from depth images? And, what are the next challenges that need to be tackled? Following the successful Hands In the Million Challenge (HIM2017), we investigate the top 10 state-of-the-art methods on three tasks: single frame 3D pose estimation, 3D hand tracking, and hand pose estimation during object interaction. We analyze the performance of different CNN structures with regard to hand shape, joint visibility, view point and articulation distributions. Our findings include: (1) isolated 3D hand pose estimation achieves low mean errors (10 mm) in the view point range of [70, 120] degrees, but it is far from being solved for extreme view points; (2) 3D volumetric representations outperform 2D CNNs, better capturing the spatial structure of the depth data; (3) Discriminative methods still generalize poorly to unseen hand shapes; (4) While joint occlusions pose a challenge for most methods, explicit modeling of structure constraints can significantly narrow the gap between errors on visible and occluded joints.

Abstract: In this paper, a continuous head pose estimation system is proposed to estimate yaw and pitch head angles from raw facial images. Our approach is based on manifold learningbased methods, due to their promising generalization properties shown for face modelling from images. The method combines histograms of oriented gradients, generalized discriminative common vectors and continuous local regression to achieve successful performance. Our proposal was tested on multiple standard face datasets, as well as in a realistic scenario. Results show a considerable performance improvement and a higher consistence of our model in comparison with other state-of-art methods, with angular errors varying between 9 and 17 degrees.

Abstract: Automatically classifying an image has been a central problem in computer vision for decades. A plethora of models has been proposed, from handcrafted feature solutions to more sophisticated approaches such as deep learning. The authors address the problem of remote sensing image classification, which is an important problem to many real world applications. They introduce a novel deep recurrent architecture that incorporates high-level feature descriptors to tackle this challenging problem. Their solution is based on the general encoder–decoder framework. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use a recurrent network structure on this task. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the previous works in the three datasets widely used in the literature. They have achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy rate of 97.29% on the UC Merced dataset.

Abstract: This paper presents the development of an Augmented Reality mobile application which aims at sensibilizing young children to abstract concepts of music. Such concepts are, for instance, the musical notation or the idea of rhythm. Recent studies in Augmented Reality for education suggest that such technologies have multiple benefits for students, including younger ones. As mobile document image acquisition and processing gains maturity on mobile platforms, we explore how it is possible to build a markerless and real-time application to augment the physical documents with didactic animations and interactive virtual content. Given a standard image processing pipeline, we compare the performance of different local descriptors at two key stages of the process. Results suggest alternatives to the SIFT local descriptors, regarding result quality and computational efficiency, both for document model identification and perspective transform estimation. All experiments are performed on an original and public dataset we introduce here.

Abstract: Color description is one of the fundamental problems of image understanding. One of the popular ways to represent colors is by means of color names. Most existing work on color names focuses on only the eleven basic color terms of the English language. This could be limiting the discriminative power of these representations, and representations based on more color names are expected to perform better. However, there exists no clear strategy to choose additional color names. We collect a dataset of 28 additional color names. To ensure that the resulting color representation has high discriminative power we propose a method to order the additional color names according to their complementary nature with the basic color names. This allows us to compute color name representations with high discriminative power of arbitrary length. In the experiments we show that these new color name descriptors outperform the existing color name descriptor on the task of visual tracking, person re-identification and image classification.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is a highly relevant topic for both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this entry, we review the ideas behind pedestrian detection systems from the point of view of perception based on computer vision and machine learning.

Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.