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Oscar Lopes, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Spherical Blurred Shape Model for 3-D Object and Pose Recognition: Quantitative Analysis and HCI Applications in Smart Environments. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(12), 2379–2390.
Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.
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Reza Azad, Maryam Asadi-Aghbolaghi, Shohreh Kasaei, & Sergio Escalera. (2019). Dynamic 3D Hand Gesture Recognition by Learning Weighted Depth Motion Maps. TCSVT - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 29(6), 1729–1740.
Abstract: Hand gesture recognition from sequences of depth maps is a challenging computer vision task because of the low inter-class and high intra-class variability, different execution rates of each gesture, and the high articulated nature of human hand. In this paper, a multilevel temporal sampling (MTS) method is first proposed that is based on the motion energy of key-frames of depth sequences. As a result, long, middle, and short sequences are generated that contain the relevant gesture information. The MTS results in increasing the intra-class similarity while raising the inter-class dissimilarities. The weighted depth motion map (WDMM) is then proposed to extract the spatio-temporal information from generated summarized sequences by an accumulated weighted absolute difference of consecutive frames. The histogram of gradient (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP) are exploited to extract features from WDMM. The obtained results define the current state-of-the-art on three public benchmark datasets of: MSR Gesture 3D, SKIG, and MSR Action 3D, for 3D hand gesture recognition. We also achieve competitive results on NTU action dataset.
Keywords: Hand gesture recognition; Multilevel temporal sampling; Weighted depth motion map; Spatio-temporal description; VLAD encoding
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Jose Seabra, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, Petia Radeva, & Joao Sanchez. (2011). Rayleigh Mixture Model for Plaque Characterization in Intravascular Ultrasound. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(5), 1314–1324.
Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
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Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Yagmur Gucluturk, Marc Perez, Umut Guçlu, Carlos Andujar, Xavier Baro, et al. (2022). First Impressions: A Survey on Vision-Based Apparent Personality Trait Analysis. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 13(1), 75–95.
Abstract: Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.
Keywords: Personality computing; first impressions; person perception; big-five; subjective bias; computer vision; machine learning; nonverbal signals; facial expression; gesture; speech analysis; multi-modal recognition
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Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu, Xavier Baro, Hugo Jair Escalante, Isabelle Guyon, Sergio Escalera, et al. (2018). Multimodal First Impression Analysis with Deep Residual Networks. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 8(3), 316–329.
Abstract: People form first impressions about the personalities of unfamiliar individuals even after very brief interactions with them. In this study we present and evaluate several models that mimic this automatic social behavior. Specifically, we present several models trained on a large dataset of short YouTube video blog posts for predicting apparent Big Five personality traits of people and whether they seem suitable to be recommended to a job interview. Along with presenting our audiovisual approach and results that won the third place in the ChaLearn First Impressions Challenge, we investigate modeling in different modalities including audio only, visual only, language only, audiovisual, and combination of audiovisual and language. Our results demonstrate that the best performance could be obtained using a fusion of all data modalities. Finally, in order to promote explainability in machine learning and to provide an example for the upcoming ChaLearn challenges, we present a simple approach for explaining the predictions for job interview recommendations
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Fatemeh Noroozi, Marina Marjanovic, Angelina Njegus, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2019). Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition in Video Clips. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 10(1), 60–75.
Abstract: This paper presents a multimodal emotion recognition system, which is based on the analysis of audio and visual cues. From the audio channel, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Filter Bank Energies and prosodic features are extracted. For the visual part, two strategies are considered. First, facial landmarks’ geometric relations, i.e. distances and angles, are computed. Second, we summarize each emotional video into a reduced set of key-frames, which are taught to visually discriminate between the emotions. In order to do so, a convolutional neural network is applied to key-frames summarizing videos. Finally, confidence outputs of all the classifiers from all the modalities are used to define a new feature space to be learned for final emotion label prediction, in a late fusion/stacking fashion. The experiments conducted on the SAVEE, eNTERFACE’05, and RML databases show significant performance improvements by our proposed system in comparison to current alternatives, defining the current state-of-the-art in all three databases.
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Maria Elena Meza-de-Luna, Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Bogdan Raducanu, & Joaquin Salas. (2016). Assessing the Influence of Mirroring on the Perception of Professional Competence using Wearable Technology. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 9(2), 161–175.
Abstract: Nonverbal communication is an intrinsic part in daily face-to-face meetings. A frequently observed behavior during social interactions is mirroring, in which one person tends to mimic the attitude of the counterpart. This paper shows that a computer vision system could be used to predict the perception of competence in dyadic interactions through the automatic detection of mirroring
events. To prove our hypothesis, we developed: (1) A social assistant for mirroring detection, using a wearable device which includes a video camera and (2) an automatic classifier for the perception of competence, using the number of nodding gestures and mirroring events as predictors. For our study, we used a mixed-method approach in an experimental design where 48 participants acting as customers interacted with a confederated psychologist. We found that the number of nods or mirroring events has a significant influence on the perception of competence. Our results suggest that: (1) Customer mirroring is a better predictor than psychologist mirroring; (2) the number of psychologist’s nods is a better predictor than the number of customer’s nods; (3) except for the psychologist mirroring, the computer vision algorithm we used worked about equally well whether it was acquiring images from wearable smartglasses or fixed cameras.
Keywords: Mirroring; Nodding; Competence; Perception; Wearable Technology
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David Roche, Debora Gil, & Jesus Giraldo. (2013). Detecting loss of diversity for an efficient termination of EAs. In 15th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (pp. 561–566).
Abstract: Termination of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) at its steady state so that useless iterations are not performed is a main point for its efficient application to black-box problems. Many EA algorithms evolve while there is still diversity in their population and, thus, they could be terminated by analyzing the behavior some measures of EA population diversity. This paper presents a numeric approximation to steady states that can be used to detect the moment EA population has lost its diversity for EA termination. Our condition has been applied to 3 EA paradigms based on diversity and a selection of functions
covering the properties most relevant for EA convergence.
Experiments show that our condition works regardless of the search space dimension and function landscape.
Keywords: EA termination; EA population diversity; EA steady state
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2010). Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition Using Laplacian Eigenmaps-Based Manifold Learning. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (156–161).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for tracking, modelling and recognition of facial expressions. The main contributions are: (i) a view- and texture independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker; (ii) the complexity of the non-linear facial expression space is modelled through a manifold, whose structure is learned using Laplacian Eigenmaps. The projected facial expressions are afterwards recognized based on Nearest Neighbor classifier; (iii) with the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the perceived facial expression.
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Alejandro Tabas, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, & Laura Igual. (2014). Spatial Discriminant ICA for RS-fMRI characterisation. In 4th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging (pp. 1–4).
Abstract: Resting-State fMRI (RS-fMRI) is a brain imaging technique useful for exploring functional connectivity. A major point of interest in RS-fMRI analysis is to isolate connectivity patterns characterising disorders such as for instance ADHD. Such characterisation is usually performed in two steps: first, all connectivity patterns in the data are extracted by means of Independent Component Analysis (ICA); second, standard statistical tests are performed over the extracted patterns to find differences between control and clinical groups. In this work we introduce a novel, single-step, approach for this problem termed Spatial Discriminant ICA. The algorithm can efficiently isolate networks of functional connectivity characterising a clinical group by combining ICA and a new variant of the Fisher’s Linear Discriminant also introduced in this work. As the characterisation is carried out in a single step, it potentially provides for a richer characterisation of inter-class differences. The algorithm is tested using synthetic and real fMRI data, showing promising results in both experiments.
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Jelena Gorbova, Egils Avots, Iiris Lusi, Mark Fishel, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2018). Integrating Vision and Language for First Impression Personality Analysis. MULTIMEDIA - IEEE Multimedia, 25(2), 24–33.
Abstract: The authors present a novel methodology for analyzing integrated audiovisual signals and language to assess a persons personality. An evaluation of their proposed multimodal method using a job candidate screening system that predicted five personality traits from a short video demonstrates the methods effectiveness.
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Mikhail Mozerov, Fei Yang, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2019). Sparse Data Interpolation Using the Geodesic Distance Affinity Space. SPL - IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 26(6), 943–947.
Abstract: In this letter, we adapt the geodesic distance-based recursive filter to the sparse data interpolation problem. The proposed technique is general and can be easily applied to any kind of sparse data. We demonstrate its superiority over other interpolation techniques in three experiments for qualitative and quantitative evaluation. In addition, we compare our method with the popular interpolation algorithm presented in the paper on EpicFlow optical flow, which is intuitively motivated by a similar geodesic distance principle. The comparison shows that our algorithm is more accurate and considerably faster than the EpicFlow interpolation technique.
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M. Altillawi, S. Li, S.M. Prakhya, Z. Liu, & Joan Serrat. (2024). Implicit Learning of Scene Geometry From Poses for Global Localization. ROBOTAUTOMLET - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 9(2), 955–962.
Abstract: Global visual localization estimates the absolute pose of a camera using a single image, in a previously mapped area. Obtaining the pose from a single image enables many robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. Inspired by latest advances in deep learning, many existing approaches directly learn and regress 6 DoF pose from an input image. However, these methods do not fully utilize the underlying scene geometry for pose regression. The challenge in monocular relocalization is the minimal availability of supervised training data, which is just the corresponding 6 DoF poses of the images. In this letter, we propose to utilize these minimal available labels (i.e., poses) to learn the underlying 3D geometry of the scene and use the geometry to estimate the 6 DoF camera pose. We present a learning method that uses these pose labels and rigid alignment to learn two 3D geometric representations ( X, Y, Z coordinates ) of the scene, one in camera coordinate frame and the other in global coordinate frame. Given a single image, it estimates these two 3D scene representations, which are then aligned to estimate a pose that matches the pose label. This formulation allows for the active inclusion of additional learning constraints to minimize 3D alignment errors between the two 3D scene representations, and 2D re-projection errors between the 3D global scene representation and 2D image pixels, resulting in improved localization accuracy. During inference, our model estimates the 3D scene geometry in camera and global frames and aligns them rigidly to obtain pose in real-time. We evaluate our work on three common visual localization datasets, conduct ablation studies, and show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art regression methods' pose accuracy on all datasets.
Keywords: Localization; Localization and mapping; Deep learning for visual perception; Visual learning
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Fernando Barrera, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Multimodal Stereo Vision System: 3D Data Extraction and Algorithm Evaluation. J-STSP - IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 6(5), 437–446.
Abstract: This paper proposes an imaging system for computing sparse depth maps from multispectral images. A special stereo head consisting of an infrared and a color camera defines the proposed multimodal acquisition system. The cameras are rigidly attached so that their image planes are parallel. Details about the calibration and image rectification procedure are provided. Sparse disparity maps are obtained by the combined use of mutual information enriched with gradient information. The proposed approach is evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Furthermore, a multispectral dataset, color and infrared images, together with their corresponding ground truth disparity maps, is generated and used as a test bed. Experimental results in real outdoor scenarios are provided showing its viability and that the proposed approach is not restricted to a specific domain.
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Karim Lekadir, Alfiia Galimzianova, Angels Betriu, Maria del Mar Vila, Laura Igual, Daniel L. Rubin, et al. (2017). A Convolutional Neural Network for Automatic Characterization of Plaque Composition in Carotid Ultrasound. J-BHI - IEEE Journal Biomedical and Health Informatics, 21(1), 48–55.
Abstract: Characterization of carotid plaque composition, more specifically the amount of lipid core, fibrous tissue, and calcified tissue, is an important task for the identification of plaques that are prone to rupture, and thus for early risk estimation of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events. Due to its low costs and wide availability, carotid ultrasound has the potential to become the modality of choice for plaque characterization in clinical practice. However, its significant image noise, coupled with the small size of the plaques and their complex appearance, makes it difficult for automated techniques to discriminate between the different plaque constituents. In this paper, we propose to address this challenging problem by exploiting the unique capabilities of the emerging deep learning framework. More specifically, and unlike existing works which require a priori definition of specific imaging features or thresholding values, we propose to build a convolutional neural network (CNN) that will automatically extract from the images the information that is optimal for the identification of the different plaque constituents. We used approximately 90 000 patches extracted from a database of images and corresponding expert plaque characterizations to train and to validate the proposed CNN. The results of cross-validation experiments show a correlation of about 0.90 with the clinical assessment for the estimation of lipid core, fibrous cap, and calcified tissue areas, indicating the potential of deep learning for the challenging task of automatic characterization of plaque composition in carotid ultrasound.
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