Abstract: Egocentric vision consists in acquiring images along the day from a first person point-of-view using wearable cameras. The automatic analysis of this information allows to discover daily patterns for improving the quality of life of the user. A natural topic that arises in egocentric vision is storytelling, that is, how to understand and tell the story relying behind the pictures.
In this paper, we tackle storytelling as an egocentric sequences description problem. We propose a novel methodology that exploits information from temporally neighboring events, matching precisely the nature of egocentric sequences. Furthermore, we present a new method for multimodal data fusion consisting on a multi-input attention recurrent network. We also release the EDUB-SegDesc dataset. This is the first dataset for egocentric image sequences description, consisting of 1,339 events with 3,991 descriptions, from 55 days acquired by 11 people. Finally, we prove that our proposal outperforms classical attentional encoder-decoder methods for video description.

Abstract: In this paper, a novel decremental subspace-based learning method called Decremental Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors method (DGDCV) is presented. The method makes use of the concept of decremental learning, which we introduce in the field of supervised feature extraction and classification. By efficiently removing unnecessary data and/or classes for a knowledge base, our methodology is able to update the model without recalculating the full projection or accessing to the previously processed training data, while retaining the previously acquired knowledge. The proposed method has been validated in 6 standard face recognition datasets, showing a considerable computational gain without compromising the accuracy of the model.

Abstract: Developing a text detection method which is invariant to scripts in natural scene images is a challeng- ing task due to different geometrical structures of various scripts. Besides, multi-oriented of text lines in natural scene images make the problem more challenging. This paper proposes to explore ring radius transform (RRT) for text detection in multi-oriented and multi-script environments. The method finds component regions based on convex hull to generate radius matrices using RRT. It is a fact that RRT pro- vides low radius values for the pixels that are near to edges, constant radius values for the pixels that represent stroke width, and high radius values that represent holes created in background and convex hull because of the regular structures of text components. We apply k -means clustering on the radius matrices to group such spatially coherent regions into individual clusters. Then the proposed method studies the radius values of such cluster components that are close to the centroid and far from the cen- troid to detect text components. Furthermore, we have developed a Bangla dataset (named as ISI-UM dataset) and propose a semi-automatic system for generating its ground truth for text detection of arbi- trary orientations, which can be used by the researchers for text detection and recognition in the future. The ground truth will be released to public. Experimental results on our ISI-UM data and other standard datasets, namely, ICDAR 2013 scene, SVT and MSRA data, show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of multi-lingual and multi-oriented text detection ability.

Abstract: Guided image processing techniques are widely used to extract meaningful information from a guiding image and facilitate the enhancement of the guided one. This paper specifically addresses the challenge of guided thermal image super-resolution, where a low-resolution thermal image is enhanced using a high-resolution visible spectrum image. We propose a new strategy that enhances outcomes from current guided super-resolution methods. This is achieved by transforming the initial guiding data into a representation resembling a thermal-like image, which is more closely in sync with the intended output. Experimental results with upscale factors of 8 and 16, demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach in guided thermal image super-resolution obtained by mapping the original guiding information to a thermal-like image representation.

Abstract: Face analysis in images in the wild still pose a challenge for automatic age and gender recognition tasks, mainly due to their high variability in resolution, deformation, and occlusion. Although the performance has highly increased thanks to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), it is still far from optimal when compared to other image recognition tasks, mainly because of the high sensitiveness of CNNs to facial variations. In this paper, inspired by biology and the recent success of attention mechanisms on visual question answering and fine-grained recognition, we propose a novel feedforward attention mechanism that is able to discover the most informative and reliable parts of a given face for improving age and gender classification. In particular, given a downsampled facial image, the proposed model is trained based on a novel end-to-end learning framework to extract the most discriminative patches from the original high-resolution image. Experimental validation on the standard Adience, Images of Groups, and MORPH II benchmarks show that including attention mechanisms enhances the performance of CNNs in terms of robustness and accuracy.

Abstract: This guest editorial introduces the twenty two papers accepted for this Special Issue on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (AMDO). They are grouped into four main categories within the field of AMDO: human motion analysis (action/gesture), human pose estimation, deformable shape segmentation, and face analysis. For each of the four topics, a survey of the recent developments in the field is presented. The accepted papers are briefly introduced in the context of this survey. They contribute novel methods, algorithms with improved performance as measured on benchmarking datasets, as well as two new datasets for hand action detection and human posture analysis. The special issue should be of high relevance to the reader interested in AMDO recognition and promote future research directions in the field.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.