Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.

Abstract: The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and reestablished in 2011, has become the defacto evaluation standard for the international community. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous
effort started to develop an online framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This short paper briefly outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the
Robust Reading Competition, comprising a collection of tools and processes that aim to simplify the management and annotation of data, and to provide online and offline performance evaluation and analysis services.

Abstract: Deep convolutional architectures have shown to be successful frameworks to solve generic computer vision problems. The estimation of intrinsic reflectance from single image is not a solved problem yet. Encoder-Decoder architectures are a perfect approach for pixel-wise reflectance estimation, although it usually suffers from the lack of large datasets. Lack of data can be partially solved with data augmentation, however usual techniques focus on geometric changes which does not help for reflectance estimation. In this paper we propose a color-based data augmentation technique that extends the training data by increasing the variability of chromaticity. Rotation on the red-green blue-yellow plane of an opponent space enable to increase the training set in a coherent and sound way that improves network generalization capability for reflectance estimation. We perform some experiments on the Sintel dataset showing that our color-based augmentation increase performance and overcomes one of the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Major advances have recently been made in merging language and vision representations. Most tasks considered so far have confined themselves to the processing of objects and lexicalised relations amongst objects (content words). We know, however, that humans (even pre-school children) can abstract over raw multimodal data to perform certain types of higher level reasoning, expressed in natural language by function words. A case in point is given by their ability to learn quantifiers, i.e. expressions like few, some and all. From formal semantics and cognitive linguistics, we know that quantifiers are relations over sets which, as a simplification, we can see as proportions. For instance, in most fish are red, most encodes the proportion of fish which are red fish. In this paper, we study how well current neural network strategies model such relations. We propose a task where, given an image and a query expressed by an object–property pair, the system must return a quantifier expressing which proportions of the queried object have the queried property. Our contributions are twofold. First, we show that the best performance on this task involves coupling state-of-the-art attention mechanisms with a network architecture mirroring the logical structure assigned to quantifiers by classic linguistic formalisation. Second, we introduce a new balanced dataset of image scenarios associated with quantification queries, which we hope will foster further research in this area.

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: Clothing is still manually manufactured for the most part nowadays, resulting in discrepancies between nominal and real dimensions, and potentially ill-fitting garments. Hence, it is common in the apparel industry to manually perform measures at preshipment time. We present an automatic method to obtain such measures from a single image of a garment that speeds up this task. It is generic and extensible in the sense that it does not depend explicitly on the garment shape or type. Instead, it learns through a probabilistic graphical model to identify the different contour parts. Subsequently, a set of Lasso regressors, one per desired measure, can predict the actual values of the measures. We present results on a dataset of 130 images of jackets and 98 of pants, of varying sizes and styles, obtaining 1.17 and 1.22 cm of mean absolute error, respectively.

Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene

Abstract: Person re-identification has received special attention by the human analysis community in the last few years. To address the challenges in this field, many researchers have proposed different strategies, which basically exploit either cross-view invariant features or cross-view robust metrics. In this work, we propose to exploit a post-ranking approach and combine different feature representations through ranking aggregation. Spatial information, which potentially benefits the person matching, is represented using a 2D body model, from which color and texture information are extracted and combined. We also consider background/foreground information, automatically extracted via Deep Decompositional Network, and the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. To describe the matching between images we use the polynomial feature map, also taking into account local and global information. The Discriminant Context Information Analysis based post-ranking approach is used to improve initial ranking lists. Finally, the Stuart ranking aggregation method is employed to combine complementary ranking lists obtained from different feature representations. Experimental results demonstrated that we improve the state-of-the-art on VIPeR and PRID450s datasets, achieving 67.21% and 75.64% on top-1 rank recognition rate, respectively, as well as obtaining competitive results on CUHK01 dataset.