Abstract: In this paper we introduce a method for person re-identification based on discriminative, sparse basis expansions of targets in terms of a labeled gallery of known individuals. We propose an iterative extension to sparse discriminative classifiers capable of ranking many candidate targets. The approach makes use of soft- and hard- re-weighting to redistribute energy among the most relevant contributing elements and to ensure that the best candidates are ranked at each iteration. Our approach also leverages a novel visual descriptor which we show to be discriminative while remaining robust to pose and illumination variations. An extensive comparative evaluation is given demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on single- and multi-shot person re-identification scenarios on the VIPeR, i-LIDS, ETHZ, and CAVIAR4REID datasets. The combination of our descriptor and iterative sparse basis expansion improves state-of-the-art rank-1 performance by six percentage points on VIPeR and by 20 on CAVIAR4REID compared to other methods with a single gallery image per person. With multiple gallery and probe images per person our approach improves by 17 percentage points the state-of-the-art on i-LIDS and by 72 on CAVIAR4REID at rank-1. The approach is also quite efficient, capable of single-shot person re-identification over galleries containing hundreds of individuals at about 30 re-identifications per second.

Abstract: Subspace-based methods have become popular due to their ability to appropriately represent complex data in such a way that both dimensionality is reduced and discriminativeness is enhanced. Several recent works have concentrated on the discriminative common vector (DCV) method and other closely related algorithms also based on the concept of null space. In this paper, we present a generalized incremental formulation of the DCV methods, which allows the update of a given model by considering the addition of new examples even from unseen classes. Having efficient incremental formulations of well-behaved batch algorithms allows us to conveniently adapt previously trained classifiers without the need of recomputing them from scratch. The proposed generalized incremental method has been empirically validated in different case studies from different application domains (faces, objects, and handwritten digits) considering several different scenarios in which new data are continuously added at different rates starting from an initial model.

Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: Action recognition in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To facilitate comparative evaluation independently of person detection, the standard evaluation protocol for action recognition uses an oracle person detector to obtain perfect bounding box information at both training and test time. The assumption is that, in practice, a general person detector will provide candidate bounding boxes for action recognition. In this paper, we argue that this paradigm is suboptimal and that action class labels should already be considered during the detection stage. Motivated by the observation that body pose is strongly conditioned on action class, we show that: 1) the existing state-of-the-art generic person detectors are not adequate for proposing candidate bounding boxes for action classification; 2) due to limited training examples, the direct training of action-specific person detectors is also inadequate; and 3) using only a small number of labeled action examples, the transfer learning is able to adapt an existing detector to propose higher quality bounding boxes for subsequent action classification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate transfer learning for the task of action-specific person detection in still images. We perform extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets: 1) Stanford-40 and 2) PASCAL VOC 2012. For the action detection task (i.e., both person localization and classification of the action performed), our approach outperforms methods based on general person detection by 5.7% mean average precision (MAP) on Stanford-40 and 2.1% MAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state of the art with a MAP of 45.4% on Stanford-40 and 31.4% on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also evaluate our action detection approach for the task of action classification (i.e., recognizing actions without localizing them). For this task, our approach, without using any ground-truth person localization at test tim- , outperforms on both data sets state-of-the-art methods, which do use person locations.

Abstract: Image mosaicking applications require both geometrical and photometrical registrations between the images that compose the mosaic. This paper proposes a probabilistic color correction algorithm for correcting the photometrical disparities. First, the image to be color corrected is segmented into several regions using mean shift. Then, connected regions are extracted using a region fusion algorithm. Local joint image histograms of each region are modeled as collections of truncated Gaussians using a maximum likelihood estimation procedure. Then, local color palette mapping functions are computed using these sets of Gaussians. The color correction is performed by applying those functions to all the regions of the image. An extensive comparison with ten other state of the art color correction algorithms is presented, using two different image pair data sets. Results show that the proposed approach obtains the best average scores in both data sets and evaluation metrics and is also the most robust to failures.

Abstract: Action recognition systems mostly work with videos of proper quality and resolution. Even most challenging benchmark databases for action recognition, hardly include videos of low-resolution from, e.g., surveillance cameras. In videos recorded by such cameras, due to the distance between people and cameras, people are pictured very small and hence challenge action recognition algorithms. Simple upsampling methods, like bicubic interpolation, cannot retrieve all the detailed information that can help the recognition. To deal with this problem, in this paper we combine results of bicubic interpolation with results of a state-ofthe-art deep learning-based super-resolution algorithm, through an alpha-blending approach. The experimental results obtained on down-sampled version of a large subset of Hoolywood2 benchmark database show the importance of the proposed system in increasing the recognition rate of a state-of-the-art action recognition system for handling low-resolution videos.

Abstract: This paper deals with Query By String word spotting in scene images. A hierarchical text segmentation algorithm based on text specific selective search is used to find text regions. These regions are indexed per character n-grams present in the text region. An attribute representation based on Pyramidal Histogram of Characters (PHOC) is used to compare text regions with the query text. For generation of the index a similar attribute space based Pyramidal Histogram of character n-grams is used. These attribute models are learned using linear SVMs over the Fisher Vector [1] representation of the images along with the PHOC labels of the corresponding strings.