Abstract: Many real problems require multi-class decisions. In the Pattern Recognition field,
many techniques have been proposed to deal with the binary problem. However,
the extension of many 2-class classifiers to the multi-class case is a hard task. In
this sense, Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) demonstrated to be a powerful
tool to combine any number of binary classifiers to model multi-class problems. But
there are still many open issues about the capabilities of the ECOC framework. In
this thesis, the two main stages of an ECOC design are analyzed: the coding and
the decoding steps. We present different problem-dependent designs. These designs
take advantage of the knowledge of the problem domain to minimize the number
of classifiers, obtaining a high classification performance. On the other hand, we
analyze the ECOC codification in order to define new decoding rules that take full
benefit from the information provided at the coding step. Moreover, as a successful
classification requires a rich feature set, new feature detection/extraction techniques
are presented and evaluated on the new ECOC designs. The evaluation of the new
methodology is performed on different real and synthetic data sets: UCI Machine
Learning Repository, handwriting symbols, traffic signs from a Mobile Mapping System, Intravascular Ultrasound images, Caltech Repository data set or Chaga’s disease
data set. The results of this thesis show that significant performance improvements
are obtained on both traditional coding and decoding ECOC designs when the new
coding and decoding rules are taken into account.

Abstract: Training vision-based pedestrian detectors using synthetic datasets (virtual world) is a useful technique to collect automatically the training examples with their pixel-wise ground truth. However, as it is often the case, these detectors must operate in real-world images, experiencing a significant drop of their performance. In fact, this effect also occurs among different real-world datasets, i.e. detectors' accuracy drops when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, it is required to adapt the detector trained with synthetic data to operate in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation approach based on boosting LDA exemplar classifiers from both virtual and real worlds. We evaluate our proposal on multiple real-world pedestrian detection datasets. The results show that our method can efficiently adapt the exemplar classifiers from virtual to real world, avoiding drops in average precision over the 15%.

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating high-level semantic labels for videos of recorded people by means of analysing their facial expressions. This problem, to which we refer as facial behavior categorization, is a weakly-supervised learning problem where we do not have access to frame-by-frame facial gesture annotations but only weak-labels at the video level are available. Therefore, the goal is to learn a set of discriminative expressions and how they determine the video weak-labels. Facial behavior categorization can be posed as a Multi-Instance-Learning (MIL) problem and we propose a novel MIL method called Regularized Multi-Concept MIL to solve it. In contrast to previous approaches applied in facial behavior analysis, RMC-MIL follows a Multi-Concept assumption which allows different facial expressions (concepts) to contribute differently to the video-label. Moreover, to handle with the high-dimensional nature of facial-descriptors, RMC-MIL uses a discriminative approach to model the concepts and structured sparsity regularization to discard non-informative features. RMC-MIL is posed as a convex-constrained optimization problem where all the parameters are jointly learned using the Projected-Quasi-Newton method. In our experiments, we use two public data-sets to show the advantages of the Regularized Multi-Concept approach and its improvement compared to existing MIL methods. RMC-MIL outperforms state-of-the-art results in the UNBC data-set for pain detection.

Abstract: In pattern recognition [8, 14], a key issue to be addressed when designing a system is how to represent input patterns. Feature vectors is a common option. That is, a set of numerical features describing relevant properties of the pattern are computed and arranged in a vector form. The main advantages of this kind of representation are computational simplicity and a well sound mathematical foundation. Thus, a large number of operations are available to work with vectors and a large repository of algorithms for pattern analysis and classification exist. However, the simple structure of feature vectors might not be the best option for complex patterns where nonnumerical features or relations between different parts of the pattern become relevant.

Abstract: The importance of logos and trademarks in nowadays society is indisputable, variably seen under a positive light as a valuable service for consumers or a negative one as a catalyst of ever-increasing consumerism. This chapter discusses the technical approaches for enabling machines to work with logos, looking into the latest methodologies for logo detection, localization, representation, recognition, retrieval, and spotting in a variety of media. This analysis is presented in the context of three different applications covering the complete depth and breadth of state of the art techniques. These are trademark retrieval systems, logo recognition in document images, and logo detection and removal in images and videos. This chapter, due to the very nature of logos and trademarks, brings together various facets of document image analysis spanning graphical and textual content, while it links document image analysis to other computer vision domains, especially when it comes to the analysis of real-scene videos and images.

Abstract: Domain adaptation addresses the problem of accuracy drop that a classifier may suffer when the training data (source domain) and the testing data (target domain) are drawn from different distributions. In this work, we focus on domain adaptation for structured SVM (SSVM). We propose a cost-sensitive domain adaptation method for SSVM, namely COSS-SSVM. In particular, during the re-training of an adapted classifier based on target and source data, the idea that we explore consists in introducing a non-zero cost even for correctly classified source domain samples. Eventually, we aim to learn a more targetoriented classifier by not rewarding (zero loss) properly classified source-domain training samples. We assess the effectiveness of COSS-SSVM on multi-category object recognition.