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.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an efficient cascaded model for sign language recognition taking benefit from spatio-temporal hand-based information using deep learning approaches, especially Single Shot Detector (SSD), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), from videos. Our simple yet efficient and accurate model includes two main parts: hand detection and sign recognition. Three types of spatial features, including hand features, Extra Spatial Hand Relation (ESHR) features, and Hand Pose (HP) features, have been fused in the model to feed to LSTM for temporal features extraction. We train SSD model for hand detection using some videos collected from five online sign dictionaries. Our model is evaluated on our proposed dataset (Rastgoo et al., Expert Syst Appl 150: 113336, 2020), including 10’000 sign videos for 100 Persian sign using 10 contributors in 10 different backgrounds, and isoGD dataset. Using the 5-fold cross-validation method, our model outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in sign language recognition

Abstract: A new approach for 2D to 3D garment retexturing is proposed based on Gaussian mixture models and thin plate splines (TPS). An automatically segmented garment of an individual is matched to a new source garment and rendered, resulting in augmented images in which the target garment has been retextured using the texture of the source garment. We divide the problem into garment boundary matching based on Gaussian mixture models and then interpolate inner points using surface topology extracted through geodesic paths, which leads to a more realistic result than standard approaches. We evaluated and compared our system quantitatively by root mean square error (RMS) and qualitatively using the mean opinion score (MOS), showing the benefits of the proposed methodology on our gathered dataset.

Abstract: This paper presents the development of an Augmented Reality mobile application which aims at sensibilizing young children to abstract concepts of music. Such concepts are, for instance, the musical notation or the idea of rhythm. Recent studies in Augmented Reality for education suggest that such technologies have multiple benefits for students, including younger ones. As mobile document image acquisition and processing gains maturity on mobile platforms, we explore how it is possible to build a markerless and real-time application to augment the physical documents with didactic animations and interactive virtual content. Given a standard image processing pipeline, we compare the performance of different local descriptors at two key stages of the process. Results suggest alternatives to the SIFT local descriptors, regarding result quality and computational efficiency, both for document model identification and perspective transform estimation. All experiments are performed on an original and public dataset we introduce here.

Abstract: The amount of multimedia data collected in museum databases is growing fast, while the capacity of museums to display information to visitors is acutely limited by physical space. Museums must seek the perfect balance of information given on individual pieces in order to provide sufficient information to aid visitor understanding while maintaining sparse usage of the walls and guaranteeing high appreciation of the exhibit. Moreover, museums often target the interests of average visitors instead of the entire spectrum of different interests each individual visitor might have. Finally, visiting a museum should not be an experience contained in the physical space of the museum but a door opened onto a broader context of related artworks, authors, artistic trends, etc. In this paper we describe the MNEMOSYNE system that attempts to address these issues through a new multimedia museum experience. Based on passive observation, the system builds a profile of the artworks of interest for each visitor. These profiles of interest are then used to drive an interactive table that personalizes multimedia content delivery. The natural user interface on the interactive table uses the visitor’s profile, an ontology of museum content and a recommendation system to personalize exploration of multimedia content. At the end of their visit, the visitor can take home a personalized summary of their visit on a custom mobile application. In this article we describe in detail each component of our approach as well as the first field trials of our prototype system built and deployed at our permanent exhibition space at LeMurate (http://www.lemurate.comune.fi.it/lemurate/) in Florence together with the first results of the evaluation process during the official installation in the National Museum of Bargello (http://www.uffizi.firenze.it/musei/?m=bargello).

Abstract: Target encoding plays a central role when learning Convolutional Neural Networks. In this realm, one-hot encoding is the most prevalent strategy due to its simplicity. However, this so widespread encoding schema assumes a flat label space, thus ignoring rich relationships existing among labels that can be exploited during training. In large-scale datasets, data does not span the full label space, but instead lies in a low-dimensional output manifold. Following this observation, we embed the targets into a low-dimensional space, drastically improving convergence speed while preserving accuracy. Our contribution is two fold: (i) We show that random projections of the label space are a valid tool to find such lower dimensional embeddings, boosting dramatically convergence rates at zero computational cost; and (ii) we propose a normalized eigenrepresentation of the class manifold that encodes the targets with minimal information loss, improving the accuracy of random projections encoding while enjoying the same convergence rates. Experiments on CIFAR-100, CUB200-2011, Imagenet, and MIT Places demonstrate that the proposed approach drastically improves convergence speed while reaching very competitive accuracy rates.

Abstract: By definition, local image features provide a compact representation of the image in which most of the image information is preserved. This capability offered by local features has been overlooked, despite being relevant in many application scenarios. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the performance of feature-driven Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) in terms of the coverage of informative image parts (completeness). This type of features results from an MSER extraction on saliency maps in which features related to objects boundaries or even symmetry axes are highlighted. These maps are intended to be suitable domains for MSER detection, allowing this detector to provide a better coverage of informative image parts. Our experimental results, which were based on a large-scale evaluation, show that feature-driven MSER have relatively high completeness values and provide more complete sets than a traditional MSER detection even when sets of similar cardinality are considered.