Chengyi Zou, Shuai Wan, Tiannan Ji, Marc Gorriz Blanch, Marta Mrak, & Luis Herranz. (2023). Chroma Intra Prediction with Lightweight Attention-Based Neural Networks. TCSVT - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 34(1), 549–560.
Abstract: Neural networks can be successfully used for cross-component prediction in video coding. In particular, attention-based architectures are suitable for chroma intra prediction using luma information because of their capability to model relations between difierent channels. However, the complexity of such methods is still very high and should be further reduced, especially for decoding. In this paper, a cost-effective attention-based neural network is designed for chroma intra prediction. Moreover, with the goal of further improving coding performance, a novel approach is introduced to utilize more boundary information effectively. In addition to improving prediction, a simplification methodology is also proposed to reduce inference complexity by simplifying convolutions. The proposed schemes are integrated into H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) pipeline, and only one additional binary block-level syntax flag is introduced to indicate whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves up to −0.46%/−2.29%/−2.17% BD-rate reduction on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, compared with H.266/VVC anchor. Reductions in the encoding and decoding complexity of up to 22% and 61%, respectively, are achieved by the proposed scheme with respect to the previous attention-based chroma intra prediction method while maintaining coding performance.
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Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). On-board image-based vehicle detection and tracking. TIM - Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control, 33(7), 783–805.
Abstract: In this paper we present a computer vision system for daytime vehicle detection and localization, an essential step in the development of several types of advanced driver assistance systems. It has a reduced processing time and high accuracy thanks to the combination of vehicle detection with lane-markings estimation and temporal tracking of both vehicles and lane markings. Concerning vehicle detection, our main contribution is a frame scanning process that inspects images according to the geometry of image formation, and with an Adaboost-based detector that is robust to the variability in the different vehicle types (car, van, truck) and lighting conditions. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the most likely three-dimensional locations of vehicles on the road ahead. With regards to the lane-markings estimation component, we have two main contributions. First, we employ a different image feature to the other commonly used edges: we use ridges, which are better suited to this problem. Second, we adapt RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane markings to the image features. We qualitatively assess our vehicle detection system in sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. The processed videos are available on a web page associated with this paper. A quantitative evaluation of the system has shown quite accurate results (a low number of false positives and negatives) at a reasonable computation time.
Keywords: vehicle detection
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Debora Gil, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2006). Reducing cardiac motion in IVUS sequences. In Proceeding of Computers in Cardiology (Vol. 33, pp. 685–688).
Abstract: Cardiac vessel displacement is a main artifact in IVUS sequences. It hinders visualization of the main structures in an appropriate orientation and alignment and affects extracting vessel measurements. In this paper, we present a novel approach for image sequence alignment based on spectral analysis, which removes rigid dynamics, preserving at the same time the vessel geometry. First, we suppress the translation by taking, for each frame, the center of mass of the image as origin of coordinates. In polar coordinates with such point as origin, the rotation appears as a horizontal displacement. The translation induces a phase shift in the Fourier coefficients of two consecutive polar images. We estimate the phase by adjusting a regression plane to the phases of the principal frequencies. Experiments show that the presented strategy suppress cardiac motion regardless of the acquisition device. 1.
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Eduard Vazquez, Ramon Baldrich, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Describing Reflectances for Colour Segmentation Robust to Shadows, Highlights and Textures. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(5), 917–930.
Abstract: The segmentation of a single material reflectance is a challenging problem due to the considerable variation in image measurements caused by the geometry of the object, shadows, and specularities. The combination of these effects has been modeled by the dichromatic reflection model. However, the application of the model to real-world images is limited due to unknown acquisition parameters and compression artifacts. In this paper, we present a robust model for the shape of a single material reflectance in histogram space. The method is based on a multilocal creaseness analysis of the histogram which results in a set of ridges representing the material reflectances. The segmentation method derived from these ridges is robust to both shadow, shading and specularities, and texture in real-world images. We further complete the method by incorporating prior knowledge from image statistics, and incorporate spatial coherence by using multiscale color contrast information. Results obtained show that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods on a widely used segmentation benchmark, having as a main characteristic its excellent performance in the presence of shadows and highlights at low computational cost.
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Arjan Gijsenij, & Theo Gevers. (2011). Color Constancy Using Natural Image Statistics and Scene Semantics. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(4), 687–698.
Abstract: Existing color constancy methods are all based on specific assumptions such as the spatial and spectral characteristics of images. As a consequence, no algorithm can be considered as universal. However, with the large variety of available methods, the question is how to select the method that performs best for a specific image. To achieve selection and combining of color constancy algorithms, in this paper natural image statistics are used to identify the most important characteristics of color images. Then, based on these image characteristics, the proper color constancy algorithm (or best combination of algorithms) is selected for a specific image. To capture the image characteristics, the Weibull parameterization (e.g., grain size and contrast) is used. It is shown that the Weibull parameterization is related to the image attributes to which the used color constancy methods are sensitive. An MoG-classifier is used to learn the correlation and weighting between the Weibull-parameters and the image attributes (number of edges, amount of texture, and SNR). The output of the classifier is the selection of the best performing color constancy method for a certain image. Experimental results show a large improvement over state-of-the-art single algorithms. On a data set consisting of more than 11,000 images, an increase in color constancy performance up to 20 percent (median angular error) can be obtained compared to the best-performing single algorithm. Further, it is shown that for certain scene categories, one specific color constancy algorithm can be used instead of the classifier considering several algorithms.
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Minimal Design of Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 33(6), 693–702.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the pattern recognition field. In literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers. In this scope, the Error-correcting output codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a minimal design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best minimal ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI datasets and different multi-class computer vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.
Keywords: Multi-class classification; Error-correcting output codes; Ensemble of classifiers
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Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, & Horst Bunke. (2012). Feature Selection on Node Statistics Based Embedding of Graphs. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 33(15), 1980–1990.
Abstract: Representing a graph with a feature vector is a common way of making statistical machine learning algorithms applicable to the domain of graphs. Such a transition from graphs to vectors is known as graphembedding. A key issue in graphembedding is to select a proper set of features in order to make the vectorial representation of graphs as strong and discriminative as possible. In this article, we propose features that are constructed out of frequencies of node label representatives. We first build a large set of features and then select the most discriminative ones according to different ranking criteria and feature transformation algorithms. On different classification tasks, we experimentally show that only a small significant subset of these features is needed to achieve the same classification rates as competing to state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: Structural pattern recognition; Graph embedding; Feature ranking; PCA; Graph classification
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Jaume Garcia, Joel Barajas, Francesc Carreras, Sandra Pujades, & Petia Radeva. (2005). An intuitive validation technique to compare local versus global tagged MRI analysis. In Computers In Cardiology (Vol. 32, 29–32).
Abstract: Myocardium appears as a uniform tissue that seen in convectional Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) shows just the contractile part of its movement. MR Tagging is a unique imaging technique that prints a grid over the tissue which moves according to the underlying movement of the myocardium revealing the true deformation of the cardiac muscle. Optical flow techniques based on spectral information estimate tissue displacement by analyzing information encoded in the phase maps which can be obtained using, local (Gabor) and global (HARP) methods. In this paper we compare both in synthetic and real Tagged MR sequences. We conclude that local method is slightly more accurate than the global one. On the other hand, global method is more efficient as it is much faster and less parameters have to be taken into account
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Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). On the Decoding Process in Ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes. TPAMI - IEEE on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(1), 120–134.
Abstract: A common way to model multiclass classification problems is to design a set of binary classifiers and to combine them. Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) represent a successful framework to deal with these type of problems. Recent works in the ECOC framework showed significant performance improvements by means of new problem-dependent designs based on the ternary ECOC framework. The ternary framework contains a larger set of binary problems because of the use of a ldquodo not carerdquo symbol that allows us to ignore some classes by a given classifier. However, there are no proper studies that analyze the effect of the new symbol at the decoding step. In this paper, we present a taxonomy that embeds all binary and ternary ECOC decoding strategies into four groups. We show that the zero symbol introduces two kinds of biases that require redefinition of the decoding design. A new type of decoding measure is proposed, and two novel decoding strategies are defined. We evaluate the state-of-the-art coding and decoding strategies over a set of UCI machine learning repository data sets and into a real traffic sign categorization problem. The experimental results show that, following the new decoding strategies, the performance of the ECOC design is significantly improved.
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David Geronimo, Antonio Lopez, Angel Sappa, & Thorsten Graf. (2010). Survey on Pedestrian Detection for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(7), 1239–1258.
Abstract: Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), and particularly pedestrian protection systems (PPSs), have become an active research area aimed at improving traffic safety. The major challenge of PPSs is the development of reliable on-board pedestrian detection systems. Due to the varying appearance of pedestrians (e.g., different clothes, changing size, aspect ratio, and dynamic shape) and the unstructured environment, it is very difficult to cope with the demanded robustness of this kind of system. Two problems arising in this research area are the lack of public benchmarks and the difficulty in reproducing many of the proposed methods, which makes it difficult to compare the approaches. As a result, surveying the literature by enumerating the proposals one-after-another is not the most useful way to provide a comparative point of view. Accordingly, we present a more convenient strategy to survey the different approaches. We divide the problem of detecting pedestrians from images into different processing steps, each with attached responsibilities. Then, the different proposed methods are analyzed and classified with respect to each processing stage, favoring a comparative viewpoint. Finally, discussion of the important topics is presented, putting special emphasis on the future needs and challenges.
Keywords: ADAS, pedestrian detection, on-board vision, survey
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Enric Marti, Jordi Regincos, Jaime Lopez-Krahe, & Juan J.Villanueva. (1993). Hand line drawing interpretation as three-dimensional objects. Signal Processing – Intelligent systems for signal and image understanding, 32(1-2), 91–110.
Abstract: In this paper we present a technique to interpret hand line drawings as objects in a three-dimensional space. The object domain considered is based on planar surfaces with straight edges, concretely, on ansextension of Origami world to hidden lines. The line drawing represents the object under orthographic projection and it is sensed using a scanner. Our method is structured in two modules: feature extraction and feature interpretation. In the first one, image processing techniques are applied under certain tolerance margins to detect lines and junctions on the hand line drawing. Feature interpretation module is founded on line labelling techniques using a labelled junction dictionary. A labelling algorithm is here proposed. It uses relaxation techniques to reduce the number of incompatible labels with the junction dictionary so that the convergence of solutions can be accelerated. We formulate some labelling hypotheses tending to eliminate elements in two sets of labelled interpretations. That is, those which are compatible with the dictionary but do not correspond to three-dimensional objects and those which represent objects not very probable to be specified by means of a line drawing. New entities arise on the line drawing as a result of the extension of Origami world. These are defined to enunciate the assumptions of our method as well as to clarify the algorithms proposed. This technique is framed in a project aimed to implement a system to create 3D objects to improve man-machine interaction in CAD systems.
Keywords: Line drawing interpretation; line labelling; scene analysis; man-machine interaction; CAD input; line extraction
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Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrew Bagdanov, & Xavier Roca. (2011). Efficient Discriminative Multiresolution Cascade for Real-Time Human Detection Applications. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(13), 1581–1587.
Abstract: Human detection is fundamental in many machine vision applications, like video surveillance, driving assistance, action recognition and scene understanding. However in most of these applications real-time performance is necessary and this is not achieved yet by current detection methods.
This paper presents a new method for human detection based on a multiresolution cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that can highly reduce the computational cost of detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed of HOG features at different resolutions, from coarse at the first level to fine at the last one.
In contrast to previous methods, our approach uses a non-uniform stride of the sliding window that is defined by the feature resolution and allows the detection to be incrementally refined as going from coarse-to-fine resolution. In this way, the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the fewer number of features computed at the first levels of the cascade, but also to the reduced number of windows that need to be evaluated at the coarse resolution. Experimental results show that our method reaches a detection rate comparable with the state-of-the-art of detectors based on HOG features, while at the same time the detection search is up to 23 times faster.
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Sergio Escalera, David Masip, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Online Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(3), 458–467.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.
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Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Augmenting Video Surveillance Footage with Virtual Agents for Incremental Event Evaluation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(6), 878–889.
Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.
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Kaida Xiao, Chenyang Fu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Sophie Wuerger. (2011). Visual Gamma Correction for LCD Displays. DIS - Displays, 32(1), 17–23.
Abstract: An improved method for visual gamma correction is developed for LCD displays to increase the accuracy of digital colour reproduction. Rather than utilising a photometric measurement device, we use observ- ers’ visual luminance judgements for gamma correction. Eight half tone patterns were designed to gen- erate relative luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 for each colour channel. A psychophysical experiment was conducted on an LCD display to find the digital signals corresponding to each relative luminance by visually matching the half-tone background to a uniform colour patch. Both inter- and intra-observer vari- ability for the eight luminance matches in each channel were assessed and the luminance matches proved to be consistent across observers (DE00 < 3.5) and repeatable (DE00 < 2.2). Based on the individual observer judgements, the display opto-electronic transfer function (OETF) was estimated by using either a 3rd order polynomial regression or linear interpolation for each colour channel. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by predicting the CIE tristimulus values of a set of coloured patches (using the observer-based OETFs) and comparing them to the expected CIE tristimulus values (using the OETF obtained from spectro-radiometric luminance measurements). The resulting colour differences range from 2 to 4.6 DE00. We conclude that this observer-based method of visual gamma correction is useful to estimate the OETF for LCD displays. Its major advantage is that no particular functional relationship between digital inputs and luminance outputs has to be assumed.
Keywords: Display calibration; Psychophysics ; Perceptual; Visual gamma correction; Luminance matching; Observer-based calibration
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