David Vazquez, Javier Marin, Antonio Lopez, Daniel Ponsa, & David Geronimo. (2014). Virtual and Real World Adaptation for Pedestrian Detection. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(4), 797–809.
Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications. Most promising detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with annotated samples. However, the annotation step is a human intensive and subjective task worth to be minimized. By using virtual worlds we can automatically obtain precise and rich annotations. Thus, we face the question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in realistic virtual worlds work successfully for pedestrian detection in realworld images?. Conducted experiments show that virtual-world based training can provide excellent testing accuracy in real world, but it can also suffer the dataset shift problem as real-world based training does. Accordingly, we have designed a domain adaptation framework, V-AYLA, in which we have tested different techniques to collect a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combine them with the many examples of the source domain (virtual world) in order to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifier that will operate in the target domain. V-AYLA reports the same detection accuracy than when training with many human-provided pedestrian annotations and testing with real-world images of the same domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Laura Igual, Xavier Perez Sala, Sergio Escalera, Cecilio Angulo, & Fernando De la Torre. (2014). Continuous Generalized Procrustes Analysis. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(2), 659–671.
Abstract: PR4883, PII: S0031-3203(13)00327-0
Two-dimensional shape models have been successfully applied to solve many problems in computer vision, such as object tracking, recognition, and segmentation. Typically, 2D shape models are learned from a discrete set of image landmarks (corresponding to projection of 3D points of an object), after applying Generalized Procustes Analysis (GPA) to remove 2D rigid transformations. However, the
standard GPA process suffers from three main limitations. Firstly, the 2D training samples do not necessarily cover a uniform sampling of all the 3D transformations of an object. This can bias the estimate of the shape model. Secondly, it can be computationally expensive to learn the shape model by sampling 3D transformations. Thirdly, standard GPA methods use only one reference shape, which can might be insufficient to capture large structural variability of some objects.
To address these drawbacks, this paper proposes continuous generalized Procrustes analysis (CGPA).
CGPA uses a continuous formulation that avoids the need to generate 2D projections from all the rigid 3D transformations. It builds an efficient (in space and time) non-biased 2D shape model from a set of 3D model of objects. A major challenge in CGPA is the need to integrate over the space of 3D rotations, especially when the rotations are parameterized with Euler angles. To address this problem, we introduce the use of the Haar measure. Finally, we extended CGPA to incorporate several reference shapes. Experimental results on synthetic and real experiments show the benefits of CGPA over GPA.
Keywords: Procrustes analysis; 2D shape model; Continuous approach
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Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Xu Hu, & Xavier Roca. (2014). Toward Real-Time Pedestrian Detection Based on a Deformable Template Model. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(1), 355–364.
Abstract: Most advanced driving assistance systems already include pedestrian detection systems. Unfortunately, there is still a tradeoff between precision and real time. For a reliable detection, excellent precision-recall such a tradeoff is needed to detect as many pedestrians as possible while, at the same time, avoiding too many false alarms; in addition, a very fast computation is needed for fast reactions to dangerous situations. Recently, novel approaches based on deformable templates have been proposed since these show a reasonable detection performance although they are computationally too expensive for real-time performance. In this paper, we present a system for pedestrian detection based on a hierarchical multiresolution part-based model. The proposed system is able to achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy due to the local deformations of the parts while exhibiting a speedup of more than one order of magnitude due to a fast coarse-to-fine inference technique. Moreover, our system explicitly infers the level of resolution available so that the detection of small examples is feasible with a very reduced computational cost. We conclude this contribution by presenting how a graphics processing unit-optimized implementation of our proposed system is suitable for real-time pedestrian detection in terms of both accuracy and speed.
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Anjan Dutta, Josep Llados, Horst Bunke, & Umapada Pal. (2014). A Product Graph Based Method for Dual Subgraph Matching Applied to Symbol Spotting. In Bart Lamiroy, & Jean-Marc Ogier (Eds.), Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges (Vol. 8746, pp. 7–11). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Product graph has been shown as a way for matching subgraphs. This paper reports the extension of the product graph methodology for subgraph matching applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. Here we focus on the two major limitations of the previous version of the algorithm: (1) spurious nodes and edges in the graph representation and (2) inefficient node and edge attributes. To deal with noisy information of vectorized graphical documents, we consider a dual edge graph representation on the original graph representing the graphical information and the product graph is computed between the dual edge graphs of the pattern graph and the target graph. The dual edge graph with redundant edges is helpful for efficient and tolerating encoding of the structural information of the graphical documents. The adjacency matrix of the product graph locates the pair of similar edges of two operand graphs and exponentiating the adjacency matrix finds similar random walks of greater lengths. Nodes joining similar random walks between two graphs are found by combining different weighted exponentials of adjacency matrices. An experimental investigation reveals that the recall obtained by this approach is quite encouraging.
Keywords: Product graph; Dual edge graph; Subgraph matching; Random walks; Graph kernel
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Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados. (2014). Boosting the Handwritten Word Spotting Experience by Including the User in the Loop. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(3), 1063–1072.
Abstract: In this paper, we study the effect of taking the user into account in a query-by-example handwritten word spotting framework. Several off-the-shelf query fusion and relevance feedback strategies have been tested in the handwritten word spotting context. The increase in terms of precision when the user is included in the loop is assessed using two datasets of historical handwritten documents and two baseline word spotting approaches both based on the bag-of-visual-words model. We finally present two alternative ways of presenting the results to the user that might be more attractive and suitable to the user's needs than the classic ranked list.
Keywords: Handwritten word spotting; Query by example; Relevance feedback; Query fusion; Multidimensional scaling
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Marçal Rusiñol, Lluis Pere de las Heras, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2014). Flowchart Recognition for Non-Textual Information Retrieval in Patent Search. IR - Information Retrieval, 17(5-6), 545–562.
Abstract: Relatively little research has been done on the topic of patent image retrieval and in general in most of the approaches the retrieval is performed in terms of a similarity measure between the query image and the images in the corpus. However, systems aimed at overcoming the semantic gap between the visual description of patent images and their conveyed concepts would be very helpful for patent professionals. In this paper we present a flowchart recognition method aimed at achieving a structured representation of flowchart images that can be further queried semantically. The proposed method was submitted to the CLEF-IP 2012 flowchart recognition task. We report the obtained results on this dataset.
Keywords: Flowchart recognition; Patent documents; Text/graphics separation; Raster-to-vector conversion; Symbol recognition
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David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Vision-based Pedestrian Protection Systems for Intelligent Vehicles. Springer Briefs in Computer Vision.
Abstract: Pedestrian Protection Systems (PPSs) are on-board systems aimed at detecting and tracking people in the surroundings of a vehicle in order to avoid potentially dangerous situations. These systems, together with other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane departure warning or adaptive cruise control, are one of the most promising ways to improve traffic safety. By the use of computer vision, cameras working either in the visible or infra-red spectra have been demonstrated as a reliable sensor to perform this task. Nevertheless, the variability of human’s appearance, not only in terms of clothing and sizes but also as a result of their dynamic shape, makes pedestrians one of the most complex classes even for computer vision. Moreover, the unstructured changing and unpredictable environment in which such on-board systems must work makes detection a difficult task to be carried out with the demanded robustness. In this brief, the state of the art in PPSs is introduced through the review of the most relevant papers of the last decade. A common computational architecture is presented as a framework to organize each method according to its main contribution. More than 300 papers are referenced, most of them addressing pedestrian detection and others corresponding to the descriptors (features), pedestrian models, and learning machines used. In addition, an overview of topics such as real-time aspects, systems benchmarking and future challenges of this research area are presented.
Keywords: Computer Vision; Driver Assistance Systems; Intelligent Vehicles; Pedestrian Detection; Vulnerable Road Users
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). New Opportunities for Computer Vision-Based Assistive Technology Systems for the Visually Impaired. COMP - Computer, 47(4), 52–58.
Abstract: Computing advances and increased smartphone use gives technology system designers greater flexibility in exploiting computer vision to support visually impaired users. Understanding these users' needs will certainly provide insight for the development of improved usability of computing devices.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Embedding new observations via sparse-coding for non-linear manifold learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(1), 480–492.
Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.
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Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, Markus Baumgartner, & Horst Bunke. (2014). Keyword spotting for self-training of BLSTM NN based handwriting recognition systems. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(3), 1073–1082.
Abstract: The automatic transcription of unconstrained continuous handwritten text requires well trained recognition systems. The semi-supervised paradigm introduces the concept of not only using labeled data but also unlabeled data in the learning process. Unlabeled data can be gathered at little or not cost. Hence it has the potential to reduce the need for labeling training data, a tedious and costly process. Given a weak initial recognizer trained on labeled data, self-training can be used to recognize unlabeled data and add words that were recognized with high confidence to the training set for re-training. This process is not trivial and requires great care as far as selecting the elements that are to be added to the training set is concerned. In this paper, we propose to use a bidirectional long short-term memory neural network handwritten recognition system for keyword spotting in order to select new elements. A set of experiments shows the high potential of self-training for bootstrapping handwriting recognition systems, both for modern and historical handwritings, and demonstrate the benefits of using keyword spotting over previously published self-training schemes.
Keywords: Document retrieval; Keyword spotting; Handwriting recognition; Neural networks; Semi-supervised learning
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, & Oriol Pujol. (2014). On the Design of an ECOC-Compliant Genetic Algorithm. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(2), 865–884.
Abstract: Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
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Naveen Onkarappa, & Angel Sappa. (2014). Speed and Texture: An Empirical Study on Optical-Flow Accuracy in ADAS Scenarios. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(1), 136–147.
Abstract: IF: 3.064
Increasing mobility in everyday life has led to the concern for the safety of automotives and human life. Computer vision has become a valuable tool for developing driver assistance applications that target such a concern. Many such vision-based assisting systems rely on motion estimation, where optical flow has shown its potential. A variational formulation of optical flow that achieves a dense flow field involves a data term and regularization terms. Depending on the image sequence, the regularization has to appropriately be weighted for better accuracy of the flow field. Because a vehicle can be driven in different kinds of environments, roads, and speeds, optical-flow estimation has to be accurately computed in all such scenarios. In this paper, we first present the polar representation of optical flow, which is quite suitable for driving scenarios due to the possibility that it offers to independently update regularization factors in different directional components. Then, we study the influence of vehicle speed and scene texture on optical-flow accuracy. Furthermore, we analyze the relationships of these specific characteristics on a driving scenario (vehicle speed and road texture) with the regularization weights in optical flow for better accuracy. As required by the work in this paper, we have generated several synthetic sequences along with ground-truth flow fields.
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, A. Wahle, Petia Radeva, S. Carlier, et al. (2014). Standardized evaluation methodology and reference database for evaluating IVUS image segmentation. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(2), 70–90.
Abstract: This paper describes an evaluation framework that allows a standardized and quantitative comparison of IVUS lumen and media segmentation algorithms. This framework has been introduced at the MICCAI 2011 Computing and Visualization for (Intra)Vascular Imaging (CVII) workshop, comparing the results of eight teams that participated.
We describe the available data-base comprising of multi-center, multi-vendor and multi-frequency IVUS datasets, their acquisition, the creation of the reference standard and the evaluation measures. The approaches address segmentation of the lumen, the media, or both borders; semi- or fully-automatic operation; and 2-D vs. 3-D methodology. Three performance measures for quantitative analysis have
been proposed. The results of the evaluation indicate that segmentation of the vessel lumen and media is possible with an accuracy that is comparable to manual annotation when semi-automatic methods are used, as well as encouraging results can be obtained also in case of fully-automatic segmentation. The analysis performed in this paper also highlights the challenges in IVUS segmentation that remains to be
solved.
Keywords: IVUS (intravascular ultrasound); Evaluation framework; Algorithm comparison; Image segmentation
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Cesar Isaza, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). Rendering ground truth data sets to detect shadows cast by static objects in outdoors. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 70(1), 557–571.
Abstract: In our work, we are particularly interested in studying the shadows cast by static objects in outdoor environments, during daytime. To assess the accuracy of a shadow detection algorithm, we need ground truth information. The collection of such information is a very tedious task because it is a process that requires manual annotation. To overcome this severe limitation, we propose in this paper a methodology to automatically render ground truth using a virtual environment. To increase the degree of realism and usefulness of the simulated environment, we incorporate in the scenario the precise longitude, latitude and elevation of the actual location of the object, as well as the sun’s position for a given time and day. To evaluate our method, we consider a qualitative and a quantitative comparison. In the quantitative one, we analyze the shadow cast by a real object in a particular geographical location and its corresponding rendered model. To evaluate qualitatively the methodology, we use some ground truth images obtained both manually and automatically.
Keywords: Synthetic ground truth data set; Sun position; Shadow detection; Static objects shadow detection
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Ariel Amato, Ivan Huerta, Mikhail Mozerov, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Moving Cast Shadows Detection Methods for Video Surveillance Applications. In Augmented Vision and Reality (Vol. 6, pp. 23–47). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Moving cast shadows are a major concern in today’s performance from broad range of many vision-based surveillance applications because they highly difficult the object classification task. Several shadow detection methods have been reported in the literature during the last years. They are mainly divided into two domains. One usually works with static images, whereas the second one uses image sequences, namely video content. In spite of the fact that both cases can be analogously analyzed, there is a difference in the application field. The first case, shadow detection methods can be exploited in order to obtain additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object (‘shape from shadows’) as well as the localization of the light source. While in the second one, the main purpose is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance (usually in a background subtraction context). Shadows can in fact modify in a negative way the shape and color of the target object and therefore affect the performance of scene analysis and interpretation in many applications. This chapter wills mainly reviews shadow detection methods as well as their taxonomies related with the second case, thus aiming at those shadows which are associated with moving objects (moving shadows).
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