Abstract: Color is a powerful visual cue for many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions affecting negatively the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, those reflection models might be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms may hold simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is taken on input composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines and weights these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, the fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the method. From the theoretical and experimental results, it is concluded that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning. Further, the method outperforms state-of- the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition.

Abstract: n this work, we introduce a novel energy-based framework that addresses the challenging problem of 3D reconstruction of facial hair from a single RGB image. To this end, we identify hair pixels over the image via texture analysis and then determine individual hair fibers that are modeled by means of a parametric hair model based on 3D helixes. We propose to minimize an energy composed of several terms, in order to adapt the hair parameters that better fit the image detections. The final hairs respond to the resulting fibers after a post-processing step where we encourage further realism. The resulting approach generates realistic facial hair fibers from solely an RGB image without assuming any training data nor user interaction. We provide an experimental evaluation on real-world pictures where several facial hair styles and image conditions are observed, showing consistent results and establishing a comparison with respect to competing approaches.

Abstract: TA7.4
Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.

Abstract: TB6.2
Road segmentation is an essential functionality for supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as road following and vehicle and pedestrian detection. Significant efforts have been made in order to solve this task using vision-based techniques. The major challenge is to deal with lighting variations and the presence of objects on the road surface. In this paper, we propose a new road detection method to infer the areas of the image depicting road surfaces without performing any image segmentation. The idea is to previously segment manually or semi-automatically the road region in a traffic-free reference video record on a first drive. And then to transfer these regions to the frames of a second video sequence acquired later in a second drive through the same road, in an on-line manner. This is possible because we are able to automatically align the two videos in time and space, that is, to synchronize them and warp each frame of the first video to its corresponding frame in the second one. The geometric transform can thus transfer the road region to the present frame on-line. In order to reduce the different lighting conditions which are present in outdoor scenarios, our approach incorporates a shadowless feature space which represents an image in an illuminant-invariant feature space. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic background subtraction algorithm which removes the regions containing vehicles in the observed frames which are within the transferred road region.

Abstract: In this work we present a novel compact scene representation based on Stixels that infers geometric and semantic information. Our approach overcomes the previous rather restrictive geometric assumptions for Stixels by introducing a novel depth model to account for non-flat roads and slanted objects. Both semantic and depth cues are used jointly to infer the scene representation in a sound global energy minimization formulation. Furthermore, a novel approximation scheme is introduced that uses an extremely efficient over-segmentation. In doing so, the computational complexity of the Stixel inference algorithm is reduced significantly, achieving real-time computation capabilities with only a slight drop in accuracy. We evaluate the proposed approach in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time on four publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach maintains accuracy on flat road scene datasets while improving substantially on a novel non-flat road dataset.