Abstract: This paper proposes a non-rigid registration formulation capturing both global and local deformations in a single framework. This formulation is based on a quadratic estimation of the registration distance together with a quadratic regularization term. Hence, the optimal transformation parameters are easily obtained by solving a liner system of equations, which guarantee a fast convergence. Experimental results with challenging 2D and 3D shapes are presented to show the validity of the proposed framework. Furthermore, comparisons with the most relevant approaches are provided.

Abstract: Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an educational strategy to improve student’s learning capability that, in recent years, has had a progressive acceptance in undergraduate studies. This methodology is based on solving a problem or project in a student working group. In this way, PBL focuses on learning the necessary tools to correctly find a solution to given problems. Since the learning initiative is transferred to the student, the PBL method promotes students own abilities. This allows a better assessment of the true workload that carries out the student in the subject. It follows that the methodology conforms to the guidelines of the Bologna document, which quantifies the student workload in a subject by means of the European credit transfer system (ECTS). PBL is currently applied in undergraduate studies needing strong practical training such as medicine, nursing or law sciences. Although this is also the case in engineering studies, amazingly, few experiences have been reported. In this paper we propose to use PBL in the educational organization of the Computer Graphics subjects in the Computer Science degree. Our PBL project focuses in the development of a C++ graphical environment based on the OpenGL libraries for visualization and handling of different graphical objects. The starting point is a basic skeleton that already includes lighting functions, perspective projection with mouse interaction to change the point of view and three predefined objects. Students have to complete this skeleton by adding their own functions to solve the project. A total number of 10 projects have been proposed and successfully solved. The exercises range from human face rendering to articulated objects, such as robot arms or puppets. In the present paper we extensively report the statement and educational objectives for two of the projects: solar system visualization and a chess game. We report our earlier educational experience based on the standard classroom theoretical, problem and practice sessions and the reasons that motivated searching for other learning methods. We have mainly chosen PBL because it improves the student learning initiative. We have applied the PBL educational model since the beginning of the second semester. The student’s feedback increases in his interest for the subject. We present a comparative study of the teachers’ and students’ workload between PBL and the classic teaching approach, which suggests that the workload increase in PBL is not as high as it seems.

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art person detectors have been proven reliable and achieve very good detection rates. However, the performance is often far from real time, which limits their use to low resolution images only. In this paper, we deal with candidate window generation problem for person detection, i.e. we want to reduce the computational complexity of a person detector by reducing the number of regions that has to be evaluated. We base our work on Alexe’s paper [1], which introduced several pre-attention cues for generic object detection. We evaluate these cues in the context of person detection and show that their performance degrades rapidly for scenes containing multiple objects of interest such as pictures from urban environment. We extend this set by new cues, which better suits our class-specific task. The cues are designed to be simple and efficient, so that they can be used in the pre-attention phase of a more complex sliding window based person detector.

Abstract: Describing persons and their actions is a challenging problem due to variations in pose, scale and viewpoint in real-world images. Recently, semantic pyramids approach [1] for pose normalization has shown to provide excellent results for gender and action recognition. The performance of semantic pyramids approach relies on robust image description and is therefore limited due to the use of shallow local features. In the context of object recognition [2] and object detection [3], convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or deep features have shown to improve the performance over the conventional shallow features.
We propose deep semantic pyramids for human attributes and action recognition. The method works by constructing spatial pyramids based on CNNs of different part locations. These pyramids are then combined to obtain a single semantic representation. We validate our approach on the Berkeley and 27 Human Attributes datasets for attributes classification. For action recognition, we perform experiments on two challenging datasets: Willow and PASCAL VOC 2010. The proposed deep semantic pyramids provide a significant gain of 17.2%, 13.9%, 24.3% and 22.6% compared to the standard shallow semantic pyramids on Berkeley, 27 Human Attributes, Willow and PASCAL VOC 2010 datasets respectively. Our results also show that deep semantic pyramids outperform conventional CNNs based on the full bounding box of the person. Finally, we compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods and show a gain in performance compared to best methods in literature.