Abstract: In this paper we improve the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), a core descriptor of state-of-the-art object detection, by the use of higher-level information coming from image segmentation. The idea is to re-weight the descriptor while computing it without increasing its size. The benefits of the proposal are two-fold: (i) to improve the performance of the detector by enriching the descriptor information and (ii) take advantage of the information of image segmentation, which in fact is likely to be used in other stages of the detection system such as candidate generation or refinement.
We test our technique in the INRIA person dataset, which was originally developed to test HOG, embedding it in a human detection system. The well-known segmentation method, mean-shift (from smaller to larger super-pixels), and different methods to re-weight the original descriptor (constant, region-luminance, color or texture-dependent) has been evaluated. We achieve performance improvements of 4:47% in detection rate through the use of differences of color between contour pixel neighborhoods as re-weighting function.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study between two road approximation techniques—planar surfaces—from stereo vision data. The first approach is carried out in the v-disparity space and is based on a voting scheme, the Hough transform. The second one consists in computing the best fitting plane for the whole 3D road data points, directly in the Euclidean space, by using least squares fitting. The comparative study is initially performed over a set of different synthetic surfaces
(e.g., plane, quadratic surface, cubic surface) digitized by a virtual stereo head; then real data obtained with a commercial stereo head are used. The comparative study is intended to be used as a criterion for fining the best technique according to the road geometry. Additionally, it highlights common problems driven from a wrong assumption about the scene’s prior knowledge.

Abstract: This paper presents a robust technique for a real time estimation of both camera’s position and orientation—referred as pose. A commercial stereo vision system is used. Unlike previous approaches, it can be used either for urban or highway scenarios. The proposed technique consists of two stages. Initially, a compact 2D representation of the original 3D data points is computed. Then, a RANSAC based least squares approach is used for fitting a plane to the road. At the same time,
relative camera’s position and orientation are computed. The proposed technique is intended to be used on a driving assistance scheme for applications such as obstacle or pedestrian detection. Experimental results on urban environments with different road geometries are presented.

Abstract: This paper presents a robust approach for detecting moving objects from on-board stereo vision systems. It relies on a feature point quaternion-based registration, which avoids common problems that appear when computationally expensive iterative-based algorithms are used on dynamic environments. The proposed approach consists of three stages. Initially, feature points are extracted and tracked through consecutive frames. Then, a RANSAC based approach is used for registering
two 3D point sets with known correspondences by means of the quaternion method. Finally, the computed 3D rigid displacement is used to map two consecutive frames into the same coordinate system. Moving objects correspond to those areas with large registration errors. Experimental results, in different scenarios, show the viability of the proposed approach.