Abstract: Pedestrian detection for autonomous driving is one of the hardest tasks within computer vision, and involves huge computational costs. Obtaining acceptable real-time performance, measured in frames per second (fps), for the most advanced algorithms is nowadays a hard challenge. Taking the work in [1] as our baseline, we propose a CUDA implementation of a pedestrian detection system that includes LBP and HOG as feature descriptors and SVM and Random forest as classifiers. We introduce significant algorithmic adjustments and optimizations to adapt the problem to the NVIDIA GPU architecture. The aim is to deploy a real-time system providing reliable results.

Abstract: Automatic analysis of visual art, such as paintings, is a challenging inter-disciplinary research problem. Conventional approaches only rely on global scene characteristics by encoding holistic information for computational painting categorization.We argue that such approaches are sub-optimal and that discriminative common visual structures provide complementary information for painting classification. We present an approach that encodes both the global scene layout and discriminative latent common structures for computational painting categorization. The region of interests are automatically extracted, without any manual part labeling, by training class-specific deformable part-based models. Both holistic and region-of-interests are then described using multi-scale dense convolutional features. These features are pooled separately using Fisher vector encoding and concatenated afterwards in a single image representation. Experiments are performed on a challenging dataset with 91 different painters and 13 diverse painting styles. Our approach outperforms the standard method, which only employs the global scene characteristics. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming a recent multi-scale deep features based approach [11] by 6.4% and 3.8% respectively on artist and style classification.

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.

Abstract: It has recently been demonstrated that local feature descriptors based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) can significantly improve the matching performance. Previous work on learning such descriptors has focused on exploiting pairs of positive and negative patches to learn discriminative CNN representations. In this work, we propose to utilize triplets of training samples, together with in-triplet mining of hard negatives.
We show that our method achieves state of the art results, without the computational overhead typically associated with mining of negatives and with lower complexity of the network architecture. We compare our approach to recently introduced convolutional local feature descriptors, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods in terms of performance and speed. We also examine different loss functions associated with triplets.