Abstract: Detecting traversable road areas ahead a moving vehicle is a key process for modern autonomous driving systems. Most existing algorithms use color to classify pixels as road or background. These algorithms reduce the effect of lighting variations and weather conditions by exploiting the discriminant/invariant properties of different color representations. However, up to date, no comparison between these representations have been conducted. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an evaluation of existing color representations for road detection. More specifically, we focus on color planes derived from RGB data and their most com-
mon combinations. The evaluation is done on a set of 7000 road images acquired
using an on-board camera in different real-driving situations.

Abstract: Non rigid registration is an important task in computer vision with many applications in shape and motion modeling. A fundamental step of the registration is the data association between the source and the target sets. Such association proves difficult in practice, due to the discrete nature of the information and its corruption by various types of noise, e.g. outliers and missing data. In this paper we investigate the benefit of the implicit representations for the non-rigid registration of 3D point clouds. First, the target points are described with small quadratic patches that are blended through partition of unity weighting. Then, the discrete association between the source and the target can be replaced by a continuous distance field induced by the interface. By combining this distance field with a proper deformation term, the registration energy can be expressed in a linear least square form that is easy and fast to solve. This significantly eases the registration by avoiding direct association between points. Moreover, a hierarchical approach can be easily implemented by employing coarse-to-fine representations. Experimental results are provided for point clouds from multi-view data sets. The qualitative and quantitative comparisons show the outperformance and robustness of our framework. %in presence of noise and outliers.

Abstract: Road detection is a vital task for the development of autonomous vehicles. The knowledge of the free road surface ahead of the target vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, road departure warning, as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems like vehicle or pedestrian detection. Using vision to detect the road has several advantages in front of other sensors: richness of features, easy integration, low cost or low power consumption. Common vision-based road detection approaches use low-level features (such as color or texture) as visual cues to group pixels exhibiting similar properties. However, it is difficult to foresee a perfect clustering algorithm since roads are in outdoor scenarios being imaged from a mobile platform. In this paper, we propose a novel high-level approach to vision-based road detection based on geographical information. The key idea of the algorithm is exploiting geographical information to provide a rough detection of the road. Then, this segmentation is refined at low-level using color information to provide the final result. The results presented show the validity of our approach.

Abstract: Training vision-based pedestrian detectors using synthetic datasets (virtual world) is a useful technique to collect automatically the training examples with their pixel-wise ground truth. However, as it is often the case, these detectors must operate in real-world images, experiencing a significant drop of their performance. In fact, this effect also occurs among different real-world datasets, i.e. detectors' accuracy drops when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, it is required to adapt the detector trained with synthetic data to operate in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation approach based on boosting LDA exemplar classifiers from both virtual and real worlds. We evaluate our proposal on multiple real-world pedestrian detection datasets. The results show that our method can efficiently adapt the exemplar classifiers from virtual to real world, avoiding drops in average precision over the 15%.

Abstract: Among the components of a pedestrian detector, its trained pedestrian classifier is crucial for achieving the desired performance. The initial task of the training process consists in collecting samples of pedestrians and background, which involves tiresome manual annotation of pedestrian bounding boxes (BBs). Thus, recent works have assessed the use of automatically collected samples from photo-realistic virtual worlds. However, learning from virtual-world samples and testing in real-world images may suffer the dataset shift problem. Accordingly, in this paper we assess an strategy to collect samples from the real world and retrain with them, thus avoiding the dataset shift, but in such a way that no BBs of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. In particular, we train a pedestrian classifier based on virtual-world samples (no human annotation required). Then, using such a classifier we collect pedestrian samples from real-world images by detection. After, a human oracle rejects the false detections efficiently (weak annotation). Finally, a new classifier is trained with the accepted detections. We show that this classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating hundreds of pedestrian BBs.