Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important in different areas of computer vision such as autonomous driving, car collision warning and pedestrian crossing detection. However, current vision-based road detection methods are usually based on low-level features and they assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions. Therefore, in this paper, contextual 3D information is used in addition to low-level cues. Low-level photometric invariant cues are derived from the appearance of roads. Contextual cues used include horizon lines, vanishing points, 3D scene layout and 3D road stages. Moreover, temporal road cues are included. All these cues are sensitive to different imaging conditions and hence are considered as weak cues. Therefore, they are combined to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. To this end, the low-level, contextual and temporal cues are combined in a Bayesian framework to classify road sequences. Large scale experiments on road sequences show that the road detection method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios (tunnels, urban and highway). Further, using the combined cues outperforms all other individual cues. Finally, the proposed method provides highest road detection accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians in images is a key functionality to avoid vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions. The most promising detectors rely on appearance-based pedestrian classifiers trained with labelled samples. This paper addresses the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in virtual scenarios work successfully for pedestrian detection in real images? (Fig. 1). Our experiments suggest a positive answer, which is a new and relevant conclusion for research in pedestrian detection. More specifically, we record training sequences in virtual scenarios and then appearance-based pedestrian classifiers are learnt using HOG and linear SVM. We test such classifiers in a publicly available dataset provided by Daimler AG for pedestrian detection benchmarking. This dataset contains real world images acquired from a moving car. The obtained result is compared with the one given by a classifier learnt using samples coming from real images. The comparison reveals that, although virtual samples were not specially selected, both virtual and real based training give rise to classifiers of similar performance.

Abstract: The current paper proposes a new parametric local color correction technique. Initially, several color transfer functions are computed from the output of the mean shift color segmentation algorithm. Secondly, color influence maps are calculated. Finally, the contribution of every color transfer function is merged using the weights from the color influence maps. The proposed approach is compared with both global and local color correction approaches. Results show that our method outperforms the technique ranked first in a recent performance evaluation on this topic. Moreover, the proposed approach is computed in about one tenth of the time.

Abstract: Co-segmentation is defined as jointly partitioning multiple images depicting the same or similar object, into foreground and background. Our method consists of a multiple-scale multiple-image generative model, which jointly estimates the foreground and background appearance distributions from several images, in a non-supervised manner. In contrast to other co-segmentation methods, our approach does not require the images to have similar foregrounds and different backgrounds to function properly. Region matching is applied to exploit inter-image information by establishing correspondences between the common objects that appear in the scene. Moreover, computing many-to-many associations of regions allow further applications, like recognition of object parts across images. We report results on iCoseg, a challenging dataset that presents extreme variability in camera viewpoint, illumination and object deformations and poses. We also show that our method is robust against large intra-class variability in the MSRC database.

Abstract: Vision-based object detectors are crucial for different applications. They rely on learnt object models. Ideally, we would like to deploy our vision system in the scenario where it must operate, and lead it to self-learn how to distinguish the objects of interest, i.e., without human intervention. However, the learning of each object model requires labelled samples collected through a tiresome manual process. For instance, we are interested in exploring the self-training of a pedestrian detector for driver assistance systems. Our first approach to avoid manual labelling consisted in the use of samples coming from realistic computer graphics, so that their labels are automatically available [12]. This would make possible the desired self-training of our pedestrian detector. However, as we showed in [14], between virtual and real worlds it may be a dataset shift. In order to overcome it, we propose the use of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques that avoid human intervention during the adaptation process. In particular, this paper explores the use of the transductive SVM (T-SVM) learning algorithm in order to adapt virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection (Fig. 1).