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Hanne Kause and 6 others. 2015. Confidence Measures for Assessing the HARP Algorithm in Tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart. Revised selected papers of Imaging and Modelling Challenges 6th International Workshop, STACOM 2015, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2015. Springer International Publishing, 69–79. (LNCS.)
Abstract: Cardiac deformation and changes therein have been linked to pathologies. Both can be extracted in detail from tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using harmonic phase (HARP) images. Although point tracking algorithms have shown to have high accuracies on HARP images, these vary with position. Detecting and discarding areas with unreliable results is crucial for use in clinical support systems. This paper assesses the capability of two confidence measures (CMs), based on energy and image structure, for detecting locations with reduced accuracy in motion tracking results. These CMs were tested on a database of simulated tMRI images containing the most common artifacts that may affect tracking accuracy. CM performance is assessed based on its capability for HARP tracking error bounding and compared in terms of significant differences detected using a multi comparison analysis of variance that takes into account the most influential factors on HARP tracking performance. Results showed that the CM based on image structure was better suited to detect unreliable optical flow vectors. In addition, it was shown that CMs can be used to detect optical flow vectors with large errors in order to improve the optical flow obtained with the HARP tracking algorithm.
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German Ros. 2016. Visual Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding Where and What. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Making Ground Autonomous Vehicles (GAVs) a reality as a service for the society is one of the major scientific and technological challenges of this century. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles include reducing accidents, improving traffic congestion and better usage of road infrastructures, among others. These vehicles must operate in our cities, towns and highways, dealing with many different types of situations while respecting traffic rules and protecting human lives. GAVs are expected to deal with all types of scenarios and situations, coping with an uncertain and chaotic world.
Therefore, in order to fulfill these demanding requirements GAVs need to be endowed with the capability of understanding their surrounding at many different levels, by means of affordable sensors and artificial intelligence. This capacity to understand the surroundings and the current situation that the vehicle is involved in is called scene understanding. In this work we investigate novel techniques to bring scene understanding to autonomous vehicles by combining the use of cameras as the main source of information—due to their versatility and affordability—and algorithms based on computer vision and machine learning. We investigate different degrees of understanding of the scene, starting from basic geometric knowledge about where is the vehicle within the scene. A robust and efficient estimation of the vehicle location and pose with respect to a map is one of the most fundamental steps towards autonomous driving. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness and computational efficiency, proposing key insights to improve current solutions. Then we advance to higher levels of abstraction to discover what is in the scene, by recognizing and parsing all the elements present on a driving scene, such as roads, sidewalks, pedestrians, etc. We investigate this problem known as semantic segmentation, proposing new approaches to improve recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. We cover these points by focusing on key aspects such as: (i) how to leverage computation moving semantics to an offline process, (ii) how to train compact architectures based on deconvolutional networks to achieve their maximum potential, (iii) how to use virtual worlds in combination with domain adaptation to produce accurate models in a cost-effective fashion, and (iv) how to use transfer learning techniques to prepare models to new situations. We finally extend the previous level of knowledge enabling systems to reasoning about what has change in a scene with respect to a previous visit, which in return allows for efficient and cost-effective map updating.
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David Geronimo, David Vazquez and Arturo de la Escalera. 2017. Vision-Based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea, and Air.
Keywords: ADAS; Autonomous Driving
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German Ros and 12 others. 2017. Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes via Domain Adaptation of SYNTHIA. In Gabriela Csurka, ed. Domain Adaptation in Computer Vision Applications. Springer, 227–241.
Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. Recent revolutionary results of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) foreshadow the advent of reliable classifiers to perform such visual tasks. However, DCNNs require learning of many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diverse images with class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained via cumbersome, human labour which is particularly challenging for semantic segmentation since pixel-level annotations are required. In this chapter, we propose to use a combination of a virtual world to automatically generate realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations, and domain adaptation to transfer the models learnt to correctly operate in real scenarios. We address the question of how useful synthetic data can be for semantic segmentation – in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic collection of diverse urban images, named SYNTHIA, with automatically generated class annotations and object identifiers. We use SYNTHIA in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments with DCNNs that show that combining SYNTHIA with simple domain adaptation techniques in the training stage significantly improves performance on semantic segmentation.
Keywords: SYNTHIA; Virtual worlds; Autonomous Driving
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Antonio Lopez, Atsushi Imiya, Tomas Pajdla and Jose Manuel Alvarez. 2017. Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Abstract: Summary This chapter examines different vision-based commercial solutions for real-live problems related to vehicles. It is worth mentioning the recent astonishing performance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in difficult visual tasks such as image classification, object recognition/localization/detection, and semantic segmentation. In fact,
different DCNN architectures are already being explored for low-level tasks such as optical flow and disparity computation, and higher level ones such as place recognition.
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Cristhian Aguilera. 2017. Local feature description in cross-spectral imagery. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Over the last few years, the number of consumer computer vision applications has increased dramatically. Today, computer vision solutions can be found in video game consoles, smartphone applications, driving assistance – just to name a few. Ideally, we require the performance of those applications, particularly those that are safety critical to remain constant under any external environment factors, such as changes in illumination or weather conditions. However, this is not always possible or very difficult to obtain by only using visible imagery, due to the inherent limitations of the images from that spectral band. For that reason, the use of images from different or multiple spectral bands is becoming more appealing.
The aforementioned possible advantages of using images from multiples spectral bands on various vision applications make multi-spectral image processing a relevant topic for research and development. Like in visible image processing, multi-spectral image processing needs tools and algorithms to handle information from various spectral bands. Furthermore, traditional tools such as local feature detection, which is the basis of many vision tasks such as visual odometry, image registration, or structure from motion, must be adjusted or reformulated to operate under new conditions. Traditional feature detection, description, and matching methods tend to underperform in multi-spectral settings, in comparison to mono-spectral settings, due to the natural differences between each spectral band.
The work in this thesis is focused on the local feature description problem when cross-spectral images are considered. In this context, this dissertation has three main contributions. Firstly, the work starts by proposing the usage of a combination of frequency and spatial information, in a multi-scale scheme, as feature description. Evaluations of this proposal, based on classical hand-made feature descriptors, and comparisons with state of the art cross-spectral approaches help to find and understand limitations of such strategy. Secondly, different convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures are evaluated when used to describe cross-spectral image patches. Results showed that CNN-based methods, designed to work with visible monocular images, could be successfully applied to the description of images from two different spectral bands, with just minor modifications. In this framework, a novel CNN-based network model, specifically intended to describe image patches from two different spectral bands, is proposed. This network, referred to as Q-Net, outperforms state of the art in the cross-spectral domain, including both previous hand-made solutions as well as L2 CNN-based architectures. The third contribution of this dissertation is in the cross-spectral feature description application domain. The multispectral odometry problem is tackled showing a real application of cross-spectral descriptors
In addition to the three main contributions mentioned above, in this dissertation, two different multi-spectral datasets are generated and shared with the community to be used as benchmarks for further studies.
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Jose M. Armingol and 11 others. 2018. Environmental Perception for Intelligent Vehicles. Intelligent Vehicles. Enabling Technologies and Future Developments.23–101.
Abstract: Environmental perception represents, because of its complexity, a challenge for Intelligent Transport Systems due to the great variety of situations and different elements that can happen in road environments and that must be faced by these systems. In connection with this, so far there are a variety of solutions as regards sensors and methods, so the results of precision, complexity, cost, or computational load obtained by these works are different. In this chapter some systems based on computer vision and laser techniques are presented. Fusion methods are also introduced in order to provide advanced and reliable perception systems.
Keywords: Computer vision; laser techniques; data fusion; advanced driver assistance systems; traffic monitoring systems; intelligent vehicles
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Antonio Lopez, David Vazquez and Gabriel Villalonga. 2018. Data for Training Models, Domain Adaptation. Intelligent Vehicles. Enabling Technologies and Future Developments.395–436.
Abstract: Simulation can enable several developments in the field of intelligent vehicles. This chapter is divided into three main subsections. The first one deals with driving simulators. The continuous improvement of hardware performance is a well-known fact that is allowing the development of more complex driving simulators. The immersion in the simulation scene is increased by high fidelity feedback to the driver. In the second subsection, traffic simulation is explained as well as how it can be used for intelligent transport systems. Finally, it is rather clear that sensor-based perception and action must be based on data-driven algorithms. Simulation could provide data to train and test algorithms that are afterwards implemented in vehicles. These tools are explained in the third subsection.
Keywords: Driving simulator; hardware; software; interface; traffic simulation; macroscopic simulation; microscopic simulation; virtual data; training data
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Antonio Lopez, Atsushi Imiya, Tomas Pajdla and Jose Manuel Alvarez. Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air.
Abstract: A unified view of the use of computer vision technology for different types of vehicles
Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology focuses on computer vision as on-board technology, bringing together fields of research where computer vision is progressively penetrating: the automotive sector, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles. It also serves as a reference for researchers of current developments and challenges in areas of the application of computer vision, involving vehicles such as advanced driver assistance (pedestrian detection, lane departure warning, traffic sign recognition), autonomous driving and robot navigation (with visual simultaneous localization and mapping) or unmanned aerial vehicles (obstacle avoidance, landscape classification and mapping, fire risk assessment).
The overall role of computer vision for the navigation of different vehicles, as well as technology to address on-board applications, is analysed.
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David Aldavert. 2021. Efficient and Scalable Handwritten Word Spotting on Historical Documents using Bag of Visual Words. (Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey.)
Abstract: Word spotting can be defined as the pattern recognition tasked aimed at locating and retrieving a specific keyword within a document image collection without explicitly transcribing the whole corpus. Its use is particularly interesting when applied in scenarios where Optical Character Recognition performs poorly or can not be used at all. This thesis focuses on such a scenario, word spotting on historical handwritten documents that have been written by a single author or by multiple authors with a similar calligraphy.
This problem requires a visual signature that is robust to image artifacts, flexible to accommodate script variations and efficient to retrieve information in a rapid manner. For this, we have developed a set of word spotting methods that on their foundation use the well known Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) representation. This representation has gained popularity among the document image analysis community to characterize handwritten words
in an unsupervised manner. However, most approaches on this field rely on a basic BoVW configuration and disregard complex encoding and spatial representations. We determine which BoVW configurations provide the best performance boost to a spotting system.
Then, we extend the segmentation-based word spotting, where word candidates are given a priori, to segmentation-free spotting. The proposed approach seeds the document images with overlapping word location candidates and characterizes them with a BoVW signature. Retrieval is achieved comparing the query and candidate signatures and returning the locations that provide a higher consensus. This is a simple but powerful approach that requires a more compact signature than in a segmentation-based scenario. We first
project the BoVW signature into a reduced semantic topics space and then compress it further using Product Quantizers. The resulting signature only requires a few dozen bytes, allowing us to index thousands of pages on a common desktop computer. The final system still yields a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art despite all the information loss during the compression phases.
Afterwards, we also study how to combine different modalities of information in order to create a query-by-X spotting system where, words are indexed using an information modality and queries are retrieved using another. We consider three different information modalities: visual, textual and audio. Our proposal is to create a latent feature space where features which are semantically related are projected onto the same topics. Creating thus a new feature space where information from different modalities can be compared. Later, we consider the codebook generation and descriptor encoding problem. The codebooks used to encode the BoVW signatures are usually created using an unsupervised clustering algorithm and, they require to test multiple parameters to determine which configuration is best for a certain document collection. We propose a semantic clustering algorithm which allows to estimate the best parameter from data. Since gather annotated data is costly, we use synthetically generated word images. The resulting codebook is database agnostic, i. e. a codebook that yields a good performance on document collections that use the same script. We also propose the use of an additional codebook to approximate descriptors and reduce the descriptor encoding
complexity to sub-linear.
Finally, we focus on the problem of signatures dimensionality. We propose a new symbol probability signature where each bin represents the probability that a certain symbol is present a certain location of the word image. This signature is extremely compact and combined with compression techniques can represent word images with just a few bytes per signature.
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