Abstract: In this paper, we present a word spotting framework that follows the query-by-string paradigm where word images are represented both by textual and visual representations. The textual representation is formulated in terms of character $n$-grams while the visual one is based on the bag-of-visual-words scheme. These two representations are merged together and projected to a sub-vector space. This transform allows to, given a textual query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. Moreover, this statistical representation can be used together with state-of-the-art indexation structures in order to deal with large-scale scenarios. The proposed method is evaluated using a collection of historical documents outperforming state-of-the-art performances.

Abstract: Segmentation of a single image is in general a highly underconstrained problem. A frequent approach to solve it is to somehow provide prior knowledge or constraints on how the objects of interest look like (in terms of their shape, size, color, location or structure). Image co-segmentation trades the need for such knowledge for something much easier to obtain, namely, additional images showing the object from other viewpoints. Now the segmentation problem is posed as one of differentiating the similar object regions in all the images from the more varying background. In this paper, for the first time, we extend this approach to video segmentation: given two or more video sequences showing the same object (or objects belonging to the same class) moving in a similar manner, we aim to outline its region in all the frames. In addition, the method works in an unsupervised manner, by learning to segment at testing time. We compare favorably with two state-of-the-art methods on video segmentation and report results on benchmark videos.

Abstract: This paper proposes a non-rigid registration formulation capturing both global and local deformations in a single framework. This formulation is based on a quadratic estimation of the registration distance together with a quadratic regularization term. Hence, the optimal transformation parameters are easily obtained by solving a liner system of equations, which guarantee a fast convergence. Experimental results with challenging 2D and 3D shapes are presented to show the validity of the proposed framework. Furthermore, comparisons with the most relevant approaches are provided.

Abstract: Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.

Abstract: State-of-the-art deformable part-based models based on latent SVM have shown excellent results on human detection. In this paper, we propose to train a multiview deformable part-based model with automatically generated part examples from virtual-world data. The method is efficient as: (i) the part detectors are trained with precisely extracted virtual examples, thus no latent learning is needed, (ii) the multiview pedestrian detector enhances the performance of the pedestrian root model, (iii) a top-down approach is used for part detection which reduces the searching space. We evaluate our model on Daimler and Karlsruhe Pedestrian Benchmarks with publicly available Caltech pedestrian detection evaluation framework and the result outperforms the state-of-the-art latent SVM V4.0, on both average miss rate and speed (our detector is ten times faster).