Abstract: In this paper we present a pixel-level object categorization method suitable to be applied under real-time constraints. Since pixels are categorized using a bag of features scheme, the major bottleneck of such an approach would be the feature pooling in local histograms of visual words. Therefore, we propose to bypass this time-consuming step and directly obtain the score from a linear Support Vector Machine classifier. This is achieved by creating an integral image of the components of the SVM which can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 10 additions and 2 products, regardless of its size. Besides, we evaluated the performance of two efficient feature quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means and the Extremely Randomized Forest. All experiments have been done in the Graz02 database, showing comparable, or even better results to related work with a lower computational cost.

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 paper, we address the problem of reconstructing the background of a scene from a video sequence with occluding objects. The images are taken by hand-held cameras. Our method composes the background by selecting the appropriate pixels from previously aligned input images. To do that, we minimize a cost function that penalizes the deviations from the following assumptions: background represents objects whose distance to the camera is maximal, and background objects are stationary. Distance information is roughly obtained by a supervised learning approach that allows us to distinguish between close and distant image regions. Moving foreground objects are filtered out by using stationariness and motion boundary constancy measurements. The cost function is minimized by a graph cuts method. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to recover an occlusion-free background in a set of sequences.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the geometric distance from a given point to the corresponding implicit quadric curve/surface. The proposed estimation is based on the height of a tetrahedron, which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the real distance. The estimated distance is then used for finding the best set of quadric parameters, by means of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, which is a common framework in other geometric fitting approaches. Comparisons of the proposed approach with previous ones are provided to show both improvements in CPU time as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results.

Abstract: Optical Flow (OF) techniques facing the complexity of real sequences have been developed in the last years. Even using the most appropriate technique for our specific problem, at some points the output flow might fail to achieve the minimum error required for the system. Confidence measures computed from either input data or OF output should discard those points where OF is not accurate enough for its further use. It follows that evaluating the capabilities of a confidence measure for bounding OF error is as important as the definition
itself. In this paper we analyze different confidence measures and point out their advantages and limitations for their use in real world settings. We also explore the agreement with current tools for their evaluation of confidence measures performance.