Abstract: Color is a powerful visual cue for many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions affecting negatively the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, those reflection models might be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms may hold simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is taken on input composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines and weights these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, the fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the method. From the theoretical and experimental results, it is concluded that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning. Further, the method outperforms state-of- the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition.

Abstract: We present a region matching algorithm which establishes correspondences between regions from two segmented images. An abstract graph-based representation conceals the image in a hierarchical graph, exploiting the scene properties at two levels. First, the similarity and spatial consistency of the image semantic objects is encoded in a graph of commute times. Second, the cluttered regions of the semantic objects are represented with a shape descriptor. Many-to-many matching of regions is specially challenging due to the instability of the segmentation under slight image changes, and we explicitly handle it through high order potentials. We demonstrate the matching approach applied to images of world famous buildings, captured under different conditions, showing the robustness of our method to large variations in illumination and viewpoint.

Abstract: This paper describes an image classification approach oriented to identify specimens of lepidopterous insects at Ecuadorian ecological reserves. This work seeks to contribute to studies in the area of biology about genus of butterflies and also to facilitate the registration of unrecognized specimens. The proposed approach is based on the fine-tuning of three widely used pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This strategy is intended to overcome the reduced number of labeled images. Experimental results with a dataset labeled by expert biologists is presented, reaching a recognition accuracy above 92%.

Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has become a hot topic and many different algorithms have been proposed in the last years. Despite this fact, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light into the characteristics of the different methods and their behavior in different scenarios. In this paper we provide such an analysis. We include methods from different families, and pay special attention to vocabulary-based approaches, a new family of methods that has not received much attention in the MIL literature. The empirical comparison includes seven databases from four heterogeneous domains, implementations of eight popular MIL methods, and a study of the behavior under synthetic conditions. Based on this analysis, we show that, with an appropriate implementation, vocabulary-based approaches outperform other MIL methods in most of the cases, showing in general a more consistent performance.