Abstract: This paper proposes a new version of Particle Filter, called Articulated Particle Filter – ArPF -, which has been specifically designed for an efficient sampling of hierarchical spaces, generated by articulated objects. Our approach decomposes the articulated motion into layers for efficiency purposes, making use of a careful modeling of the diffusion noise along with its propagation through the articulations. This produces an increase of accuracy and prevent for divergences. The algorithm is tested on hand tracking due to its complex hierarchical articulated nature. With this purpose, a new dataset generation tool for quantitative evaluation is also presented in this paper.

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of video surveillance by mobile cameras. We present a method that allows online change detection in night-time outdoor surveillance. Because of the camera movement, background frames are not available and must be “localized” in former sequences and registered with the current frames. To this end, we propose a Frame Localization And Registration (FLAR) approach that solves the problem efficiently. Frames of former sequences define a database which is queried by current frames in turn. To quickly retrieve nearest neighbors, database is indexed through a visual dictionary method based on the SURF descriptor. Furthermore, the frame localization is benefited by a temporal filter that exploits the temporal coherence of videos. Next, the recently proposed ECC alignment scheme is used to spatially register the synchronized frames. Finally, change detection methods apply to aligned frames in order to mark suspicious areas. Experiments with real night sequences recorded by in-vehicle cameras demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and verify its efficiency and effectiveness against other methods.

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: Most MAP inference algorithms for CRFs optimize an energy function knowing all the potentials. In this paper, we focus on CRFs where the computational cost of instantiating the potentials is orders of magnitude higher than MAP inference. This is often the case in semantic image segmentation, where most potentials are instantiated by slow classifiers fed with costly features. We introduce Active MAP inference 1) to on-the-fly select a subset of potentials to be instantiated in the energy function, leaving the rest of the parameters of the potentials unknown, and 2) to estimate the MAP labeling from such incomplete energy function. Results for semantic segmentation benchmarks, namely PASCAL VOC 2010 [5] and MSRC-21 [19], show that Active MAP inference achieves similar levels of accuracy but with major efficiency gains.