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: The current paper proposes a novel color correction approach based on a probabilistic segmentation framework by using 3D Gaussian Mixture Models. Regions are used to compute local color correction functions, which are then combined to obtain the final corrected image. The proposed approach is evaluated using both a recently published metric and two large data sets composed of seventy images. The evaluation is performed by comparing our algorithm with eight well known color correction algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is the highest scoring color correction method. Also, the proposed single step 3D color space probabilistic segmentation reduces processing time over similar approaches.

Abstract: Camera-based person detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications. The task is diffcult because the great variety of backgrounds (scenarios, illumination) in which persons are present, as well as their intra-class variability (pose, clothe, occlusion). In fact, the class person is one of the included in the popular PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) challenge. A breakthrough for this challenge, regarding person detection, is due to Felzenszwalb et al. These authors proposed a part-based detector that relies on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and latent support vector machines (LatSVM) to learn a model of the whole human body and its constitutive parts, as well as their relative position. Since the approach of Felzenszwalb et al. appeared new variants have been proposed, usually giving rise to more complex models. In this paper, we focus on an issue that has not attracted suficient interest up to now. In particular, we refer to the fact that HOG is usually computed from RGB color space, but other possibilities exist and deserve the corresponding investigation. In this paper we challenge RGB space with the opponent color space (OPP), which is inspired in the human vision system.We will compute the HOG on top of OPP, then we train and test the part-based human classifer by Felzenszwalb et al. using PASCAL VOC challenge protocols and person database. Our experiments demonstrate that OPP outperforms RGB. We also investigate possible differences among types of scenarios: indoor, urban and countryside. Interestingly, our experiments suggest that the beneficts of OPP with respect to RGB mainly come for indoor and countryside scenarios, those in which the human visual system was designed by evolution.

Abstract: We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an endto-end
model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via
reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of
increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform’s utility for autonomous driving research.