Abstract: n this work, we introduce a novel energy-based framework that addresses the challenging problem of 3D reconstruction of facial hair from a single RGB image. To this end, we identify hair pixels over the image via texture analysis and then determine individual hair fibers that are modeled by means of a parametric hair model based on 3D helixes. We propose to minimize an energy composed of several terms, in order to adapt the hair parameters that better fit the image detections. The final hairs respond to the resulting fibers after a post-processing step where we encourage further realism. The resulting approach generates realistic facial hair fibers from solely an RGB image without assuming any training data nor user interaction. We provide an experimental evaluation on real-world pictures where several facial hair styles and image conditions are observed, showing consistent results and establishing a comparison with respect to competing approaches.

Abstract: Video synchronization and alignment is a rather recent topic in computer vision. It usually deals with the problem of aligning sequences recorded simultaneously by static, jointly- or independently-moving cameras. In this paper, we investigate the more difficult problem of matching videos captured at different times from independently-moving cameras, whose trajectories are approximately coincident or parallel. To this end, we propose a novel method that pixel-wise aligns videos and allows thus to automatically highlight their differences. This primarily aims at visual surveillance but the method can be adopted as is by other related video applications, like object transfer (augmented reality) or high dynamic range video. We build upon a slice matching scheme to first synchronize the sequences, while we develop a spatio-temporal alignment scheme to spatially register corresponding frames and refine the temporal mapping. We investigate the performance of the proposed method on videos recorded from vehicles driven along different types of roads and compare with related previous works.

Abstract: Pedestrian classifiers decide which image windows contain a pedestrian. In practice, such classifiers provide a relatively high response at neighbor windows overlapping a pedestrian, while the responses around potential false positives are expected to be lower. An analogous reasoning applies for image sequences. If there is a pedestrian located within a frame, the same pedestrian is expected to appear close to the same location in neighbor frames. Therefore, such a location has chances of receiving high classification scores during several frames, while false positives are expected to be more spurious. In this paper we propose to exploit such correlations for improving the accuracy of base pedestrian classifiers. In particular, we propose to use two-stage classifiers which not only rely on the image descriptors required by the base classifiers but also on the response of such base classifiers in a given spatiotemporal neighborhood. More specifically, we train pedestrian classifiers using a stacked sequential learning (SSL) paradigm. We use a new pedestrian dataset we have acquired from a car to evaluate our proposal at different frame rates. We also test on a well known dataset: Caltech. The obtained results show that our SSL proposal boosts detection accuracy significantly with a minimal impact on the computational cost. Interestingly, SSL improves more the accuracy at the most dangerous situations, i.e. when a pedestrian is close to the camera.

Abstract: Action recognition in videos is a challenging task due to the complexity of the spatio-temporal patterns to model and the difficulty to acquire and learn on large quantities of video data. Deep learning, although a breakthrough for image classification and showing promise for videos, has still not clearly superseded action recognition methods using hand-crafted features, even when training on massive datasets. In this paper, we introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of hand-crafted spatio-temporal features classified by supervised deep networks. As we show in our experiments on five popular benchmarks for action recognition, our hybrid model combines the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10000 short clips) and yet improves significantly on the state of the art, including recent deep models trained on millions of manually labelled images and videos.

Abstract: Autonomous driving systems require huge amounts of data to train. Manual annotation of this data is time-consuming and prohibitively expensive since it involves human resources. Therefore, active learning emerged as an alternative to ease this effort and to make data annotation more manageable. In this paper, we introduce a novel active learning approach for object detection in videos by exploiting temporal coherence. Our active learning criterion is based on the estimated number of errors in terms of false positives and false negatives. The detections obtained by the object detector are used to define the nodes of a graph and tracked forward and backward to temporally link the nodes. Minimizing an energy function defined on this graphical model provides estimates of both false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic video dataset, called SYNTHIA-AL, specially designed to evaluate active learning for video object detection in road scenes. Finally, we show that our approach outperforms active learning baselines tested on two datasets.