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: This paper presents a bag of feature based method for visual object recognition. Our contribution is focussed on the selection of the best feature descriptor. It is implemented by using a novel multi-table reinforcement learning method that selects among five of classical descriptors (i.e., Spin, SIFT, SURF, C-SIFT and PHOW) the one that best describes each image. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing the improvements achieved with the proposed approach.

Abstract: TA7.4
Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.

Abstract: In object-class segmentation, one of the most tedious tasks is to manually segment many object examples in order to learn a model of the object category. Yet, there has been little research on reducing the degree of manual annotation for
object-class segmentation. In this work we explore alternative strategies which do not require full manual segmentation of the object in the training set. In particular, we study the use of bounding boxes as a coarser and much cheaper form of segmentation and we perform a comparative study of several Multiple-Instance Learning techniques that allow to obtain a model with this type of weak annotation. We show that some of these methods can be competitive, when used with coarse
segmentations, with methods that require full manual segmentation of the objects. Furthermore, we show how to use active learning combined with this weakly supervised strategy.
As we see, this strategy permits to reduce the amount of annotation and optimize the number of examples that require full manual segmentation in the training set.

Abstract: We propose a method that aims to lessen the significant accuracy degradation
that a discriminative classifier can suffer when it is trained in a specific domain (source domain) and applied in a different one (target domain). The principal reason for this degradation is the discrepancies in the distribution of the features that feed the classifier in different domains. Therefore, we propose a domain adaptation method that maps the features from the different domains into a common subspace and learns a discriminative domain-invariant classifier within it. Our algorithm combines bilinear classifiers and multi-task learning for domain adaptation.
The bilinear classifier encodes the feature transformation and classification
parameters by a matrix decomposition. In this way, specific feature transformations for multiple domains and a shared classifier are jointly learned in a multi-task learning framework. Focusing on domain adaptation for visual object detection, we apply this method to the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model for cross domain pedestrian detection. Experimental results show that our method significantly avoids the domain drift and improves the accuracy when compared to several baselines.