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: Autonomous driving models should ideally be evaluated by deploying
them on a fleet of physical vehicles in the real world. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for the vast majority of researchers. An attractive alternative is to evaluate models offline, on a pre-collected validation dataset with ground truth annotation. In this paper, we investigate the relation between various online and offline metrics for evaluation of autonomous driving models. We find that offline prediction error is not necessarily correlated with driving quality, and two models with identical prediction error can differ dramatically in their driving performance. We show that the correlation of offline evaluation with driving quality can be significantly improved by selecting an appropriate validation dataset and
suitable offline metrics.

Abstract: Photorealistic virtual environments are crucial for developing and testing automated driving systems in a safe way during trials. As commercially available simulators are expensive and bulky, this paper presents a low-cost, extendable, and easy-to-use (LEE) virtual environment with the aim to highlight its utility for level 3 driving automation. In particular, an experiment is performed using the presented simulator to explore the influence of different variables regarding control transfer of the car after the system was driving autonomously in a highway scenario. The results show that the speed of the car at the time when the system needs to transfer the control to the human driver is critical.

Abstract: Describing persons and their actions is a challenging problem due to variations in pose, scale and viewpoint in real-world images. Recently, semantic pyramids approach [1] for pose normalization has shown to provide excellent results for gender and action recognition. The performance of semantic pyramids approach relies on robust image description and is therefore limited due to the use of shallow local features. In the context of object recognition [2] and object detection [3], convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or deep features have shown to improve the performance over the conventional shallow features.
We propose deep semantic pyramids for human attributes and action recognition. The method works by constructing spatial pyramids based on CNNs of different part locations. These pyramids are then combined to obtain a single semantic representation. We validate our approach on the Berkeley and 27 Human Attributes datasets for attributes classification. For action recognition, we perform experiments on two challenging datasets: Willow and PASCAL VOC 2010. The proposed deep semantic pyramids provide a significant gain of 17.2%, 13.9%, 24.3% and 22.6% compared to the standard shallow semantic pyramids on Berkeley, 27 Human Attributes, Willow and PASCAL VOC 2010 datasets respectively. Our results also show that deep semantic pyramids outperform conventional CNNs based on the full bounding box of the person. Finally, we compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods and show a gain in performance compared to best methods in literature.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.