Abstract: Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.

Abstract: In emergency situations, actions that save lives and limit the impact of hazards are crucial. In order to act, situational awareness is needed to decide what to do. Geolocalized photos and video of the situations as they evolve can be crucial in better understanding them and making decisions faster. Cameras are almost everywhere these days, either in terms of smartphones, installed CCTV cameras, UAVs or others. However, this poses challenges in big data and information overflow. Moreover, most of the time there are no disasters at any given location, so humans aiming to detect sudden situations may not be as alert as needed at any point in time. Consequently, computer vision tools can be an excellent decision support. The number of emergencies where computer vision tools has been considered or used is very wide, and there is a great overlap across related emergency research. Researchers tend to focus on state-of-the-art systems that cover the same emergency as they are studying, obviating important research in other fields. In order to unveil this overlap, the survey is divided along four main axes: the types of emergencies that have been studied in computer vision, the objective that the algorithms can address, the type of hardware needed and the algorithms used. Therefore, this review provides a broad overview of the progress of computer vision covering all sorts of emergencies.

Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene