Abstract: While wearable cameras are becoming increasingly popular, locating relevant information in large unstructured collections of egocentric images is still a tedious and time consuming processes. This paper addresses the problem of organizing egocentric photo streams acquired by a wearable camera into semantically meaningful segments. First, contextual and semantic information is extracted for each image by employing a Convolutional Neural Networks approach. Later, by integrating language processing, a vocabulary of concepts is defined in a semantic space. Finally, by exploiting the temporal coherence in photo streams, images which share contextual and semantic attributes are grouped together. The resulting temporal segmentation is particularly suited for further analysis, ranging from activity and event recognition to semantic indexing and summarization. Experiments over egocentric sets of nearly 17,000 images, show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Wearable cameras offer a hands-free way to record egocentric images of daily experiences, where social events are of special interest. The first step towards detection of social events is to track the appearance of multiple persons involved in them. In this paper, we propose a novel method to find correspondences of multiple faces in low temporal resolution egocentric videos acquired through a wearable camera. This kind of photo-stream imposes additional challenges to the multi-tracking problem with respect to conventional videos. Due to the free motion of the camera and to its low temporal resolution, abrupt changes in the field of view, in illumination condition and in the target location are highly frequent. To overcome such difficulties, we propose a multi-face tracking method that generates a set of tracklets through finding correspondences along the whole sequence for each detected face and takes advantage of the tracklets redundancy to deal with unreliable ones. Similar tracklets are grouped into the so called extended bag-of-tracklets (eBoT), which is aimed to correspond to a specific person. Finally, a prototype tracklet is extracted for each eBoT, where the occurred occlusions are estimated by relying on a new measure of confidence. We validated our approach over an extensive dataset of egocentric photo-streams and compared it to state of the art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

Abstract: This paper introduces a new automatic technique for garment retexturing using a single static image along with the depth and infrared information obtained using the Microsoft Kinect II as the RGB-D acquisition device. First, the garment is segmented out from the image using either the Breadth-First Search algorithm or the semi-automatic procedure provided by the GrabCut method. Then texture domain coordinates are computed for each pixel belonging to the garment using normalised 3D information. Afterwards, shading is applied to the new colours from the texture image. As the main contribution of the proposed method, the latter information is obtained based on extracting a linear map transforming the colour present on the infrared image to that of the RGB colour channels. One of the most important impacts of this strategy is that the resulting retexturing algorithm is colour-, pattern- and lighting-invariant. The experimental results show that it can be used to produce realistic representations, which is substantiated through implementing it under various experimentation scenarios, involving varying lighting intensities and directions. Successful results are accomplished also on video sequences, as well as on images of subjects taking different poses. Based on the Mean Opinion Score analysis conducted on many randomly chosen users, it has been shown to produce more realistic-looking results compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods suggested in the literature. From a wide perspective, the proposed method can be used for retexturing all sorts of segmented surfaces, although the focus of this study is on garment retexturing, and the investigation of the configurations is steered accordingly, since the experiments target an application in the context of virtual fitting rooms.