Abstract: We propose an efficient method, built on the popular Bag of Features approach, that obtains robust multiclass pixel-level object segmentation of an image in less than 500ms, with results comparable or better than most state of the art methods. We introduce the Integral Linear Classifier (ILC), that can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 6 additions and 1 product by fusing the accumulation and classification steps in a single operation. In order to design a method as efficient as possible, our building blocks are carefully selected from the quickest in the state of the art. More precisely, we evaluate the performance of three popular local descriptors, that can be very efficiently computed using integral images, and two fast quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means, and the Extremely Randomized Forest. Finally, we explore the utility of adding spatial bins to the Bag of Features histograms and that of cascade classifiers to improve the obtained segmentation. Our method is compared to the state of the art in the difficult Graz-02 and PASCAL 2007 Segmentation Challenge datasets.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a word spotting framework that follows the query-by-string paradigm where word images are represented both by textual and visual representations. The textual representation is formulated in terms of character $n$-grams while the visual one is based on the bag-of-visual-words scheme. These two representations are merged together and projected to a sub-vector space. This transform allows to, given a textual query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. Moreover, this statistical representation can be used together with state-of-the-art indexation structures in order to deal with large-scale scenarios. The proposed method is evaluated using a collection of historical documents outperforming state-of-the-art performances.

Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot must face the correspondence or data association problem in order to carry out tasks like place recognition or unknown environment mapping. In order to put into correspondence two maps, most methods estimate the transformation relating the maps from matches established between low level feature extracted from sensor data. However, finding explicit matches between features is a challenging and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method to align obstacle maps without searching explicit matches between features. The maps are obtained from a stereo pair. Then, we use a vocabulary tree approach to identify putative corresponding maps followed by the Newton minimization algorithm to find the transformation that relates both maps. The proposed method is evaluated in a typical office environment showing good performance.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection from images of the visible spectrum is a high relevant area of research given its potential impact in the design of pedestrian protection systems. There are many proposals in the literature but they lack a comparative viewpoint. According to this, in this paper we first propose a common framework where we fit the different approaches, and second we use this framework to provide a comparative point of view of the details of such different approaches, pointing out also the main challenges to be solved in the future. In summary, we expect
this survey to be useful for both novel and experienced researchers in the field. In the first case, as a clarifying snapshot of the state of the art; in the second, as a way to unveil trends and to take conclusions from the comparative study.

Abstract: Multi-person tracking can be exploited in applications such as driver assistance, surveillance, multimedia and human-robot interaction. With the help of human detectors, particle filters offer a robust method able to filter noisy detections and provide temporal coherence. However, some traditional problems such as occlusions with other targets or the scene, temporal drifting or even the lost targets detection are rarely considered, making the systems performance decrease. Some authors propose to overcome these problems using heuristics not explained
and formalized in the papers, for instance by defining exceptions to the model updating depending on tracks overlapping. In this paper we propose to formalize these events by the use of a state-graph, defining the current state of the track (e.g., potential , tracked, occluded or lost) and the transitions between states in an explicit way. This approach has the advantage of linking track actions such as the online underlying models updating, which gives flexibility to the system. It provides an explicit representation to adapt the multiple parallel trackers depending on the context, i.e., each track can make use of a specific filtering strategy, dynamic model, number of particles, etc. depending on its state. We implement this technique in a single-camera multi-person tracker and test
it in public video sequences.