Abstract: Robust and dense computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for real-time autonomous driving. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) [1] approximates heavy-computation global algorithms results but with lower computational complexity, therefore it is a good candidate for a real-time implementation. SGM minimizes energy along several 1D paths across the image. The aim of this work is to provide a real-time system producing reliable results on energy-efficient hardware. Our design runs on a NVIDIA Titan X GPU at 104.62 FPS and on a NVIDIA Drive PX at 6.7 FPS, promising for real-time platforms

Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. The irruption of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) allows to foresee obtaining reliable classifiers to perform such a visual task. However, DCNNs require to learn many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diversified images with this class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained by a human cumbersome labour specially challenging for semantic segmentation, since pixel-level annotations are required. In this paper, we propose to use a virtual world for automatically generating realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations. Then, we address the question of how useful can be such data for the task of semantic segmentation; in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic diversified collection of urban images, named SynthCity, with automatically generated class annotations. We use SynthCity in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments on a DCNN setting that show how the inclusion of SynthCity in the training stage significantly improves the performance of the semantic segmentation task

Abstract: We propose an online domain adaptation method for the deformable part-based model (DPM). The online domain adaptation is based on a two-level hierarchical adaptation tree, which consists of instance detectors in the leaf nodes and a category detector at the root node. Moreover, combined with a multiple object tracking procedure (MOT), our proposal neither requires target-domain annotated data nor revisiting the source-domain data for performing the source-to-target domain adaptation of the DPM. From a practical point of view this means that, given a source-domain DPM and new video for training on a new domain without object annotations, our procedure outputs a new DPM adapted to the domain represented by the video. As proof-of-concept we apply our proposal to the challenging task of pedestrian detection. In this case, each instance detector is an exemplar classifier trained online with only one pedestrian per frame. The pedestrian instances are collected by MOT and the hierarchical model is constructed dynamically according to the pedestrian trajectories. Our experimental results show that the adapted detector achieves the accuracy of recent supervised domain adaptation methods (i.e., requiring manually annotated targetdomain data), and improves the source detector more than 10 percentage points.

Abstract: Automatic analysis of visual art, such as paintings, is a challenging inter-disciplinary research problem. Conventional approaches only rely on global scene characteristics by encoding holistic information for computational painting categorization.We argue that such approaches are sub-optimal and that discriminative common visual structures provide complementary information for painting classification. We present an approach that encodes both the global scene layout and discriminative latent common structures for computational painting categorization. The region of interests are automatically extracted, without any manual part labeling, by training class-specific deformable part-based models. Both holistic and region-of-interests are then described using multi-scale dense convolutional features. These features are pooled separately using Fisher vector encoding and concatenated afterwards in a single image representation. Experiments are performed on a challenging dataset with 91 different painters and 13 diverse painting styles. Our approach outperforms the standard method, which only employs the global scene characteristics. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming a recent multi-scale deep features based approach [11] by 6.4% and 3.8% respectively on artist and style classification.

Abstract: It has recently been demonstrated that local feature descriptors based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) can significantly improve the matching performance. Previous work on learning such descriptors has focused on exploiting pairs of positive and negative patches to learn discriminative CNN representations. In this work, we propose to utilize triplets of training samples, together with in-triplet mining of hard negatives.
We show that our method achieves state of the art results, without the computational overhead typically associated with mining of negatives and with lower complexity of the network architecture. We compare our approach to recently introduced convolutional local feature descriptors, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods in terms of performance and speed. We also examine different loss functions associated with triplets.