Abstract: The manuscript evaluates the performance of a monocular visual odometry approach when images from different spectra are considered, both independently and fused. The objective behind this evaluation is to analyze if classical approaches can be improved when the given images, which are from different spectra, are fused and represented in new domains. The images in these new domains should have some of the following properties: i) more robust to noisy data; ii) less sensitive to changes (e.g., lighting); iii) more rich in descriptive information, among other. In particular in the current work two different image fusion strategies are considered. Firstly, images from the visible and thermal spectrum are fused using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Secondly, a monochrome threshold strategy is considered. The obtained
representations are evaluated under a visual odometry framework, highlighting
their advantages and disadvantages, using different urban and semi-urban scenarios. Comparisons with both monocular-visible spectrum and monocular-infrared spectrum, are also provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new querying paradigm for handwritten keyword spotting. We propose to represent handwritten word images both by visual and audio representations, enabling a query-by-speech keyword spotting system. The two representations are merged together and projected to a common sub-space in the training phase. This transform allows to, given a spoken query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. In addition, the same method can be used backwards at no additional cost to produce a handwritten text-tospeech system. We present our first results on this new querying mechanism using synthetic voices over the George Washington
dataset.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel methodology to compute a 3D scene
representation. The algorithm uses macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scene. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene. In addition, the algorithm is very efficient when compared to other techniques.

Abstract: Nowadays, classifiers play a core role in many computer vision tasks. The underlying assumption for learning classifiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classifiers. However, in practice, there are different reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classifiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain)
is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this paper we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for object detection. In particular, we focus on a relatively unexplored scenario, i.e. incremental domain adaptation for object detection assuming weak-labeling. Therefore, our algorithm is ready to improve existing source-oriented DPM-based detectors as soon as a little amount of labeled target-domain training data is available, and keeps improving as more of such data arrives in a continuous fashion. For achieving this, we follow a multiple
instance learning (MIL) paradigm that operates in an incremental per-image basis. As proof of concept, we address the challenging scenario of adapting a DPM-based pedestrian detector trained with synthetic pedestrians to operate in real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that our incremental adaptive models obtain equally good accuracy results as the batch learned models, while being more flexible for handling continuously arriving target-domain data.

Abstract: Non rigid registration is an important task in computer vision with many applications in shape and motion modeling. A fundamental step of the registration is the data association between the source and the target sets. Such association proves difficult in practice, due to the discrete nature of the information and its corruption by various types of noise, e.g. outliers and missing data. In this paper we investigate the benefit of the implicit representations for the non-rigid registration of 3D point clouds. First, the target points are described with small quadratic patches that are blended through partition of unity weighting. Then, the discrete association between the source and the target can be replaced by a continuous distance field induced by the interface. By combining this distance field with a proper deformation term, the registration energy can be expressed in a linear least square form that is easy and fast to solve. This significantly eases the registration by avoiding direct association between points. Moreover, a hierarchical approach can be easily implemented by employing coarse-to-fine representations. Experimental results are provided for point clouds from multi-view data sets. The qualitative and quantitative comparisons show the outperformance and robustness of our framework. %in presence of noise and outliers.