Abstract: In this paper we present a computer vision system for daytime vehicle detection and localization, an essential step in the development of several types of advanced driver assistance systems. It has a reduced processing time and high accuracy thanks to the combination of vehicle detection with lane-markings estimation and temporal tracking of both vehicles and lane markings. Concerning vehicle detection, our main contribution is a frame scanning process that inspects images according to the geometry of image formation, and with an Adaboost-based detector that is robust to the variability in the different vehicle types (car, van, truck) and lighting conditions. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the most likely three-dimensional locations of vehicles on the road ahead. With regards to the lane-markings estimation component, we have two main contributions. First, we employ a different image feature to the other commonly used edges: we use ridges, which are better suited to this problem. Second, we adapt RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane markings to the image features. We qualitatively assess our vehicle detection system in sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. The processed videos are available on a web page associated with this paper. A quantitative evaluation of the system has shown quite accurate results (a low number of false positives and negatives) at a reasonable computation time.

Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.

Abstract: Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), and particularly pedestrian protection systems (PPSs), have become an active research area aimed at improving traffic safety. The major challenge of PPSs is the development of reliable on-board pedestrian detection systems. Due to the varying appearance of pedestrians (e.g., different clothes, changing size, aspect ratio, and dynamic shape) and the unstructured environment, it is very difficult to cope with the demanded robustness of this kind of system. Two problems arising in this research area are the lack of public benchmarks and the difficulty in reproducing many of the proposed methods, which makes it difficult to compare the approaches. As a result, surveying the literature by enumerating the proposals one-after-another is not the most useful way to provide a comparative point of view. Accordingly, we present a more convenient strategy to survey the different approaches. We divide the problem of detecting pedestrians from images into different processing steps, each with attached responsibilities. Then, the different proposed methods are analyzed and classified with respect to each processing stage, favoring a comparative viewpoint. Finally, discussion of the important topics is presented, putting special emphasis on the future needs and challenges.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications. Most promising detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with annotated samples. However, the annotation step is a human intensive and subjective task worth to be minimized. By using virtual worlds we can automatically obtain precise and rich annotations. Thus, we face the question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in realistic virtual worlds work successfully for pedestrian detection in realworld images?. Conducted experiments show that virtual-world based training can provide excellent testing accuracy in real world, but it can also suffer the dataset shift problem as real-world based training does. Accordingly, we have designed a domain adaptation framework, V-AYLA, in which we have tested different techniques to collect a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combine them with the many examples of the source domain (virtual world) in order to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifier that will operate in the target domain. V-AYLA reports the same detection accuracy than when training with many human-provided pedestrian annotations and testing with real-world images of the same domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector.

Abstract: Smoothing of biomedical images should preserve gray-level transitions between adjacent tissues, while restoring contours consistent with anatomical structures. Anisotropic diffusion operators are based on image appearance discontinuities (either local or contextual) and might fail at weak inter-tissue transitions. Meanwhile, the output of block-wise and morphological operations is prone to present a block structure due to the shape and size of the considered pixel neighborhood. In this contribution, we use differential geometry concepts to define a diffusion operator that restricts to image consistent level-sets. In this manner, the final state is a non-uniform intensity image presenting homogeneous inter-tissue transitions along anatomical structures, while smoothing intra-structure texture. Experiments on different types of medical images (magnetic resonance, computerized tomography) illustrate its benefit on a further process (such as segmentation) of images.