Abstract: Top-performing computer vision models are powered by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Training an accurate CNN highly depends on both the raw sensor data and their associated ground truth (GT). Collecting such GT is usually done through human labeling, which is time-consuming and does not scale as we wish. This data-labeling bottleneck may be intensified due to domain shifts among image sensors, which could force per-sensor data labeling. In this paper, we focus on the use of co-training, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method, for obtaining self-labeled object bounding boxes (BBs), i.e., the GT to train deep object detectors. In particular, we assess the goodness of multi-modal co-training by relying on two different views of an image, namely, appearance (RGB) and estimated depth (D). Moreover, we compare appearance-based single-modal co-training with multi-modal. Our results suggest that in a standard SSL setting (no domain shift, a few human-labeled data) and under virtual-to-real domain shift (many virtual-world labeled data, no human-labeled data) multi-modal co-training outperforms single-modal. In the latter case, by performing GAN-based domain translation both co-training modalities are on par, at least when using an off-the-shelf depth estimation model not specifically trained on the translated images.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, object detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities, and a strong multiview (MV) classifier that accounts for different object views and poses. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multicue, multimodality, and strong MV classifier) affect accuracy both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component, we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition light detection and ranging, a type of modality that is starting to receive increasing attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the accuracy, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient.

Abstract: Action recognition in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To facilitate comparative evaluation independently of person detection, the standard evaluation protocol for action recognition uses an oracle person detector to obtain perfect bounding box information at both training and test time. The assumption is that, in practice, a general person detector will provide candidate bounding boxes for action recognition. In this paper, we argue that this paradigm is suboptimal and that action class labels should already be considered during the detection stage. Motivated by the observation that body pose is strongly conditioned on action class, we show that: 1) the existing state-of-the-art generic person detectors are not adequate for proposing candidate bounding boxes for action classification; 2) due to limited training examples, the direct training of action-specific person detectors is also inadequate; and 3) using only a small number of labeled action examples, the transfer learning is able to adapt an existing detector to propose higher quality bounding boxes for subsequent action classification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate transfer learning for the task of action-specific person detection in still images. We perform extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets: 1) Stanford-40 and 2) PASCAL VOC 2012. For the action detection task (i.e., both person localization and classification of the action performed), our approach outperforms methods based on general person detection by 5.7% mean average precision (MAP) on Stanford-40 and 2.1% MAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state of the art with a MAP of 45.4% on Stanford-40 and 31.4% on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also evaluate our action detection approach for the task of action classification (i.e., recognizing actions without localizing them). For this task, our approach, without using any ground-truth person localization at test tim- , outperforms on both data sets state-of-the-art methods, which do use person locations.

Abstract: In this paper, the registration problem is formulated as a point to model distance minimization. Unlike most of the existing works, which are based on minimizing a point-wise correspondence term, this formulation avoids the correspondence search that is time-consuming. In the first stage, the target set is described through an implicit function by employing a linear least squares fitting. This function can be either an implicit polynomial or an implicit B-spline from a coarse to fine representation. In the second stage, we show how the obtained implicit representation is used as an interface to convert point-to-point registration into point-to-implicit problem. Furthermore, we show that this registration distance is smooth and can be minimized through the Levengberg-Marquardt algorithm. All the formulations presented for both stages are compact and easy to implement. In addition, we show that our registration method can be handled using any implicit representation though some are coarse and others provide finer representations; hence, a tradeoff between speed and accuracy can be set by employing the right implicit function. Experimental results and comparisons in 2D and 3D show the robustness and the speed of convergence of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.