|
|
David Vazquez, Javier Marin, Antonio Lopez, Daniel Ponsa and David Geronimo. 2014. Virtual and Real World Adaptation for Pedestrian Detection. TPAMI, 36(4), 797–809.
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.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
|
|
|
|
Daniel Hernandez, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez and Juan C. Moure. 2021. 3D Perception With Slanted Stixels on GPU. TPDS, 32(10), 2434–2447.
Abstract: This article presents a GPU-accelerated software design of the recently proposed model of Slanted Stixels, which represents the geometric and semantic information of a scene in a compact and accurate way. We reformulate the measurement depth model to reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm, relying on the confidence of the depth estimation and the identification of invalid values to handle outliers. The proposed massively parallel scheme and data layout for the irregular computation pattern that corresponds to a Dynamic Programming paradigm is described and carefully analyzed in performance terms. Performance is shown to scale gracefully on current generation embedded GPUs. We assess the proposed methods in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time performance on three publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach achieves real-time performance with high accuracy for 2048 × 1024 image sizes and 4 × 4 Stixel resolution on the low-power embedded GPU of an NVIDIA Tegra Xavier.
Keywords: Daniel Hernandez-Juarez; Antonio Espinosa; David Vazquez; Antonio M. Lopez; Juan C. Moure
|
|
|
|
Katerine Diaz, Francesc J. Ferri and W. Diaz. 2015. Incremental Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors for Image Classification. TNNLS, 26(8), 1761–1775.
Abstract: Subspace-based methods have become popular due to their ability to appropriately represent complex data in such a way that both dimensionality is reduced and discriminativeness is enhanced. Several recent works have concentrated on the discriminative common vector (DCV) method and other closely related algorithms also based on the concept of null space. In this paper, we present a generalized incremental formulation of the DCV methods, which allows the update of a given model by considering the addition of new examples even from unseen classes. Having efficient incremental formulations of well-behaved batch algorithms allows us to conveniently adapt previously trained classifiers without the need of recomputing them from scratch. The proposed generalized incremental method has been empirically validated in different case studies from different application domains (faces, objects, and handwritten digits) considering several different scenarios in which new data are continuously added at different rates starting from an initial model.
|
|
|
|
Ferran Diego, Joan Serrat and Antonio Lopez. 2013. Joint spatio-temporal alignment of sequences. TMM, 15(6), 1377–1387.
Abstract: Video alignment is important in different areas of computer vision such as wide baseline matching, action recognition, change detection, video copy detection and frame dropping prevention. Current video alignment methods usually deal with a relatively simple case of fixed or rigidly attached cameras or simultaneous acquisition. Therefore, in this paper we propose a joint video alignment for bringing two video sequences into a spatio-temporal alignment. Specifically, the novelty of the paper is to formulate the video alignment to fold the spatial and temporal alignment into a single alignment framework. This simultaneously satisfies a frame-correspondence and frame-alignment similarity; exploiting the knowledge among neighbor frames by a standard pairwise Markov random field (MRF). This new formulation is able to handle the alignment of sequences recorded at different times by independent moving cameras that follows a similar trajectory, and also generalizes the particular cases that of fixed geometric transformation and/or linear temporal mapping. We conduct experiments on different scenarios such as sequences recorded simultaneously or by moving cameras to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The proposed method provides the highest video alignment accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods on sequences recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times.
Keywords: video alignment
|
|
|
|
A.F. Sole, S. Ngan, G. Sapiro, X. Hu and Antonio Lopez. 2001. Anisotropic 2-D and 3-D Averaging of fMRI Signals. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2020(2), 86–93.
|
|
|
|
Angel Sappa, Fadi Dornaika, Daniel Ponsa, David Geronimo and Antonio Lopez. 2008. An Efficient Approach to Onboard Stereo Vision System Pose Estimation. TITS, 9(3), 476–490.
Abstract: This paper presents an efficient technique for estimating the pose of an onboard stereo vision system relative to the environment’s dominant surface area, which is supposed to be the road surface. Unlike previous approaches, it can be used either for urban or highway scenarios since it is not based on a specific visual traffic feature extraction but on 3-D raw data points. The whole process is performed in the Euclidean space and consists of two stages. Initially, a compact 2-D representation of the original 3-D data points is computed. Then, a RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) based least-squares approach is used to fit a plane to the road. Fast RANSAC fitting is obtained by selecting points according to a probability function that takes into account the density of points at a given depth. Finally, stereo camera height and pitch angle are computed related to the fitted road plane. The proposed technique is intended to be used in driverassistance systems for applications such as vehicle or pedestrian detection. Experimental results on urban environments, which are the most challenging scenarios (i.e., flat/uphill/downhill driving, speed bumps, and car’s accelerations), are presented. These results are validated with manually annotated ground truth. Additionally, comparisons with previous works are presented to show the improvements in the central processing unit processing time, as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results.
Keywords: Camera extrinsic parameter estimation, ground plane estimation, onboard stereo vision system
|
|
|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez and Antonio Lopez. 2011. Road Detection Based on Illuminant Invariance. TITS, 12(1), 184–193.
Abstract: By using an onboard camera, it is possible to detect the free road surface ahead of the ego-vehicle. Road detection is of high relevance for autonomous driving, road departure warning, and supporting driver-assistance systems such as vehicle and pedestrian detection. The key for vision-based road detection is the ability to classify image pixels as belonging or not to the road surface. Identifying road pixels is a major challenge due to the intraclass variability caused by lighting conditions. A particularly difficult scenario appears when the road surface has both shadowed and nonshadowed areas. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach to vision-based road detection that is robust to shadows. The novelty of our approach relies on using a shadow-invariant feature space combined with a model-based classifier. The model is built online to improve the adaptability of the algorithm to the current lighting and the presence of other vehicles in the scene. The proposed algorithm works in still images and does not depend on either road shape or temporal restrictions. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on real-world road sequences with heavy traffic and shadows show that the method is robust to shadows and lighting variations. Moreover, the proposed method provides the highest performance when compared with hue-saturation-intensity (HSI)-based algorithms.
Keywords: road detection
|
|
|
|
Fadi Dornaika, Jose Manuel Alvarez, Angel Sappa and Antonio Lopez. 2011. A New Framework for Stereo Sensor Pose through Road Segmentation and Registration. TITS, 12(4), 954–966.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for real-time estimation of the onboard stereo head's position and orientation relative to the road surface, which is required for any advanced driver-assistance application. This framework can be used with all road types: highways, urban, etc. Unlike existing works that rely on feature extraction in either the image domain or 3-D space, we propose a framework that directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs' brightness. The proposed approach consists of two stages that are invoked for every stereo frame. The first stage segments the road region in one monocular view. The second stage estimates the camera pose using a featureless registration between the segmented monocular road region and the other view in the stereo pair. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution combines a road segmentation algorithm with a registration technique to estimate the online stereo camera pose. The second contribution solves the registration using a featureless method, which is carried out using two different optimization techniques: 1) the differential evolution algorithm and 2) the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. We provide experiments and evaluations of performance. The results presented show the validity of our proposed framework.
Keywords: road detection
|
|
|
|
Jose Carlos Rubio, Joan Serrat, Antonio Lopez and Daniel Ponsa. 2012. Multiple target tracking for intelligent headlights control. TITS, 13(2), 594–605.
Abstract: Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.
Keywords: Intelligent Headlights
|
|
|
|
Jose Manuel Alvarez, Theo Gevers, Ferran Diego and Antonio Lopez. 2013. Road Geometry Classification by Adaptative Shape Models. TITS, 14(1), 459–468.
Abstract: Vision-based road detection is important for different applications in transportation, such as autonomous driving, vehicle collision warning, and pedestrian crossing detection. Common approaches to road detection are based on low-level road appearance (e.g., color or texture) and neglect of the scene geometry and context. Hence, using only low-level features makes these algorithms highly depend on structured roads, road homogeneity, and lighting conditions. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to classify road geometries for road detection through the analysis of scene composition and temporal coherence. Road geometry classification is proposed by building corresponding models from training images containing prototypical road geometries. We propose adaptive shape models where spatial pyramids are steered by the inherent spatial structure of road images. To reduce the influence of lighting variations, invariant features are used. Large-scale experiments show that the proposed road geometry classifier yields a high recognition rate of 73.57% ± 13.1, clearly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. Including road shape information improves road detection results over existing appearance-based methods. Finally, it is shown that invariant features and temporal information provide robustness against disturbing imaging conditions.
Keywords: road detection
|
|
