Abstract: Depth information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Usually, this GT is acquired at training time through a calibrated multi-modal suite of sensors. However, also using only a monocular system at training time is cheaper and more scalable. This is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. In this paper, we perform monocular depth estimation by virtual-world supervision (MonoDEVS) and real-world SfM self-supervision. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision and addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. Our MonoDEVSNet outperforms previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences.

Abstract: While the objective of the standard supervised learning problem is to classify feature vectors, in the multiple instance learning problem, the objective is to classify bags, where each bag contains multiple feature vectors. This represents a generalization of the standard problem, and this generalization becomes necessary in many real applications such as drug activity prediction, content-based image retrieval, and others. While the existing paradigms are based on learning the discriminant information either at the instance level or at the bag level, we propose to incorporate both levels of information. This is done by defining a discriminative embedding of the original space based on the responses of cluster-adapted instance classifiers. Results clearly show the advantage of the proposed method over the state of the art, where we tested the performance through a variety of well-known databases that come from real problems, and we also included an analysis of the performance using synthetically generated data.

Abstract: Impact factor: 3.508 (the last available from JCR2009SCI). Position 4/103 in the category Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Quartile
Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.
Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is computed composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, our fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the proposed method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Further, the proposed method is extended to deal with temporal data by predicting the evolution of observations over time.
Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning, and outperforms state-of-the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition. Considering sequential data, the proposed method (extended to deal with future observations) outperforms the other methods

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.