Abstract: This manuscript presents a review of state-of-the-art techniques proposed in the literature for multimodal image registration, addressing instances where images from different modalities need to be precisely aligned in the same reference system. This scenario arises when the images to be registered come from different modalities, among the visible and thermal spectral bands, 3D-RGB, or flash-no flash, or NIR-visible. The review spans different techniques from classical approaches to more modern ones based on deep learning, aiming to highlight the particularities required at each step in the registration pipeline when dealing with multimodal images. It is noteworthy that medical images are excluded from this review due to their specific characteristics, including the use of both active and passive sensors or the non-rigid nature of the body contained in the image.

Abstract: This paper describes a general method to address partial occlusions for human detection in still images. The Random Subspace Method (RSM) is chosen for building a classifier ensemble robust against partial occlusions. The component classifiers are chosen on the basis of their individual and combined performance. The main contribution of this work lies in our approach’s capability to improve the detection rate when partial occlusions are present without compromising the detection performance on non occluded data. In contrast to many recent approaches, we propose a method which does not require manual labelling of body parts, defining any semantic spatial components, or using additional data coming from motion or stereo. Moreover, the method can be easily extended to other object classes. The experiments are performed on three large datasets: the INRIA person dataset, the Daimler Multicue dataset, and a new challenging dataset, called PobleSec, in which a considerable number of targets are partially occluded. The different approaches are evaluated at the classification and detection levels for both partially occluded and non-occluded data. The experimental results show that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the presence of partial occlusions, while offering performance and reliability similar to those of the holistic approach on non-occluded data. The datasets used in our experiments have been made publicly available for benchmarking purposes

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.

Abstract: During the next decade, on-board pedestrian detection systems will play a key role in the challenge of increasing traffic safety. The main target of these systems, to detect pedestrians in urban scenarios, implies overcoming difficulties like processing outdoor scenes from a mobile platform and searching for aspect-changing objects in cluttered environments. This makes such systems combine techniques in the state-of-the-art Computer Vision. In this paper we present a three module system based on both 2D and 3D cues. The first module uses 3D information to estimate the road plane parameters and thus select a coherent set of regions of interest (ROIs) to be further analyzed. The second module uses Real AdaBoost and a combined set of Haar wavelets and edge orientation histograms to classify the incoming ROIs as pedestrian or non-pedestrian. The final module loops again with the 3D cue in order to verify the classified ROIs and with the 2D in order to refine the final results. According to the results, the integration of the proposed techniques gives rise to a promising system.

Abstract: This paper introduces a method to obtain a detailed 3D reconstruction of facial skin from a single RGB image.
To this end, we propose the exclusive use of an input image without requiring any information about the observed material nor training data to model the wrinkle properties. They are detected and characterized directly from the image via a simple and effective parametric model, determining several features such as location, orientation, width, and height. With these ingredients, we propose to minimize a photometric error to retrieve the final detailed 3D map, which is initialized by current techniques based on deep learning. In contrast with other approaches, we only require estimating a depth parameter, making our approach fast and intuitive. Extensive experimental evaluation is presented in a wide variety of synthetic and real images, including different skin properties and facial
expressions. In all cases, our method outperforms the current approaches regarding 3D reconstruction accuracy, providing striking results for both large and fine wrinkles.