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Mohammad Rouhani, Angel Sappa and E. Boyer. 2015. Implicit B-Spline Surface Reconstruction. TIP, 24(1), 22–32.
Abstract: This paper presents a fast and flexible curve, and surface reconstruction technique based on implicit B-spline. This representation does not require any parameterization and it is locally supported. This fact has been exploited in this paper to propose a reconstruction technique through solving a sparse system of equations. This method is further accelerated to reduce the dimension to the active control lattice. Moreover, the surface smoothness and user interaction are allowed for controlling the surface. Finally, a novel weighting technique has been introduced in order to blend small patches and smooth them in the overlapping regions. The whole framework is very fast and efficient and can handle large cloud of points with very low computational cost. The experimental results show the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm to describe objects with complex topologies. Comparisons with other fitting methods highlight the superiority of the proposed approach in the presence of noise and missing data.
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Mohammad Rouhani and Angel Sappa. 2013. The Richer Representation the Better Registration. TIP, 22(12), 5036–5049.
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.
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Mohammad Rouhani and Angel Sappa. 2012. Implicit Polynomial Representation through a Fast Fitting Error Estimation. TIP, 21(4), 2089–2098.
Abstract: Impact Factor
This paper presents a simple distance estimation for implicit polynomial fitting. It is computed as the height of a simplex built between the point and the surface (i.e., a triangle in 2-D or a tetrahedron in 3-D), which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the orthogonal distance. The proposed distance can be described as a function of the coefficients of the implicit polynomial. Moreover, it is differentiable and has a smooth behavior . Hence, it can be used in any gradient-based optimization. In this paper, its use in a Levenberg-Marquardt framework is shown, which is particularly devoted for nonlinear least squares problems. The proposed estimation is a generalization of the gradient-based distance estimation, which is widely used in the literature. Experimental results, both in 2-D and 3-D data sets, are provided. Comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques are presented, showing the advantages of the proposed approach.
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David Geronimo, Joan Serrat, Antonio Lopez and Ramon Baldrich. 2013. Traffic sign recognition for computer vision project-based learning. T-EDUC, 56(3), 364–371.
Abstract: This paper presents a graduate course project on computer vision. The aim of the project is to detect and recognize traffic signs in video sequences recorded by an on-board vehicle camera. This is a demanding problem, given that traffic sign recognition is one of the most challenging problems for driving assistance systems. Equally, it is motivating for the students given that it is a real-life problem. Furthermore, it gives them the opportunity to appreciate the difficulty of real-world vision problems and to assess the extent to which this problem can be solved by modern computer vision and pattern classification techniques taught in the classroom. The learning objectives of the course are introduced, as are the constraints imposed on its design, such as the diversity of students' background and the amount of time they and their instructors dedicate to the course. The paper also describes the course contents, schedule, and how the project-based learning approach is applied. The outcomes of the course are discussed, including both the students' marks and their personal feedback.
Keywords: traffic signs
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Alejandro Gonzalez Alzate, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez and Jaume Amores. 2017. On-Board Object Detection: Multicue, Multimodal, and Multiview Random Forest of Local Experts. Cyber, 47(11), 3980–3990.
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.
Keywords: Multicue; multimodal; multiview; object detection
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M. Altillawi, S. Li, S.M. Prakhya, Z. Liu and Joan Serrat. 2024. Implicit Learning of Scene Geometry From Poses for Global Localization. ROBOTAUTOMLET, 9(2), 955–962.
Abstract: Global visual localization estimates the absolute pose of a camera using a single image, in a previously mapped area. Obtaining the pose from a single image enables many robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. Inspired by latest advances in deep learning, many existing approaches directly learn and regress 6 DoF pose from an input image. However, these methods do not fully utilize the underlying scene geometry for pose regression. The challenge in monocular relocalization is the minimal availability of supervised training data, which is just the corresponding 6 DoF poses of the images. In this letter, we propose to utilize these minimal available labels (i.e., poses) to learn the underlying 3D geometry of the scene and use the geometry to estimate the 6 DoF camera pose. We present a learning method that uses these pose labels and rigid alignment to learn two 3D geometric representations ( X, Y, Z coordinates ) of the scene, one in camera coordinate frame and the other in global coordinate frame. Given a single image, it estimates these two 3D scene representations, which are then aligned to estimate a pose that matches the pose label. This formulation allows for the active inclusion of additional learning constraints to minimize 3D alignment errors between the two 3D scene representations, and 2D re-projection errors between the 3D global scene representation and 2D image pixels, resulting in improved localization accuracy. During inference, our model estimates the 3D scene geometry in camera and global frames and aligns them rigidly to obtain pose in real-time. We evaluate our work on three common visual localization datasets, conduct ablation studies, and show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art regression methods' pose accuracy on all datasets.
Keywords: Localization; Localization and mapping; Deep learning for visual perception; Visual learning
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Fernando Barrera, Felipe Lumbreras and Angel Sappa. 2012. Multimodal Stereo Vision System: 3D Data Extraction and Algorithm Evaluation. J-STSP, 6(5), 437–446.
Abstract: This paper proposes an imaging system for computing sparse depth maps from multispectral images. A special stereo head consisting of an infrared and a color camera defines the proposed multimodal acquisition system. The cameras are rigidly attached so that their image planes are parallel. Details about the calibration and image rectification procedure are provided. Sparse disparity maps are obtained by the combined use of mutual information enriched with gradient information. The proposed approach is evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Furthermore, a multispectral dataset, color and infrared images, together with their corresponding ground truth disparity maps, is generated and used as a test bed. Experimental results in real outdoor scenarios are provided showing its viability and that the proposed approach is not restricted to a specific domain.
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Gabriel Villalonga and Antonio Lopez. 2020. Co-Training for On-Board Deep Object Detection. ACCESS, 194441–194456.
Abstract: Providing ground truth supervision to train visual models has been a bottleneck over the years, exacerbated by domain shifts which degenerate the performance of such models. This was the case when visual tasks relied on handcrafted features and shallow machine learning and, despite its unprecedented performance gains, the problem remains open within the deep learning paradigm due to its data-hungry nature. Best performing deep vision-based object detectors are trained in a supervised manner by relying on human-labeled bounding boxes which localize class instances (i.e. objects) within the training images. Thus, object detection is one of such tasks for which human labeling is a major bottleneck. In this article, we assess co-training as a semi-supervised learning method for self-labeling objects in unlabeled images, so reducing the human-labeling effort for developing deep object detectors. Our study pays special attention to a scenario involving domain shift; in particular, when we have automatically generated virtual-world images with object bounding boxes and we have real-world images which are unlabeled. Moreover, we are particularly interested in using co-training for deep object detection in the context of driver assistance systems and/or self-driving vehicles. Thus, using well-established datasets and protocols for object detection in these application contexts, we will show how co-training is a paradigm worth to pursue for alleviating object labeling, working both alone and together with task-agnostic domain adaptation.
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Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao and Antonio Lopez. 2019. Self-supervised Domain Adaptation for Computer Vision Tasks. ACCESS, 7, 156694–156706.
Abstract: Recent progress of self-supervised visual representation learning has achieved remarkable success on many challenging computer vision benchmarks. However, whether these techniques can be used for domain adaptation has not been explored. In this work, we propose a generic method for self-supervised domain adaptation, using object recognition and semantic segmentation of urban scenes as use cases. Focusing on simple pretext/auxiliary tasks (e.g. image rotation prediction), we assess different learning strategies to improve domain adaptation effectiveness by self-supervision. Additionally, we propose two complementary strategies to further boost the domain adaptation accuracy on semantic segmentation within our method, consisting of prediction layer alignment and batch normalization calibration. The experimental results show adaptation levels comparable to most studied domain adaptation methods, thus, bringing self-supervision as a new alternative for reaching domain adaptation. The code is available at this link. https://github.com/Jiaolong/self-supervised-da.
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Katerine Diaz, Jesus Martinez del Rincon, Aura Hernandez-Sabate and Debora Gil. 2018. Continuous head pose estimation using manifold subspace embedding and multivariate regression. ACCESS, 6, 18325–18334.
Abstract: In this paper, a continuous head pose estimation system is proposed to estimate yaw and pitch head angles from raw facial images. Our approach is based on manifold learningbased methods, due to their promising generalization properties shown for face modelling from images. The method combines histograms of oriented gradients, generalized discriminative common vectors and continuous local regression to achieve successful performance. Our proposal was tested on multiple standard face datasets, as well as in a realistic scenario. Results show a considerable performance improvement and a higher consistence of our model in comparison with other state-of-art methods, with angular errors varying between 9 and 17 degrees.
Keywords: Head Pose estimation; HOG features; Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors; B-splines; Multiple linear regression
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