Abstract: Kidney stone formation is a common disease and the incidence rate is constantly increasing worldwide. It has been shown that the classification of kidney stones can lead to an important reduction of the recurrence rate. The classification of kidney stones by human experts on the basis of certain visual color and texture features is one of the most employed techniques. However, the knowledge of how to analyze kidney stones is not widespread, and the experts learn only after being trained on a large number of samples of the different classes. In this paper we describe a new device specifically designed for capturing images of expelled kidney stones, and a method to learn and apply the experts knowledge with regard to their classification. We show that with off the shelf components, a carefully selected set of features and a state of the art classifier it is possible to automate this difficult task to a good degree. We report results on a collection of 454 kidney stones, achieving an overall accuracy of 63% for a set of eight classes covering almost all of the kidney stones taxonomy. Moreover, for more than 80% of samples the real class is the first or the second most probable class according to the system, being then the patient recommendations for the two top classes similar. This is the first attempt towards the automatic visual classification of kidney stones, and based on the current results we foresee better accuracies with the increase of the dataset size.

Abstract: Computer vision technologies are at the core of different advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and will play a key role in oncoming autonomous vehicles too. One of the main challenges for such technologies is to perceive the driving environment, i.e. to detect and track relevant driving information in a reliable manner (e.g. pedestrians in the vehicle route, free space to drive through). Nowadays it is clear that machine learning techniques are essential for developing such a visual perception for driving. In particular, the standard working pipeline consists of collecting data (i.e. on-board images), manually annotating the data (e.g. drawing bounding boxes around pedestrians), learning a discriminative data representation taking advantage of such annotations (e.g. a deformable part-based model, a deep convolutional neural network), and then assessing the reliability of such representation with the acquired data. In the last two decades most of the research efforts focused on representation learning (first, designing descriptors and learning classifiers; later doing it end-to-end). Hence, collecting data and, especially, annotating it, is essential for learning good representations. While this has been the case from the very beginning, only after the disruptive appearance of deep convolutional neural networks that it became a serious issue due to their data hungry nature. In this context, the problem is that manual data annotation is a tiresome work prone to errors. Accordingly, in the late 00’s we initiated a research line consisting of training visual models using photo-realistic computer graphics, especially focusing on assisted and autonomous driving. In this paper, we summarize such a work and show how it has become a new tendency with increasing acceptance.

Abstract: In this paper, a novel decremental subspace-based learning method called Decremental Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors method (DGDCV) is presented. The method makes use of the concept of decremental learning, which we introduce in the field of supervised feature extraction and classification. By efficiently removing unnecessary data and/or classes for a knowledge base, our methodology is able to update the model without recalculating the full projection or accessing to the previously processed training data, while retaining the previously acquired knowledge. The proposed method has been validated in 6 standard face recognition datasets, showing a considerable computational gain without compromising the accuracy of the model.

Abstract: Despite all the significant advances in pedestrian detection brought by computer vision for driving assistance, it is still a challenging problem. One reason is the extremely varying lighting conditions under which such a detector should operate, namely day and night time. Recent research has shown that the combination of visible and non-visible imaging modalities may increase detection accuracy, where the infrared spectrum plays a critical role. The goal of this paper is to assess the accuracy gain of different pedestrian models (holistic, part-based, patch-based) when training with images in the far infrared spectrum. Specifically, we want to compare detection accuracy on test images recorded at day and nighttime if trained (and tested) using (a) plain color images, (b) just infrared images and (c) both of them. In order to obtain results for the last item we propose an early fusion approach to combine features from both modalities. We base the evaluation on a new dataset we have built for this purpose as well as on the publicly available KAIST multispectral dataset.

Abstract: When an autonomous vehicle is traveling through some scenario it receives a continuous stream of sensor data. This sensor data arrives in an asynchronous fashion and often contains overlapping or redundant information. Thus, it is not trivial how a representation of the environment observed by the vehicle can be created and updated over time. This paper presents a novel methodology to compute an incremental 3D representation of a scenario from 3D range measurements. We propose to use macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scenario. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms designed to update the geometric polygonal primitives over time whenever fresh sensor data is collected. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene, and that it is computationally very efficient when compared to other reconstruction techniques.