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Oscar Lopes, Miguel Reyes, Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Spherical Blurred Shape Model for 3-D Object and Pose Recognition: Quantitative Analysis and HCI Applications in Smart Environments. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(12), 2379–2390.
Abstract: The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios.
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Reza Azad, Maryam Asadi-Aghbolaghi, Shohreh Kasaei, & Sergio Escalera. (2019). Dynamic 3D Hand Gesture Recognition by Learning Weighted Depth Motion Maps. TCSVT - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 29(6), 1729–1740.
Abstract: Hand gesture recognition from sequences of depth maps is a challenging computer vision task because of the low inter-class and high intra-class variability, different execution rates of each gesture, and the high articulated nature of human hand. In this paper, a multilevel temporal sampling (MTS) method is first proposed that is based on the motion energy of key-frames of depth sequences. As a result, long, middle, and short sequences are generated that contain the relevant gesture information. The MTS results in increasing the intra-class similarity while raising the inter-class dissimilarities. The weighted depth motion map (WDMM) is then proposed to extract the spatio-temporal information from generated summarized sequences by an accumulated weighted absolute difference of consecutive frames. The histogram of gradient (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP) are exploited to extract features from WDMM. The obtained results define the current state-of-the-art on three public benchmark datasets of: MSR Gesture 3D, SKIG, and MSR Action 3D, for 3D hand gesture recognition. We also achieve competitive results on NTU action dataset.
Keywords: Hand gesture recognition; Multilevel temporal sampling; Weighted depth motion map; Spatio-temporal description; VLAD encoding
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Jose Seabra, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Josepa Mauri, Petia Radeva, & Joao Sanchez. (2011). Rayleigh Mixture Model for Plaque Characterization in Intravascular Ultrasound. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(5), 1314–1324.
Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
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Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Yagmur Gucluturk, Marc Perez, Umut Guçlu, Carlos Andujar, Xavier Baro, et al. (2022). First Impressions: A Survey on Vision-Based Apparent Personality Trait Analysis. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 13(1), 75–95.
Abstract: Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.
Keywords: Personality computing; first impressions; person perception; big-five; subjective bias; computer vision; machine learning; nonverbal signals; facial expression; gesture; speech analysis; multi-modal recognition
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Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu, Xavier Baro, Hugo Jair Escalante, Isabelle Guyon, Sergio Escalera, et al. (2018). Multimodal First Impression Analysis with Deep Residual Networks. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 8(3), 316–329.
Abstract: People form first impressions about the personalities of unfamiliar individuals even after very brief interactions with them. In this study we present and evaluate several models that mimic this automatic social behavior. Specifically, we present several models trained on a large dataset of short YouTube video blog posts for predicting apparent Big Five personality traits of people and whether they seem suitable to be recommended to a job interview. Along with presenting our audiovisual approach and results that won the third place in the ChaLearn First Impressions Challenge, we investigate modeling in different modalities including audio only, visual only, language only, audiovisual, and combination of audiovisual and language. Our results demonstrate that the best performance could be obtained using a fusion of all data modalities. Finally, in order to promote explainability in machine learning and to provide an example for the upcoming ChaLearn challenges, we present a simple approach for explaining the predictions for job interview recommendations
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