Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: Most advanced driving assistance systems already include pedestrian detection systems. Unfortunately, there is still a tradeoff between precision and real time. For a reliable detection, excellent precision-recall such a tradeoff is needed to detect as many pedestrians as possible while, at the same time, avoiding too many false alarms; in addition, a very fast computation is needed for fast reactions to dangerous situations. Recently, novel approaches based on deformable templates have been proposed since these show a reasonable detection performance although they are computationally too expensive for real-time performance. In this paper, we present a system for pedestrian detection based on a hierarchical multiresolution part-based model. The proposed system is able to achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracy due to the local deformations of the parts while exhibiting a speedup of more than one order of magnitude due to a fast coarse-to-fine inference technique. Moreover, our system explicitly infers the level of resolution available so that the detection of small examples is feasible with a very reduced computational cost. We conclude this contribution by presenting how a graphics processing unit-optimized implementation of our proposed system is suitable for real-time pedestrian detection in terms of both accuracy and speed.

Abstract: Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.