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Miguel Oliveira, Vítor Santos, Angel D. Sappa, Paulo Dias, & A. Paulo Moreira. (2016). Incremental Texture Mapping for Autonomous Driving. Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, Vol. 84, pp. 113–128.
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles have a large number of on-board sensors, not only for providing coverage all around the vehicle, but also to ensure multi-modality in the observation of the scene. Because of this, it is not trivial to come up with a single, unique representation that feeds from the data given by all these sensors. We propose an algorithm which is capable of mapping texture collected from vision based sensors onto a geometric description of the scenario constructed from data provided by 3D sensors. The algorithm uses a constrained Delaunay triangulation to produce a mesh which is updated using a specially devised sequence of operations. These enforce a partial configuration of the mesh that avoids bad quality textures and ensures that there are no gaps in the texture. Results show that this algorithm is capable of producing fine quality textures.
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Miguel Oliveira, Vítor Santos, Angel D. Sappa, Paulo Dias, & A. Paulo Moreira. (2016). Incremental Scenario Representations for Autonomous Driving using Geometric Polygonal Primitives. Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, Vol. 83, pp. 312–325.
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.
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Cristhian A. Aguilera, Francisco J. Aguilera, Angel D. Sappa, & Ricardo Toledo. (2016). Learning crossspectral similarity measures with deep convolutional neural networks. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops (pp. 267–275).
Abstract: The simultaneous use of images from different spectra can be helpful to improve the performance of many com- puter vision tasks. The core idea behind the usage of cross- spectral approaches is to take advantage of the strengths of each spectral band providing a richer representation of a scene, which cannot be obtained with just images from one spectral band. In this work we tackle the cross-spectral image similarity problem by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore three different CNN archi- tectures to compare the similarity of cross-spectral image patches. Specifically, we train each network with images from the visible and the near-infrared spectrum, and then test the result with two public cross-spectral datasets. Ex- perimental results show that CNN approaches outperform the current state-of-art on both cross-spectral datasets. Ad- ditionally, our experiments show that some CNN architec- tures are capable of generalizing between different cross- spectral domains.
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Angel D. Sappa, Juan A. Carvajal, Cristhian A. Aguilera, Miguel Oliveira, Dennis G. Romero, & Boris X. Vintimilla. (2016). Wavelet-Based Visible and Infrared Image Fusion: A Comparative Study. Sensors Journal, Vol. 16, pp. 1–15.
Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and LongWave InfraRed (LWIR).
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Miguel Oliveira, Vítor Santos, Angel D. Sappa, & Paulo Dias. (2015). Scene representations for autonomous driving: an approach based on polygonal primitives. In Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2015), Lisbon, Portugal, 2015 (Vol. 417, pp. 503–515). Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel methodology to compute a 3D scene representation. The algorithm uses macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scene. 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. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene. In addition, the algorithm is very efficient when compared to other techniques.
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Julien Poujol, Cristhian A. Aguilera, Etienne Danos, Boris X. Vintimilla, Ricardo Toledo, & Angel D. Sappa. (2015). A visible-Thermal Fusion based Monocular Visual Odometry. In Iberian Robotics Conference (ROBOT 2015), International Conference on, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015 (Vol. 417, pp. 517–528).
Abstract: The manuscript evaluates the performance of a monocular visual odometry approach when images from different spectra are considered, both independently and fused. The objective behind this evaluation is to analyze if classical approaches can be improved when the given images, which are from different spectra, are fused and represented in new domains. The images in these new domains should have some of the following properties: i) more robust to noisy data; ii) less sensitive to changes (e.g., lighting); iii) more rich in descriptive information, among other. In particular in the current work two different image fusion strategies are considered. Firstly, images from the visible and thermal spectrum are fused using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Secondly, a monochrome threshold strategy is considered. The obtained representations are evaluated under a visual odometry framework, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, using different urban and semi-urban scenarios. Comparisons with both monocular-visible spectrum and monocular-infrared spectrum, are also provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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Dennis G. Romero, A. Frizera, Angel D. Sappa, Boris X. Vintimilla, & T.F. Bastos. (2015). A predictive model for human activity recognition by observing actions and context. In ACIVS 2015 (Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems), International Conference on, Catania, Italy, 2015 (pp. 323–333).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel model to estimate human activities – a human activity is defined by a set of human actions. The proposed approach is based on the usage of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Bayesian inference through the continuous monitoring of human actions and its surrounding environment. In the current work human activities are inferred considering not only visual analysis but also additional resources; external sources of information, such as context information, are incorporated to contribute to the activity estimation. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the way the information is encoded, so that it can be later associated according to a predefined semantic structure. Hence, a pattern representing a given activity can be defined by a set of actions, plus contextual information or other kind of information that could be relevant to describe the activity. Experimental results with real data are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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M. Oliveira, L. Seabra Lopes, G. Hyun Lim, S. Hamidreza Kasaei, Angel D. Sappa, & A. Tomé. (2015). Concurrent Learning of Visual Codebooks and Object Categories in Open- ended Domains. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, Hamburg, Germany, 2015 (pp. 2488–2495). Hamburg, Germany: IEEE.
Abstract: In open-ended domains, robots must continuously learn new object categories. When the training sets are created offline, it is not possible to ensure their representativeness with respect to the object categories and features the system will find when operating online. In the Bag of Words model, visual codebooks are usually constructed from training sets created offline. This might lead to non-discriminative visual words and, as a consequence, to poor recognition performance. This paper proposes a visual object recognition system which concurrently learns in an incremental and online fashion both the visual object category representations as well as the codebook words used to encode them. The codebook is defined using Gaussian Mixture Models which are updated using new object views. The approach contains similarities with the human visual object recognition system: evidence suggests that the development of recognition capabilities occurs on multiple levels and is sustained over large periods of time. Results show that the proposed system with concurrent learning of object categories and codebooks is capable of learning more categories, requiring less examples, and with similar accuracies, when compared to the classical Bag of Words approach using codebooks constructed offline.
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Cristhian A. Aguilera, Angel D. Sappa, & R. Toledo. (2015). LGHD: A feature descriptor for matching across non-linear intensity variations. In IEEE International Conference on, Quebec City, QC, 2015 (pp. 178–181). Quebec City, QC, Canada: IEEE.
Abstract: This paper presents a new feature descriptor suitable to the task of matching features points between images with nonlinear intensity variations. This includes image pairs with significant illuminations changes, multi-modal image pairs and multi-spectral image pairs. The proposed method describes the neighbourhood of feature points combining frequency and spatial information using multi-scale and multi-oriented Log- Gabor filters. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed approach and also the improvements with respect to the state of the art.
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Ricaurte P, Chilán C, Cristhian A. Aguilera, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Angel D. Sappa. (2014). Feature Point Descriptors: Infrared and Visible Spectra. Sensors Journal, Vol. 14, pp. 3690–3701.
Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the behavior of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in images from long-wave infrared spectral band and compare them with the results obtained in the visible spectrum. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are analyzed using a state of the art framework. Experimental results using a cross-spectral outdoor image data set are presented and conclusions from these experiments are given.
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