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Marta Diaz, Dennys Paillacho, & Cecilio Angulo. (2015). Evaluating Group-Robot Interaction in Crowded Public Spaces: A Week-Long Exploratory Study in the Wild with a Humanoid Robot Guiding Visitors Through a Science Museum. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, Vol. 12.
Abstract: This paper describes an exploratory study on group interaction with a robot-guide in an open large-scale busy environment. For an entire week a humanoid robot was deployed in the popular Cosmocaixa Science Museum in Barcelona and guided hundreds of people through the museum facilities. The main goal of this experience is to study in the wild the episodes of the robot guiding visitors to a requested destination focusing on the group behavior during displacement. The walking behavior follow-me and the face to face communication in a populated environment are analyzed in terms of guide- visitors interaction, grouping patterns and spatial formations. Results from observational data show that the space configurations spontaneously formed by the robot guide and visitors walking together did not always meet the robot communicative and navigational requirements for successful guidance. Therefore additional verbal and nonverbal prompts must be considered to regulate effectively the walking together and follow-me behaviors. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and recommendations for robot’s spatial behavior in dense crowded scenarios.
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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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Charco, J. L., Sappa, A.D., Vintimilla, B.X., Velesaca, H.O. (2021). Camera pose estimation in multi-view environments:from virtual scenarios to the real world. In Image and Vision Computing Journal. (Article number 104182), Vol. 110.
Abstract: This paper presents a domain adaptation strategy to efficiently train network architectures for estimating the relative camera pose in multi-view scenarios. The network architectures are fed by a pair of simultaneously acquired
images, hence in order to improve the accuracy of the solutions, and due to the lack of large datasets with pairs of
overlapped images, a domain adaptation strategy is proposed. The domain adaptation strategy consists on transferring the knowledge learned from synthetic images to real-world scenarios. For this, the networks are firstly
trained using pairs of synthetic images, which are captured at the same time by a pair of cameras in a virtual environment; and then, the learned weights of the networks are transferred to the real-world case, where the networks are retrained with a few real images. Different virtual 3D scenarios are generated to evaluate the
relationship between the accuracy on the result and the similarity between virtual and real scenarios—similarity
on both geometry of the objects contained in the scene as well as relative pose between camera and objects in the
scene. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing that the accuracy of all the evaluated networks for estimating the camera pose improves when the proposed domain adaptation strategy is used,
highlighting the importance on the similarity between virtual-real scenarios.
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Ángel Morera, Á. S., A. Belén Moreno, Angel D. Sappa, & José F. Vélez. (2020). SSD vs. YOLO for Detection of Outdoor Urban Advertising Panels under Multiple Variabilities. In Sensors, Vol. 2020-August(16), pp. 1–23.
Abstract: This work compares Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO)
deep neural networks for the outdoor advertisement panel detection problem by handling multiple
and combined variabilities in the scenes. Publicity panel detection in images o ers important
advantages both in the real world as well as in the virtual one. For example, applications like Google
Street View can be used for Internet publicity and when detecting these ads panels in images, it could
be possible to replace the publicity appearing inside the panels by another from a funding company.
In our experiments, both SSD and YOLO detectors have produced acceptable results under variable
sizes of panels, illumination conditions, viewing perspectives, partial occlusion of panels, complex
background and multiple panels in scenes. Due to the diculty of finding annotated images for the
considered problem, we created our own dataset for conducting the experiments. The major strength
of the SSD model was the almost elimination of False Positive (FP) cases, situation that is preferable
when the publicity contained inside the panel is analyzed after detecting them. On the other side,
YOLO produced better panel localization results detecting a higher number of True Positive (TP)
panels with a higher accuracy. Finally, a comparison of the two analyzed object detection models
with di erent types of semantic segmentation networks and using the same evaluation metrics is
also included.
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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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