Publications by Rita Cucchiara

The evaluation of computer vision and pattern recognition systems is usually a burdensome and time-consuming activity. In this chapter all the benchmarks publicly available for re-identification will be reviewed and compared, starting from the ancestors VIPeR and Caviar to the most recent datasets for 3D modeling such as SARC3d (with calibrated cameras) and RGBD-ID (with range sensors). Specific requirements and constraints are highlighted and reported for each of the described collections. In addition, details on the metrics that are mostly used to test and evaluate the re-identification systems are provided.

In this paper we propose a novel image descriptor built by computing the covariance of pixel level features on densely sampled patches and encoding them using their covariance. Appropriate projections to the Euclidean space and feature normalizations are employed in order to provide a strong descriptor usable with linear classifiers. In order to remove border effects, we further enhance the Spatial Pyramid representation with bilinear interpolation. Experimental results conducted on two common datasets for object and texture classification show that the performance of our method is comparable with state of the art techniques, but removing any dataset specific dependency in the feature encoding step.

A surveillance system specifically developed to manage crowded scenes is described in this paper. In particular we focused on static crowds, composed by groups of people gathered and stayed in the same place for a while. The detection and spatial localization of static crowd situations is performed by means of a One Class Support Vector Machine, working on texture features extracted at patch level. Spatial regions containing crowds are identified and filtered using motion information to prevent noise and false alarms due to moving flows of people. By means of one class classification and inner texture descriptors, we are able to obtain, from a single training set, a sufficiently general crowd model that can be used for all the scenarios that shares a similar viewpoint. Tests on public datasets and real setups validate the proposed system.

We present a novel method for monocular hand gesture recognition in ego-vision scenarios that deals with static and dynamic gestures and can achieve high accuracy results using a few positive samples. Specifically, we use and extend the dense trajectories approach that has been successfully introduced for action recognition. Dense features are extracted around regions selected by a new hand segmentation technique that integrates superpixel classification, temporal and spatial coherence. We extensively testour gesture recognition and segmentation algorithms on public datasets and propose a new dataset shot with a wearable camera. In addition, we demonstrate that our solution can work in near real-time on a wearable device.

In this paper we present a new method for head pose real-time estimation in ego-vision scenarios that is a key step in the understanding of social interactions. In order to robustly detect head under changing aspect ratio, scale and orientation we use and extend the Hough-Based Tracker which allows to follow simultaneously each subject in the scene. In an ego-vision scenario where a group interacts in a discussion, each subject's head orientation will be more likely to remain focused for a while on the person who has the floor. In order to encode this behavior we include a stateful Hidden Markov Model technique that enforces the predicted pose with the temporal coherence from a video sequence. We extensively test our approach on several indoor and outdoor ego-vision videos with high illumination variations showing its validity and outperforming other recent related state of the art approaches.

In this paper we propose an approach for Document Layout Analysis based on local correlation features. We identify and extract illustrations in digitized documents by learning the discriminative patterns of textual and pictorial regions. The proposal has been demonstrated to be effective on historical datasets and to outperform the state-of-the-art in presence of challenging documents with a large variety of pictorial elements.

Despite pattern recognition methods for human behavioral analysis has flourished in the last decade, animal behavioral analysis has been almost neglected. Those few approaches are mostly focused on preserving livestock economic value while attention on the welfare of companion animals, like dogs, is now emerging as a social need. In this work, following the analogy with human behavior recognition, we propose a system for recognizing body parts of dogs kept in pens. We decide to adopt both 2D and 3D features in order to obtain a rich description of the dog model. Images are acquired using the Microsoft Kinect to capture the depth map images of the dog. Upon depth maps a Structural Support Vector Machine (SSVM) is employed to identify the body parts using both 3D features and 2D images. The proposal relies on a kernelized discriminative structural classificator specifically tailored for dogs independently from the size and breed. The classification is performed in an online fashion using the LaRank optimization technique to obtaining real time performances. Promising results have emerged during the experimental evaluation carried out at a dog shelter, managed by IZSAM, in Teramo, Italy.

In this paper we address the task of learning how to segment a particular class of objects, by means of a training set of images and their segmentations. In particular we propose a method to overcome the extremely high training time of a previously proposed solution to this problem, Kernelized Structural Support Vector Machines. We employ a one-class SVM working with joint kernels to robustly learn significant support vectors (representative image-mask pairs) and accordingly weight them to build a suitable energy function for the graph cut framework. We report results obtained on two public datasets and a comparison of training times on different training set sizes.

In this paper we propose to extend the well known graph cut segmentation framework by learning superpixel relations and use them to weight superpixel-to-superpixel edges in a superpixel graph. Adjacent superpixel-pairs are analyzed to build an object boundary model, able to discriminate between superpixel-pairs belonging to the same object or placed on the edge between the foreground object and the background. Several superpixel-pair features are investigated and exploited to build a non-linear SVM to learn object boundary appearance. The adoption of this modified graph cut enhances the performance of a previously proposed segmentation method on two publicly available datasets, reaching state-of-the-art results.