Publications by Simone Calderara

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.

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.

There is a large variety of trackers, which have been proposed in the literature during the last two decades with some mixed success. Object tracking in realistic scenarios is difficult problem, therefore it remains a most active area of research in Computer Vision. A good tracker should perform well in a large number of videos involving illumination changes, occlusion, clutter, camera motion, low contrast, specularities and at least six more aspects. However, the performance of proposed trackers have been evaluated typically on less than ten videos, or on the special purpose datasets. In this paper, we aim to evaluate trackers systematically and experimentally on 315 video fragments covering above aspects. We selected a set of nineteen trackers to include a wide variety of algorithms often cited in literature, supplemented with trackers appearing in 2010 and 2011 for which the code was publicly available. We demonstrate that trackers can be evaluated objectively by survival curves, Kaplan Meier statistics, and Grubs testing. We find that in the evaluation practice the F-score is as effective as the object tracking accuracy (OTA) score. The analysis under a large variety of circumstances provides objective insight into the strengths and weaknesses of trackers.

Most of the behaviors people exhibit while being part of a crowd are social processes that tend to emerge among groups and as a consequence, detecting groups in crowds is becoming an important issue in modern behavior analysis. We propose a supervised correlation clustering technique that employs Structural SVM and a proxemic based feature to learn how to partition people trajectories in groups, by injecting in the model socially plausible shape configurations. By taking into account social groups patterns, the system is able to outperform state of the art methods on two publicly available benchmark sets of videos. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Most of the behaviors people exhibit while being part of a crowd are social processes that tend to emerge among groups and as a consequence, detecting groups in crowds is becoming an important issue in modern behavior analysis. We propose a supervised correlation clustering technique that employs Structural SVM and a proxemic based feature to learn how to partition people trajectories in groups, by injecting in the model socially plausible shape configurations. By taking into account social groups patterns, the system is able to outperform state of the art methods on two publicly available benchmark sets of videos.

Group detection in crowds will play a key role in future behavior analysis surveillance systems. In this work we build a new Structural SVM-based learning framework able to solve the group detection task by exploiting annotated video data to deduce a sociologically motivated distance measure founded on Hall's proxemics and Granger's causality. We improve over state-of-the-art results even in the most crowded test scenarios, while keeping the classification time affordable for quasi-real time applications. A new scoring scheme specifically designed for the group detection task is also proposed.

In the past literature, online alarm-based video-surveillance and offline forensic-based data mining systems are often treated separately, even from different scientific communities. However, the founding techniques are almost the same and, despite some examples in commercial systems, the cases on which an integrated approach is followed are limited. For this reason, this study describes an integrated tool capable of putting together these two subsystems in an effective way. Despite its generality, the proposal is here reported in the case of people trajectory analysis, both in real time and offline. Trajectories are modelled based on either their spatial location or their shape, and proper similarity measures are proposed. Special solutions to meet real-time requirements in both cases are also presented and the trade-off between efficiency and efficacy is analysed by comparing when using a statistical model and when not. Examples of results in large datasets acquired in the University campus are reported as preliminary evaluation of the system.

In this paper we propose a color-based approach for skin detection and interest garment selection aimed at an automatic segmentation of pieces of clothing. For both purposes, the color description is extracted by an iterative energy minimization approach and an automatic initialization strategy is proposed by learning geometric constraints and shape cues. Experiments confirms the good performance of this technique both in the context of skin removal and in the context of classification of garments.

Understanding social and collective people behaviour in open spaces is one of the frontier of modern video surveillance. Many sociological theories, and proxemics in particular, have been proved their validity as a support for classifying and interpreting human behaviour. Proxemics suggest some simple but effective behavioural rules, useful to understand what people are doing and their social involvement with other individuals. In this paper we propose to extend the proxemics analysis along the time and provide a solution for analysing sequences of proxemic states computed between trajectories of people pairs (dyads). Trajectories, computed from videosurveillance videos, are first analysed and converted to a sequence of symbols according to proxemic theory. Then an elastic measure for comparing those sequences is introduced. Finally, interactions are classified both in an off-line unsupervised way and in an on-line fashion. Results on videosurveillance data, demonstrate that sequences of proxemic states can be effective in characterizing mutual interactions and experiments in capturing the most frequent dyads interactions and on-line classifying them when a labelled training set is available are proposed.