Publications

Banknote recognition systems have many applications in the modern world of automatic monetary transaction machines. They are traditionally based on simple classifiers applied over manually selected areas. A new solution in this field, borrowed by content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which is based on dense scale-invariant feature transform features in a bag-of-words framework followed by a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, is explored. The proposed computer vision system for banknote recognition, on one hand, enables recognition at high accuracy and speed, and, on the other hand, provides basis for further applications, e.g., counterfeit detection and fitness test. This approach makes the system robust to various defects, which may occur during image acquisition or during circulation life of banknote. We implemented and tested on an embedded platform three state-of-the-art classification techniques [SVM, artificial neural network (ANN), and hidden Markov model (HMM)]. The comparative results are reported for accuracy with different sizes of the training datasets and with various types of datasets. In this framework, the SVM classifier outperforms ANN and HMM on the basis of speed and accuracy on our embedded platform. © 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

The field of surveillance and forensics research is currently shifting focus and is now showing an ever increasing interest in the task of people reidentification. This is the task of assigning the same identifier to all instances of a particular individual captured in a series of images or videos, even after the occurrence of significant gaps over time or space. People reidentification can be a useful tool for people analysis in security as a data association method for long-term tracking in surveillance. However, current identification techniques being utilized present many difficulties and shortcomings. For instance, they rely solely on the exploitation of visual cues such as color, texture, and the object's shape. Despite the many advances in this field, reidentification is still an open problem. This survey aims to tackle all the issues and challenging aspects of people reidentification while simultaneously describing the previously proposed solutions for the encountered problems. This begins with the first attempts of holistic descriptors and progresses to the more recently adopted 2D and 3D model-based approaches. The survey also includes an exhaustive treatise of all the aspects of people reidentification, including available datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarking.

Surveillance systems can really benefit from the integration of multiple and heterogeneous sensors. In this paper we describe an innovative sensing floor. Thanks to its low cost and ease of installation, the floor is suitable for both private and public environments, from narrow zones to wide areas. The floor is made adding a sensing layer below commercial floating tiles. The sensor is scalable, reliable, and completely invisible to the users. The temporal and spatial resolutions of the data are high enough to identify the presence of people, to recognize their behavior and to detect events in a privacy compliant way. Experimental results on a real prototype implementation confirm the potentiality of the framework.

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 this paper we propose a large-scale Image annotation system for the Scalable Concept Image Annotation task. For each concept to be detected a separated classifier is built using the provided textual annotation. Images are represented as a Multivariate Gaussian distribution of a set of local features extracted over a dense regular grid. Textual analysis, on the web pages containing training images, is performed to retrieve a relevant set of samples for learning each concept classifier. An online SVMs solver based on Stochastic Gradient Descent is used to manage the large amount of training data. Experimental results show that the combination of different kind of local features encoded with our strategy achieves very competitive performance both in terms of mAP and mean F-measure.

This paper describe the ViSOR (Video Surveillance Online Repository) repository, designed with the aim of establishing an open platform for collecting, annotating, retrieving, and sharing surveillance videos, as well as evaluating the performance of automatic surveillance systems. The repository is free and researchers can collaborate sharing their own videos or datasets. Most of the included videos are annotated. Annotations are based on a reference ontology which has been defined integrating hundreds of concepts, some of them coming from the LSCOM and MediaMill ontologies. A new annotation classification schema is also provided, which is aimed at identifying the spatial, temporal and domain detail level used. The web interface allows video browsing, querying by annotated concepts or by keywords, compressed video previewing, media downloading and uploading. Finally, ViSOR includes a performance evaluation desk which can be used to compare different annotations.