In this article, we explore the correlation between people trajectories and their head orientations. We argue that people trajectory and head pose forecasting can be modelled as a joint problem. Recent approaches on trajectory forecasting leverage short-term trajectories (aka tracklets) of pedestrians to predict their future paths. In addition, sociological cues, such as expected destination or pedestrian interaction, are often combined with tracklets. In this article, we propose MiXing-LSTM (MX-LSTM) to capture the interplay between positions and head orientations (vislets) thanks to a joint unconstrained optimization of full covariance matrices during the LSTM backpropagation. We additionally exploit the head orientations as a proxy for the visual attention, when modeling social interactions. MX-LSTM predicts future pedestrians location and head pose, increasing the standard capabilities of the current approaches on long-term trajectory forecasting. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach shows better performances on an extensive set of public benchmarks. MX-LSTM is particularly effective when people move slowly, i.e., the most challenging scenario for all other models. The proposed approach also allows for accurate predictions on a longer time horizon.

Person search has recently gained attention as the novel task of finding a person, provided as a cropped sample, from a gallery of non-cropped images, whereby several other people are also visible. We believe that i. person detection and re-identification should be pursued in a joint optimization framework and that ii. the person search should leverage the query image extensively (e.g. emphasizing unique query patterns). However, so far, no prior art realizes this. We introduce a novel query-guided end-to-end person search network (QEEPS) to address both aspects. We leverage a most recent joint detector and re-identification work, OIM [37]. We extend this with i. a query-guided Siamese squeeze-and-excitation network (QSSE-Net) that uses global context from both the query and gallery images, ii. a query-guided region proposal network (QRPN) to produce query-relevant proposals, and iii. a query-guided similarity subnetwork (QSimNet), to learn a query-guided re-identification score. QEEPS is the first end-to-end query-guided detection and re-id network. On both the most recent CUHK-SYSU [37] and PRW [46] datasets, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin.

A desirable smart traffic-monitoring and street-safety system can elicit and support the intervention of law enforcement agencies or medical staff. Recently, there has been a dramatically higher demand for such smart systems. To this end, the International Workshop on Traffic and Street Surveillance for Safety and Security (IWT4S) was organized in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-based Surveillance (AVSS 2018). Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art detection and tracking algorithms and provide a comprehensive performance evaluation for them. We evaluate 5 submitted detection and 7 submitted tracking methods on the large-scale UA-DETRAC benchmark, and the results are shared publicly on the website http://detrac-db. rit.albany.edu. We expect this challenge to advance the research and development of new detection and tracking methods for transportation applications.

Faster R-CNN has established itself as the de-facto best object detector but it remains strongly limited in two aspects: (i) it is sensitive to background clutter and its classification performance decreases when it is confronted with more noisy proposals; (ii) it suffers when the objects vary largely in scale and specifically for the small objects. We address both issues with our geometric-proposals for Faster R-CNN (GP-FRCNN), whereby we re-rank the generic object proposals with an approximate geometric estimate of the scene. But the devil is in the details: the simple extension requires involved scale adjustments (e.g. anchors, layer resolution) which we detail in this paper. Finally, our GP-FRCNN performs equally well on smaller and larger objects, a long standing challenge for any object detection algorithm. The application of GP-FRCNN to surveillance videos is straightforward and does not require an explicit geometric formulation. We extensively test the model on the UA-DETRAC dataset, where GP-FRCNN outperforms the standard Faster R-CNN by 19%.

The rapid advances of transportation infrastructure have led to a dramatic increase in the demand for smart systems capable of monitoring traffic and street safety. Fundamental to these applications are a community-based evaluation platform and benchmark for object detection and multi-object tracking. To this end, we organize the AVSS2017 Challenge on Advanced Traffic Monitoring, in conjunction with the International Workshop on Traffic and Street Surveillance for Safety and Security (IWT4S), to evaluate the state-of-the-art object detection and multi-object tracking algorithms in the relevance of traffic surveillance. Submitted algorithms are evaluated using the large-scale UA-DETRAC benchmark and evaluation protocol. The benchmark, the evaluation toolkit and the algorithm performance are publicly available from the website http://detrac-db.rit.albany.edu.

We address the problem of 3D pose estimation of multiple humans from multiple views. The transition from single to multiple human pose estimation and from the 2D to 3D space is challenging due to a much larger state space, occlusions and across-view ambiguities when not knowing the identity of the humans in advance. To address these problems, we first create a reduced state space by triangulation of corresponding pairs of body parts obtained by part detectors for each camera view. In order to resolve ambiguities of wrong and mixed parts of multiple humans after triangulation and also those coming from false positive detections, we introduce a 3D pictorial structures (3DPS) model. Our model builds on multi-view unary potentials, while a prior model is integrated into pairwise and ternary potential functions. To balance the potentials' influence, the model parameters are learnt using a Structured SVM (SSVM). The model is generic and applicable to both single and multiple human pose estimation. To evaluate our model on single and multiple human pose estimation, we rely on four different datasets. We first analyse the contribution of the potentials and then compare our results with related work where we demonstrate superior performance.

Previous work on emotion recognition from bodily expressions focused on analysing such expressions in isolation, of individuals or in controlled settings, from a single camera view, or required intrusive motion tracking equipment. We study the problem of emotion recognition from bodily expressions and speech during dyadic (person-person) interactions in a real kitchen instrumented with ambient cameras and microphones. We specifically focus on bodily expressions that are embedded in regular interactions and background activities and recorded without human augmentation to increase naturalness of the expressions. We present a human-validated dataset that contains 224 high-resolution, multi-view video clips and audio recordings of emotionally charged interactions between eight couples of actors. The dataset is fully annotated with categorical labels for four basic emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and continuous labels for valence, activation, power, and anticipation provided by five annotators for each actor. We evaluate vision and audio-based emotion recognition using dense trajectories and a standard audio pipeline and provide insights into the importance of different body parts and audio features for emotion recognition.

In this work, we address the problem of 3D pose estimation of multiple humans from multiple views. This is a more challenging problem than single human 3D pose estimation due to the much larger state space, partial occlusions as well as across view ambiguities when not knowing the identity of the humans in advance. To address these problems, we first create a reduced state space by triangulation of corresponding body joints obtained from part detectors in pairs of camera views. In order to resolve the ambiguities of wrong and mixed body parts of multiple humans after triangulation and also those coming from false positive body part detections, we introduce a novel 3D pictorial structures (3DPS) model. Our model infers 3D human body configurations from our reduced state space. The 3DPS model is generic and applicable to both single and multiple human pose estimation. In order to compare to the state-of-the art, we first evaluate our method on single human 3D pose estimation on HumanEva-I [22] and KTH Multiview Football Dataset II [8] datasets. Then, we introduce and evaluate our method on two datasets for multiple human 3D pose estimation. In order to compare to the state-of-the art, we first evaluate our method on single human 3D pose estimation on HumanEva-I [22] and KTH Multiview Football Dataset II [8] datasets. Then, we introduce and evaluate our method on two datasets for multiple human 3D pose estimation.

Pictorial structure models are the de facto standard for 2D human pose estimation. Numerous refinements and improvements have been proposed such as discriminatively trained body part detectors, flexible body models, and local and global mixtures. While these techniques allow to achieve state-of-the-art performance for 2D pose estimation, they have not yet been extended to enable pose estimation in 3D. This paper thus proposes a multi-view pictorial structures model that builds on recent advances in 2D pose estimation and incorporates evidence across multiple viewpoints to allow for robust 3D pose estimation. We evaluate our multi-view pictorial structures approach on the HumanEva-I and MPII Cooking dataset. In comparison to related work for 3D pose estimation our approach achieves similar or better results while operating on single-frames only and not relying on activity specific motion models or tracking. Notably, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art for activities with more complex motions.

While activity recognition is a current focus of research the challenging problem of fine-grained activity recognition is largely overlooked. We thus propose a novel database of 65 cooking activities, continuously recorded in a realistic setting. Activities are distinguished by fine-grained body motions that have low inter-class variability and high intra-class variability due to diverse subjects and ingredients. We benchmark two approaches on our dataset, one based on articulated pose tracks and the second using holistic video features. While the holistic approach outperforms the pose-based approach, our evaluation suggests that fine-grained activities are more difficult to detect and the body model can help in those cases. Providing high-resolution videos as well as an intermediate pose representation we hope to foster research in fine-grained activity recognition.