Abstract In human behaviour analysis, the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of a person is a very important cue. VFOA detection is difficult, though, especially in a unconstrained and crowded environment, typical of video surveillance scenarios. In this paper, we estimate the VFOA by defining the Subjective View Frustum, which approximates the visual field of a person in a three‐dimensional representation of the scene. This opens up to several intriguing behavioural investigations. In particular, we propose the Inter‐Relation Pattern Matrix, which suggests possible social interactions between the people present in a scene. Theoretical justifications and experimental results substantiate the validity and the goodness of the analysis performed.

In this paper, we present an appearance-based method for person re-identification. It consists in the extraction of features that model three complementary aspects of the human appearance: the overall chromatic content, the spatial arrangement of colors into stable regions, and the presence of recurrent local motifs with high entropy. All this information is derived from different body parts, and weighted opportunely by exploiting symmetry and asymmetry perceptual principles. In this way, robustness against very low resolution, occlusions and pose, viewpoint and illumination changes is achieved. The approach applies to situations where the number of candidates varies continuously, considering single images or bunch of frames for each individual. It has been tested on several public benchmark datasets (ViPER, iLIDS, ETHZ), gaining new state-of-the-art performances.

We present a completely automated Structure and Motion pipeline capable of working with uncalibrated images with varying internal parameters and no ancillary information. The system is based on a novel hierarchical scheme which reduces the total complexity by one order of magnitude. We assess the quality of our approach analytically by comparing the recovered point clouds with laser scans, which serves as ground truth data.

In this paper we propose a novel part-based framework for pedestrian detection. We model a human as a hierarchy of fixed overlapped parts, each of which described by covariances of features. Each part is modeled by a boosted classifier, learnt using Logitboost on Riemannian manifolds. All the classifiers are then linked to form a high-level classifier, through weighted summation, whose weights are estimated during the learning. The final classifier is simple, light and robust. The experimental results show that we outperform the state-of-the-art human detection performances on the INRIA person dataset.

In this paper, we propose a novel appearance-based method for person re-identification, that condenses a set of frames of the same individual into a highly informative signature, called Histogram Plus Epitome, HPE. It incorporates complementary global and local statistical descriptions of the human appearance, focusing on the overall chromatic content, via histograms representation, and on the presence of recurrent local patches, via epitome estimation. The matching of HPEs provides optimal performances against low resolution, occlusions, pose and illumination variations, defining novel state-of-the-art results on all the datasets considered.

Boosting covariance data on Riemannian manifolds has proven to be a convenient strategy in a pedestrian detection context. In this paper we show that the detection performances of the state-of-the-art approach of Tuzel et al. can be greatly improved, from both a computational and a qualitative point of view, by considering practical and theoretical issues, and allowing also the estimation of occlusions in a fine way. The resulting detection system reaches the best performance on the INRIA dataset, setting novel state-of-the art results.

This paper proposes a technique for estimating piece wise planar models of objects from their images and geometric constraints. First, assuming a bounded noise in the localization of 2D points, the position of the 3D point is estimated as a polyhedron containing all the possible solutions of the triangulation. Then, given the topological structure of the 3D points cloud, geometric relationships among facets, such as coplanarity, parallelism, orthogonality, and angle equality, are automatically detected. A subset of them that is sufficient to stabilize the 3D model estimation is selected with a flow-network based algorithm. Finally a feasible instance of the 3D model, i.e. one that satisfies the selected geometric relationships and whose 3D points lie within the associated polyhedral bounds, is computed by solving a Constraint Satisfaction Problem.

Building an accurate three dimensional map is an important task for autonomous localisation and navigation. In a sequential approach to reconstruction from video streams, we show how adding prior knowledge about camera motion improves reconstruction accuracy, obtaining a more precise trajectory estimation and preventing failures over time. We add a smoothing penalty on camera trajectory and the smoothing parameter, usually fixed by trial and error, is automatically estimated using Cross-Validation. The method is substantiated by experimental results on synthetic and real data. They show that it improves accuracy and stability in the reconstruction process, preventing several failure cases.

In this paper a method for the extraction of shading and reflectance intrinsic images from a single uncalibrated image is presented. It is based on the classification of the image derivatives as either caused by shading or reflectance effects, using an illumination-invariant image to guide this classification. Our approach avoids the learning process -which requires ground truth intrinsic images -and obtain results comparable with the state of the art.

In this paper we demonstrate how Interval Analysis and Constraint Logic Programming can be used to obtain an accurate geometric model of a scene that rigorously takes into account the propagation of data errors and roundoff. Image points are represented as small rectangles: As a result, the output of the n-views triangulation is not a single point in space, but a polyhedron that contains all the possible solutions. Interval Analysis is used to bound this polyhedron with a box. Geometrical constraints such as orthogonality, parallelism, and coplanarity are subsequently enforced in order to reduce the size of those boxes, using Constraint Logic Programming. Experiments with real calibrated images illustrate the approach.

We address the problem of autocalibration of a moving camera with unknown constant intrinsic parameters. Existing autocalibration techniques use numerical optimization algorithms whose convergence to the correct result cannot be guaranteed, in general. To address this problem, we have developed a method where an interval branch-and-bound method is employed for numerical minimization. Thanks to the properties of Interval Analysis this method converges to the global solution with mathematical certainty and arbitrary accuracy and the only input information it requires from the user are a set of point correspondences and a search interval. The cost function is based on the Huang-Faugeras constraint of the essential matrix. A recently proposed interval extension based on Bernstein polynomial forms has been investigated to speed up the search for the solution. Finally, experimental results are presented.

Existing autocalibration techniques use numerical optimization algorithms that are prone to the problem of local minima. To address this problem, we have developed a method where an interval branch-and-bound method is employed for numerical minimization. Thanks to the properties of interval analysis this method is guaranteed to converge to the global solution with mathematical certainty and arbitrary accuracy, and the only input information it requires from the user is a set of point correspondences and a search box. The cost function is based on the Huang-Faugeras constraint of the fundamental matrix. A recently proposed interval extension based on Bernstein polynomial forms has been investigated to speed up the search for the solution. Finally, some experimental results on synthetic images are presented.