Publications by Rita Cucchiara

In this paper, we propose a general approach for automatic segmentation, color-based retrieval and classification of garments in fashion store databases, exploiting shape and color information. The garment segmentation is automatically initialized by learning geometric constraints and shape cues, then it is performed by modeling both skin and accessory colors with Gaussian Mixture Models. For color similarity retrieval and classification, to adapt the color description to the users’ perception and the company marketing directives, a color histogram with an optimized binning strategy, learned on the given color classes, is introduced and combined with HOG features for garment classification. Experiments validating the proposed strategy, and a free-to-use dataset publicly available for scientific purposes, are finally detailed.

Several papers addressed ellipse detection as a first step for several computer vision applications, but most of the proposed solutions are too slow to be applied in real time on large images or with limited hardware resources. This paper presents a novel algorithm for fast and effective ellipse detection and demonstrates its superior speed performance on large and challenging datasets. The proposed algorithm relies on an innovative selection strategy of arcs which are candidate to form ellipses and on the use of Hough transform to estimate parameters in a decomposed space. The final aim of this solution is to represent a building block for new generation of smart-phone applications which need fast and accurate ellipse detection also with limited computational resources. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

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.