3D Robotic Sensing of People: Human Perception, Representation and Activity Recognition

The robots are coming. Their presence will eventually bridge the digital-physical divide and dramatically impact human life by taking over tasks where our current society has shortcomings (e.g., search and rescue, elderly care, and child education). Human-centered robotics (HCR) is a vision to address how robots can coexist with humans and help people live safer, simpler and more independent lives. As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us, perceive people, and interpret their behaviors. Endowing robots with these critical capabilities in highly dynamic human social environments is a significant but very challenging problem in practical human-centered robotics applications. This research focuses on robotic sensing of people, that is, how robots can perceive and represent humans and understand their behaviors, primarily through 3D robotic vision. In this dissertation, I begin with a broad perspective on human-centered robotics by discussing its real-world applications and significant challenges. Then, I will introduce a real-time perception system, based on the concept of Depth of Interest, to detect and track multiple individuals using a color-depth camera that is installed on moving robotic platforms. In addition, I will discuss human representation approaches, based on local spatio-temporal features, including new “CoDe4D” features that incorporate both color and depth information, a new “SOD” descriptor to efficiently quantize 3D visual features, and the novel AdHuC features, which are capable of representing the activities of multiple individuals. Several new algorithms to recognize human activities are also discussed, including the RG-PLSA model, which allows us to discover activity patterns without supervision, the MC-HCRF model, which can explicitly investigate certainty in latent temporal patterns, and the FuzzySR model, which is used to segment continuous data into events and probabilistically recognize human activities. Cognition models based on recognition results are also implemented for decision making that allow robotic systems to react to human activities. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of future directions that will accelerate the upcoming technological revolution of human-centered robotics

A perceptual learning model to discover the hierarchical latent structure of image collections

Biology has been an unparalleled source of inspiration for the work of researchers in several scientific and engineering fields including computer vision. The starting point of this thesis is the neurophysiological properties of the human early visual system, in particular, the cortical mechanism that mediates learning by exploiting information about stimuli repetition. Repetition has long been considered a fundamental correlate of skill acquisition andmemory formation in biological aswell as computational learning models. However, recent studies have shown that biological neural networks have differentways of exploiting repetition in forming memory maps. The thesis focuses on a perceptual learning mechanism called repetition suppression, which exploits the temporal distribution of neural activations to drive an efficient neural allocation for a set of stimuli. This explores the neurophysiological hypothesis that repetition suppression serves as an unsupervised perceptual learning mechanism that can drive efficient memory formation by reducing the overall size of stimuli representation while strengthening the responses of the most selective neurons. This interpretation of repetition is different from its traditional role in computational learning models mainly to induce convergence and reach training stability, without using this information to provide focus for the neural representations of the data. The first part of the thesis introduces a novel computational model with repetition suppression, which forms an unsupervised competitive systemtermed CoRe, for Competitive Repetition-suppression learning. The model is applied to generalproblems in the fields of computational intelligence and machine learning. Particular emphasis is placed on validating the model as an effective tool for the unsupervised exploration of bio-medical data. In particular, it is shown that the repetition suppression mechanism efficiently addresses the issues of automatically estimating the number of clusters within the data, as well as filtering noise and irrelevant input components in highly dimensional data, e.g. gene expression levels from DNA Microarrays. The CoRe model produces relevance estimates for the each covariate which is useful, for instance, to discover the best discriminating bio-markers. The description of the model includes a theoretical analysis using Huber’s robust statistics to show that the model is robust to outliers and noise in the data. The convergence properties of themodel also studied. It is shown that, besides its biological underpinning, the CoRe model has useful properties in terms of asymptotic behavior. By exploiting a kernel-based formulation for the CoRe learning error, a theoretically sound motivation is provided for the model’s ability to avoid local minima of its loss function. To do this a necessary and sufficient condition for global error minimization in vector quantization is generalized by extending it to distance metrics in generic Hilbert spaces. This leads to the derivation of a family of kernel-based algorithms that address the local minima issue of unsupervised vector quantization in a principled way. The experimental results show that the algorithm can achieve a consistent performance gain compared with state-of-the-art learning vector quantizers, while retaining a lower computational complexity (linear with respect to the dataset size). Bridging the gap between the low level representation of the visual content and the underlying high-level semantics is a major research issue of current interest. The second part of the thesis focuses on this problem by introducing a hierarchical and multi-resolution approach to visual content understanding. On a spatial level, CoRe learning is used to pool together the local visual patches by organizing them into perceptually meaningful intermediate structures. On the semantical level, it provides an extension of the probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) model that allows discovery and organization of the visual topics into a hierarchy of aspects. The proposed hierarchical pLSA model is shown to effectively address the unsupervised discovery of relevant visual classes from pictorial collections, at the same time learning to segment the image regions containing the discovered classes. Furthermore, by drawing on a recent pLSA-based image annotation system, the hierarchical pLSA model is extended to process and representmulti-modal collections comprising textual and visual data. The results of the experimental evaluation show that the proposed model learns to attach textual labels (available only at the level of the whole image) to the discovered image regions, while increasing the precision/ recall performance with respect to flat, pLSA annotation model

Multimodal non-linear latent semantic method for information retrieval

La búsqueda y recuperación de datos multimodales es una importante tarea dentro del campo de búsqueda y recuperación de información, donde las consultas y los elementos de la base de datos objetivo están representados por un conjunto de modalidades, donde cada una de ellas captura un aspecto de un fenómeno de interés. Cada modalidad contiene información complementaria y común a otras modalidades. Con el fin de tomar ventaja de la información adicional distribuida a través de las distintas modalidades han sido desarrollados muchos algoritmos y métodos que utilizan las propiedades estadísticas en los datos multimodales para encontrar correlaciones implícitas, otros aprenden a calcular distancias heterogéneas, otros métodos aprenden a proyectar los datos desde el espacio de entrada hasta un espacio semántico común, donde las diferentes modalidades son comparables y se puede construir un ranking a partir de ellas. En esta tesis se presenta el diseño de un sistema para la búsqueda y recuperación de información multimodal que aprende varias proyecciones no lineales a espacios semánticos latentes donde las distintas modalidades son representadas en conjunto y es posible realizar comparaciones y medidas de similitud para construir rankings multimodales. Adicionalmente se propone un método kernelizado para la proyección de datos a un espacio semántico latente usando la información de las etiquetas como método de supervisión para construir índice multimodal que integra los datos multimodales y la información de las etiquetas; este método puede proyectar los datos a tres diferentes espacios semánticos donde varias configuraciones de búsqueda y recuperación de información pueden ser aplicadas. El sistema y el método propuestos fueron evaluados en un conjunto de datos compuesto por casos médicos, donde cada caso consta de una imagen de tejido prostático, un reporte de texto del patólogo y un valor de Gleason score como etiqueta de supervisión. Combinando la información multimodal y la información en las etiquetas se generó un índice multimodal que se utilizó para realizar la tarea de búsqueda y recuperación de información por contenido obteniendo resultados sobresalientes. Las proyecciones no-lineales permiten al modelo una mayor flexibilidad y capacidad de representación. Sin embargo calcular estas proyecciones no-lineales en un conjunto de datos enorme es computacionalmente costoso, para reducir este costo y habilitar el modelo para procesar datos a gran escala, la técnica del budget fue utilizada, mostrando un buen compromiso entre efectividad y velocidad.Multimodal information retrieval is an information retrieval sub-task where queries and database target elements are composed of several modalities or views. A modality is a representation of complex phenomena, captured and measured by different sensors or information sources, each one encodes some information about it. Each modality representation contains complementary and shared information about the phenomenon of interest, this additional information can be used to improve the information retrieval process. Several methods have been developed to take advantage of additional information distributed across different modalities. Some of them exploit statistical properties in multimodal data to find correlations and implicit relationships, others learn heterogeneous distance functions, and others learn linear and non-linear projections that transform data from the original input space to a common latent semantic space where different modalities are comparable. In spite of the attention dedicated to this issue, multimodal information retrieval is still an open problem. This thesis presents a multimodal information retrieval system designed to learn several mapping functions to transform multimodal data to a latent semantic space, where different modalities are combined and can be compared to build a multimodal ranking and perform a multimodal information retrieval task. Additionally, a multimodal kernelized latent semantic embedding method is proposed to construct a supervised multimodal index, integrating multimodal data and label supervision. This method can perform mappings to three different spaces where some information retrieval task setups can be performed. The proposed system and method were evaluated in a multimodal medical case-based retrieval task where data is composed of whole-slide images of prostate tissue samples, pathologist’s text report and Gleason score as a supervised label. Multimodal data and labels were combined to produce a multimodal index. This index was used to retrieve multimodal information and achieves outstanding results compared with previous works on this topic. Non-linear mappings provide more flexibility and representation capacity to the proposed model. However, constructing the non-linear mapping in a large dataset using kernel methods can be computationally costly. To reduce the cost and allow large scale applications, the budget technique was introduced, showing good performance between speed and effectiveness.COLCIENCIASJóvenes investigadores 761/2016Línea de investigación: Ciencias de la computaciónMaestrí

Patch-based semantic labelling of images.

PhDThe work presented in this thesis is focused at associating a semantics to the content of an image, linking the content to high level semantic categories. The process can take place at two levels: either at image level, towards image categorisation, or at pixel level, in se- mantic segmentation or semantic labelling. To this end, an analysis framework is proposed, and the different steps of part (or patch) extraction, description and probabilistic modelling are detailed. Parts of different nature are used, and one of the contributions is a method to complement information associated to them. Context for parts has to be considered at different scales. Short range pixel dependences are accounted by associating pixels to larger patches. A Conditional Random Field, that is, a probabilistic discriminative graphical model, is used to model medium range dependences between neighbouring patches. Another contribution is an efficient method to consider rich neighbourhoods without having loops in the inference graph. To this end, weak neighbours are introduced, that is, neighbours whose label probability distribution is pre-estimated rather than mutable during the inference. Longer range dependences, that tend to make the inference problem intractable, are addressed as well. A novel descriptor based on local histograms of visual words has been proposed, meant to both complement the feature descriptor of the patches and augment the context awareness in the patch labelling process. Finally, an alternative approach to consider multiple scales in a hierarchical framework based on image pyramids is proposed. An image pyramid is a compositional representation of the image based on hierarchical clustering. All the presented contributions are extensively detailed throughout the thesis, and experimental results performed on publicly available datasets are reported to assess their validity. A critical comparison with the state of the art in this research area is also presented, and the advantage in adopting the proposed improvements are clearly highlighted

Image Annotation and Topic Extraction Using Super-Word Latent Dirichlet

This research presents a multi-domain solution that uses text and images to iteratively improve automated information extraction. Stage I uses local text surrounding an embedded image to provide clues that help rank-order possible image annotations. These annotations are forwarded to Stage II, where the image annotations from Stage I are used as highly-relevant super-words to improve extraction of topics. The model probabilities from the super-words in Stage II are forwarded to Stage III where they are used to refine the automated image annotation developed in Stage I. All stages demonstrate improvement over existing equivalent algorithms in the literature

A novel approach for multimodal graph dimensionality reduction

This thesis deals with the problem of multimodal dimensionality reduction (DR), which arises when the input objects, to be mapped on a low-dimensional space, consist of multiple vectorial representations, instead of a single one. Herein, the problem is addressed in two alternative manners. One is based on the traditional notion of modality fusion, but using a novel approach to determine the fusion weights. In order to optimally fuse the modalities, the known graph embedding DR framework is extended to multiple modalities by considering a weighted sum of the involved affinity matrices. The weights of the sum are automatically calculated by minimizing an introduced notion of inconsistency of the resulting multimodal affinity matrix. The other manner for dealing with the problem is an approach to consider all modalities simultaneously, without fusing them, which has the advantage of minimal information loss due to fusion. In order to avoid fusion, the problem is viewed as a multi-objective optimization problem. The multiple objective functions are defined based on graph representations of the data, so that their individual minimization leads to dimensionality reduction for each modality separately. The aim is to combine the multiple modalities without the need to assign importance weights to them, or at least postpone such an assignment as a last step. The proposed approaches were experimentally tested in mapping multimedia data on low-dimensional spaces for purposes of visualization, classification and clustering. The no-fusion approach, namely Multi-objective DR, was able to discover mappings revealing the structure of all modalities simultaneously, which cannot be discovered by weight-based fusion methods. However, it results in a set of optimal trade-offs, from which one needs to be selected, which is not trivial. The optimal-fusion approach, namely Multimodal Graph Embedding DR, is able to easily extend unimodal DR methods to multiple modalities, but depends on the limitations of the unimodal DR method used. Both the no-fusion and the optimal-fusion approaches were compared to state-of-the-art multimodal dimensionality reduction methods and the comparison showed performance improvement in visualization, classification and clustering tasks. The proposed approaches were also evaluated for different types of problems and data, in two diverse application fields, a visual-accessibility-enhanced search engine and a visualization tool for mobile network security data. The results verified their applicability in different domains and suggested promising directions for future advancements.Open Acces

Cloud-Based Benchmarking of Medical Image Analysis

Medical imagin