Towards social pattern characterization in egocentric photo-streams

Following the increasingly popular trend of social interaction analysis in egocentric vision, this article presents a comprehensive pipeline for automatic social pattern characterization of a wearable photo-camera user. The proposed framework relies merely on the visual analysis of egocentric photo-streams and consists of three major steps. The first step is to detect social interactions of the user where the impact of several social signals on the task is explored. The detected social events are inspected in the second step for categorization into different social meetings. These two steps act at event-level where each potential social event is modeled as a multi-dimensional time-series, whose dimensions correspond to a set of relevant features for each task; finally, LSTM is employed to classify the time-series. The last step of the framework is to characterize social patterns of the user. Our goal is to quantify the duration, the diversity and the frequency of the user social relations in various social situations. This goal is achieved by the discovery of recurrences of the same people across the whole set of social events related to the user. Experimental evaluation over EgoSocialStyle - the proposed dataset in this work, and EGO-GROUP demonstrates promising results on the task of social pattern characterization from egocentric photo-streams

Spatio-temporal alignment and hyperspherical radon transform for 3D gait recognition in multi-view environments

This paper presents a view-invariant approach to gait recognition in multi-camera scenarios exploiting a joint spatio-temporal data representation and analysis. First, multi-view information is employed to generate a 3D voxel reconstruction of the scene under study. The analyzed subject is tracked and its centroid and orientation allow recentering and aligning the volume associated to it, thus obtaining a representation invariant to translation, rotation and scaling. Temporal periodicity of the walking cycle is extracted to align the input data in the time domain. Finally, Hyperspherical Radon Transform is presented as an efficient tool to obtain features from spatio-temporal gait templates for classification purposes. Experimental results prove the validity and robustness of the proposed method for gait recognition tasks with several covariates.Postprint (published version

Voxel based annealed particle filtering for markerless 3D articulated motion capture

This paper presents a view-independent approach to markerless human motion capture in low resolution sequences from multiple calibrated and synchronized cameras. Redundancy among cameras is exploited to generate a 3D voxelized representation of the scene and a human body model (HBM) is introduced towards analyzing these data. An annealed particle filtering scheme where every particle encodes an instance of the pose of the HBM is employed. Likelihood between particles and input data is performed using occupancy and surface information and kinematic constrains are imposed in the propagation step towards avoiding impossible poses. Test over the HumanEva annotated dataset yield quantitative results showing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Postprint (published version

Data-Driven but Privacy-Conscious: Pedestrian Dataset De-identification via Full-Body Person Synthesis

The advent of data-driven technology solutions is accompanied by an increasing concern with data privacy. This is of particular importance for human-centered image recognition tasks, such as pedestrian detection, re-identification, and tracking. To highlight the importance of privacy issues and motivate future research, we motivate and introduce the Pedestrian Dataset De-Identification (PDI) task. PDI evaluates the degree of de-identification and downstream task training performance for a given de-identification method. As a first baseline, we propose IncogniMOT, a two-stage full-body de-identification pipeline based on image synthesis via generative adversarial networks. The first stage replaces target pedestrians with synthetic identities. To improve downstream task performance, we then apply stage two, which blends and adapts the synthetic image parts into the data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of IncogniMOT, we generate a fully de-identified version of the MOT17 pedestrian tracking dataset and analyze its application as training data for pedestrian re-identification, detection, and tracking models. Furthermore, we show how our data is able to narrow the synthetic-to-real performance gap in a privacy-conscious manner