Abstract: Detecting pedestrians with on-board vision systems is of paramount interest for assisting drivers to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. The core of a pedestrian detector is its classification module, which aims at deciding if a given image window contains a pedestrian. Given the difficulty of this task, many classifiers have been proposed during the last fifteen years. Among them, the so-called (deformable) part-based classifiers including multi-view modeling are usually top ranked in accuracy. Training such classifiers is not trivial since a proper aspect clustering and spatial part alignment of the pedestrian training samples are crucial for obtaining an accurate classifier. In this paper, first we perform automatic aspect clustering and part alignment by using virtual-world pedestrians, i.e., human annotations are not required. Second, we use a mixture-of-parts approach that allows part sharing among different aspects. Third, these proposals are integrated in a learning framework which also allows to incorporate real-world training data to perform domain adaptation between virtual- and real-world cameras. Overall, the obtained results on four popular on-board datasets show that our proposal clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art deformable part-based detector known as latent SVM.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications, e.g. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Intelligent Video Surveillance and Multimedia systems. Most promising pedestrian detectors rely on appearance-based classifiers trained with annotated data. However, the required annotation step represents an intensive and subjective task for humans, what makes worth to minimize their intervention in this process by using computational tools like realistic virtual worlds. The reason to use these kind of tools relies in the fact that they allow the automatic generation of precise and rich annotations of visual information. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of data comes with the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt with virtual-world data work successfully for pedestrian detection in real-world scenarios?. To answer this question, we conduct different experiments that suggest a positive answer. However, the pedestrian classifiers trained with virtual-world data can suffer the so called dataset shift problem as real-world based classifiers does. Accordingly, we have designed different domain adaptation techniques to face this problem, all of them integrated in a same framework (V-AYLA). We have explored different methods to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifiers by collecting a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combining them with many samples of the source domain (virtual world). The extensive experiments we present show that pedestrian detectors developed within the V-AYLA framework do achieve domain adaptation. Ideally, we would like to adapt our system without any human intervention. Therefore, as a first proof of concept we also propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that avoids human intervention during the adaptation process. To the best of our knowledge, this Thesis work is the first demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector. Last but not least, we also assessed a different strategy to avoid the dataset shift that consists in collecting real-world samples and retrain with them in such a way that no bounding boxes of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. We show that the generated classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating pedestrian bounding boxes. The results presented on this Thesis not only end with a proposal for adapting a virtual-world pedestrian detector to the real world, but also it goes further by pointing out a new methodology that would allow the system to adapt to different situations, which we hope will provide the foundations for future research in this unexplored area.

Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications in fields such as advanced driving assistance, surveillance and media analysis. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. The most promising human detectors rely on classifiers developed in the discriminative paradigm, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labeling is a manual intensive step, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, some authors have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of rendered images, i.e., using realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera, or similar ones. Accordingly, in this paper we address the challenge of using a virtual world for gathering (while playing a videogame) a large amount of automatically labelled samples (virtual humans and background) and then training a classifier that performs equal, in real-world images, than the one obtained by equally training from manually labelled real-world samples. For doing that, we cast the problem as one of domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labelled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labelled samples we propose a non-standard active learning technique. Therefore, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual and real world labelled samples (Fig. 1), which has not been done before. We present quantitative results showing that this approach is valid.

Abstract: Vision-based object detectors are crucial for different applications. They rely on learnt object models. Ideally, we would like to deploy our vision system in the scenario where it must operate, and lead it to self-learn how to distinguish the objects of interest, i.e., without human intervention. However, the learning of each object model requires labelled samples collected through a tiresome manual process. For instance, we are interested in exploring the self-training of a pedestrian detector for driver assistance systems. Our first approach to avoid manual labelling consisted in the use of samples coming from realistic computer graphics, so that their labels are automatically available [12]. This would make possible the desired self-training of our pedestrian detector. However, as we showed in [14], between virtual and real worlds it may be a dataset shift. In order to overcome it, we propose the use of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques that avoid human intervention during the adaptation process. In particular, this paper explores the use of the transductive SVM (T-SVM) learning algorithm in order to adapt virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection (Fig. 1).

Abstract: Supervised learning tends to produce more accurate classifiers than unsupervised learning in general. This implies that training data is preferred with annotations. When addressing visual perception challenges, such as localizing certain object classes within an image, the learning of the involved classifiers turns out to be a practical bottleneck. The reason is that, at least, we have to frame object examples with bounding boxes in thousands of images. A priori, the more complex the model is regarding its number of parameters, the more annotated examples are required. This annotation task is performed by human oracles, which ends up in inaccuracies and errors in the annotations (aka ground truth) since the task is inherently very cumbersome and sometimes ambiguous. As an alternative we have pioneered the use of virtual worlds for collecting such annotations automatically and with high precision. However, since the models learned with virtual data must operate in the real world, we still need to perform domain adaptation (DA). In this chapter we revisit the DA of a deformable part-based model (DPM) as an exemplifying case of virtual- to-real-world DA. As a use case, we address the challenge of vehicle detection for driver assistance, using different publicly available virtual-world data. While doing so, we investigate questions such as: how does the domain gap behave due to virtual-vs-real data with respect to dominant object appearance per domain, as well as the role of photo-realism in the virtual world.