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.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications. Most promising detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with annotated samples. However, the annotation step is a human intensive and subjective task worth to be minimized. By using virtual worlds we can automatically obtain precise and rich annotations. Thus, we face the question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in realistic virtual worlds work successfully for pedestrian detection in realworld images?. Conducted experiments show that virtual-world based training can provide excellent testing accuracy in real world, but it can also suffer the dataset shift problem as real-world based training does. Accordingly, we have designed a domain adaptation framework, V-AYLA, in which we have tested different techniques to collect a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combine them with the many examples of the source domain (virtual world) in order to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifier that will operate in the target domain. V-AYLA reports the same detection accuracy than when training with many human-provided pedestrian annotations and testing with real-world images of the same domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector.

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: Handbook of pattern recognition will include contributions from university educators and active research experts. This Handbook is intended to serve as a basic reference on methods and applications of pattern recognition. The primary aim of this handbook is providing the community of pattern recognition with a readable, easy to understand resource that covers introductory, intermediate and advanced topics with equal clarity. Therefore, the Handbook of pattern recognition can serve equally well as reference resource and as classroom textbook. Contributions cover all methods, techniques and applications of pattern recognition. A tentative list of relevant topics might include: 1- Statistical, structural, syntactic pattern recognition. 2- Neural networks, machine learning, data mining. 3- Discrete geometry, algebraic, graph-based techniques for pattern recognition. 4- Face recognition, Signal analysis, image coding and processing, shape and texture analysis. 5- Document processing, text and graphics recognition, digital libraries. 6- Speech recognition, music analysis, multimedia systems. 7- Natural language analysis, information retrieval. 8- Biometrics, biomedical pattern analysis and information systems. 9- Other scientific, engineering, social and economical applications of pattern recognition. 10- Special hardware architectures, software packages for pattern recognition.

Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest for different applications. The most promising human detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labelling is a manual intensive task, 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, in Marin et al. we 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 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 and the same type of scenario. Accordingly, in Vazquez et al. we cast the problem as one of supervised 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 use an active learning technique. Thus, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual- and real-world labelled samples which, to the best of our knowledge, was not done before. Here, we term such combined space cool world. In this extended abstract we summarize our proposal, and include quantitative results from Vazquez et al. showing its validity.