Despite all the significant advances in pedestrian detection brought by computer vision for driving assistance, it is still a challenging problem. One reason is the extremely varying lighting conditions under which such a detector should operate, namely day and nighttime. Recent research has shown that the combination of visible and non-visible imaging modalities may increase detection accuracy, where the infrared spectrum plays a critical role. The goal of this paper is to assess the accuracy gain of different pedestrian models (holistic, part-based, patch-based) when training with images in the far infrared spectrum. Specifically, we want to compare detection accuracy on test images recorded at day and nighttime if trained (and tested) using (a) plain color images; (b) just infrared images; and (c) both of them. In order to obtain results for the last item, we propose an early fusion approach to combine features from both modalities. We base the evaluation on a new dataset that we have built for this purpose as well as on the publicly available KAIST multispectral dataset.

Ridges and valleys are useful geometric features for image analysis. Different characterizations have been proposed to formalize the intuitive notion of ridge/valley. In this paper, we review their principal characterizations and propose a new one. Subsequently, we evaluate these characterizations with respect to a list of desirable properties and their purpose in the context of representative image analysis tasks.

Hierarchical conditional random fields have been successfully applied to object segmentation. One reason is their ability to incorporate contextual information at different scales. However, these models do not allow multiple labels to be assigned to a single node. At higher scales in the image, this yields an oversimplified model, since multiple classes can be reasonable expected to appear within one region. This simplified model especially limits the impact that observations at larger scales may have on the CRF model. Neglecting the information at larger scales is undesirable since class-label estimates based on these scales are more reliable than at smaller, noisier scales. To address this problem, we propose a new potential, called harmony potential, which can encode any possible combination of class labels. We propose an effective sampling strategy that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Results show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging datasets: Pascal VOC 2009 and MSRC-21.

Co-segmentation is defined as jointly partitioning multiple images depicting the same or similar object, into foreground and background. Our method consists of a multiple-scale multiple-image generative model, which jointly estimates the foreground and background appearance distributions from several images, in a non-supervised manner. In contrast to other co-segmentation methods, our approach does not require the images to have similar foregrounds and different backgrounds to function properly. Region matching is applied to exploit inter-image information by establishing correspondences between the common objects that appear in the scene. Moreover, computing many-to-many associations of regions allow further applications, like recognition of object parts across images. We report results on iCoseg, a challenging dataset that presents extreme variability in camera viewpoint, illumination and object deformations and poses. We also show that our method is robust against large intra-class variability in the MSRC database.