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.

This paper presents a novel feature point descriptor for the multispectral image case: Far-Infrared and Visible Spectrum images. It allows matching interest points on images of the same scene but acquired in different spectral bands. Initially, points of interest are detected on both images through a SIFT-like based scale space representation. Then, these points are characterized using an Edge Oriented Histogram (EOH) descriptor. Finally, points of interest from multispectral images are matched by finding nearest couples using the information from the descriptor. The provided experimental results and comparisons with similar methods show both the validity of the proposed approach as well as the improvements it offers with respect to the current state-of-the-art.

Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning. Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.

This paper presents an algorithm for large-scale automatic detection of burial mounds, one of the most common types of archaeological sites globally, using LiDAR and multispectral satellite data. Although previous attempts were able to detect a good proportion of the known mounds in a given area, they still presented high numbers of false positives and low precision values. Our proposed approach combines random forest for soil classification using multitemporal multispectral Sentinel-2 data and a deep learning model using YOLOv3 on LiDAR data previously pre-processed using a multi–scale relief model. The resulting algorithm significantly improves previous attempts with a detection rate of 89.5%, an average precision of 66.75%, a recall value of 0.64 and a precision of 0.97, which allowed, with a small set of training data, the detection of 10,527 burial mounds over an area of near 30,000 km², the largest in which such an approach has ever been applied. The open code and platforms employed to develop the algorithm allow this method to be applied anywhere LiDAR data or high-resolution digital terrain models are available.

This paper proposes an imaging system for computing sparse depth maps from multispectral images. A special stereo head consisting of an infrared and a color camera defines the proposed multimodal acquisition system. The cameras are rigidly attached so that their image planes are parallel. Details about the calibration and image rectification procedure are provided. Sparse disparity maps are obtained by the combined use of mutual information enriched with gradient information. The proposed approach is evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Furthermore, a multispectral dataset, color and infrared images, together with their corresponding ground truth disparity maps, is generated and used as a test bed. Experimental results in real outdoor scenarios are provided showing its viability and that the proposed approach is not restricted to a specific domain.