Estefania Talavera

CV
h-index45
20papers
175citations
Novelty28%
AI Score35

20 Papers

CVJul 4, 2022
Crime scene classification from skeletal trajectory analysis in surveillance settings

Alina-Daniela Matei, Estefania Talavera, Maya Aghaei

Video anomaly analysis is a core task actively pursued in the field of computer vision, with applications extending to real-world crime detection in surveillance footage. In this work, we address the task of human-related crime classification. In our proposed approach, the human body in video frames, represented as skeletal joints trajectories, is used as the main source of exploration. First, we introduce the significance of extending the ground truth labels for HR-Crime dataset and hence, propose a supervised and unsupervised methodology to generate trajectory-level ground truth labels. Next, given the availability of the trajectory-level ground truth, we introduce a trajectory-based crime classification framework. Ablation studies are conducted with various architectures and feature fusion strategies for the representation of the human trajectories. The conducted experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the task and pave the path for further research in the field.

CVNov 11, 2025
WiCV at CVPR 2025: The Women in Computer Vision Workshop

Estefania Talavera, Deblina Bhattacharjee, Himangi Mittal et al.

The Women in Computer Vision Workshop (WiCV@CVPR 2025) was held in conjunction with the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2025) in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. This report presents an overview of the workshop program, participation statistics, mentorship outcomes, and historical trends from previous WiCV editions. The goal is to document the impact and evolution of WiCV as a reference for future editions and for other initiatives aimed at advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the AI and computer vision communities. WiCV@CVPR 2025 marked the 16th edition of this long-standing event dedicated to increasing the visibility, inclusion, and professional growth of women and underrepresented minorities in the computer vision community. This year's workshop featured 14 accepted papers in the CVPR Workshop Proceedings out of 32 full-paper submissions. Five of these were selected for oral presentations, while all 14 were also presented as posters, along with 36 extended abstract posters accepted from 62 short-paper submissions, which are not included in the proceedings. The mentoring program matched 80 mentees with 37 mentors from both academia and industry. The 2025 edition attracted over 100 onsite participants, fostering rich technical and networking interactions across all career stages. Supported by 10 sponsors and approximately $44,000 USD in travel grants and diversity awards, WiCV continued its mission to empower emerging researchers and amplify diverse voices in computer vision.

CVOct 8, 2025
DADO: A Depth-Attention framework for Object Discovery

Federico Gonzalez, Estefania Talavera, Petia Radeva

Unsupervised object discovery, the task of identifying and localizing objects in images without human-annotated labels, remains a significant challenge and a growing focus in computer vision. In this work, we introduce a novel model, DADO (Depth-Attention self-supervised technique for Discovering unseen Objects), which combines an attention mechanism and a depth model to identify potential objects in images. To address challenges such as noisy attention maps or complex scenes with varying depth planes, DADO employs dynamic weighting to adaptively emphasize attention or depth features based on the global characteristics of each image. We evaluated DADO on standard benchmarks, where it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in object discovery accuracy and robustness without the need for fine-tuning.

CVNov 3, 2024
WiCV@CVPR2024: The Thirteenth Women In Computer Vision Workshop at the Annual CVPR Conference

Asra Aslam, Sachini Herath, Ziqi Huang et al.

In this paper, we present the details of Women in Computer Vision Workshop - WiCV 2024, organized alongside the CVPR 2024 in Seattle, Washington, United States. WiCV aims to amplify the voices of underrepresented women in the computer vision community, fostering increased visibility in both academia and industry. We believe that such events play a vital role in addressing gender imbalances within the field. The annual WiCV@CVPR workshop offers a)~opportunity for collaboration between researchers from minority groups, b) mentorship for female junior researchers, c) financial support to presenters to alleviate financial burdens and d)~a diverse array of role models who can inspire younger researchers at the outset of their careers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive report on the workshop program, historical trends from the past WiCV@CVPR events, and a summary of statistics related to presenters, attendees, and sponsorship for the WiCV 2024 workshop.

CVDec 23, 2021
InstaIndoor and Multi-modal Deep Learning for Indoor Scene Recognition

Andreea Glavan, Estefania Talavera

Indoor scene recognition is a growing field with great potential for behaviour understanding, robot localization, and elderly monitoring, among others. In this study, we approach the task of scene recognition from a novel standpoint, using multi-modal learning and video data gathered from social media. The accessibility and variety of social media videos can provide realistic data for modern scene recognition techniques and applications. We propose a model based on fusion of transcribed speech to text and visual features, which is used for classification on a novel dataset of social media videos of indoor scenes named InstaIndoor. Our model achieves up to 70% accuracy and 0.7 F1-Score. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of our approach by benchmarking on a YouTube-8M subset of indoor scenes as well, where it achieves 74% accuracy and 0.74 F1-Score. We hope the contributions of this work pave the way to novel research in the challenging field of indoor scene recognition.

CVDec 28, 2020
Playing to distraction: towards a robust training of CNN classifiers through visual explanation techniques

David Morales, Estefania Talavera, Beatriz Remeseiro

The field of deep learning is evolving in different directions, with still the need for more efficient training strategies. In this work, we present a novel and robust training scheme that integrates visual explanation techniques in the learning process. Unlike the attention mechanisms that focus on the relevant parts of images, we aim to improve the robustness of the model by making it pay attention to other regions as well. Broadly speaking, the idea is to distract the classifier in the learning process to force it to focus not only on relevant regions but also on those that, a priori, are not so informative for the discrimination of the class. We tested the proposed approach by embedding it into the learning process of a convolutional neural network for the analysis and classification of two well-known datasets, namely Stanford cars and FGVC-Aircraft. Furthermore, we evaluated our model on a real-case scenario for the classification of egocentric images, allowing us to obtain relevant information about peoples' lifestyles. In particular, we work on the challenging EgoFoodPlaces dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results with a lower level of complexity. The obtained results indicate the suitability of our proposed training scheme for image classification, improving the robustness of the final model.

CVSep 16, 2020
Eating Habits Discovery in Egocentric Photo-streams

Estefania Talavera, Andreea Glavan, Alina Matei et al.

Eating habits are learned throughout the early stages of our lives. However, it is not easy to be aware of how our food-related routine affects our healthy living. In this work, we address the unsupervised discovery of nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. We build a food-related behavioural pattern discovery model, which discloses nutritional routines from the activities performed throughout the days. To do so, we rely on Dynamic-Time-Warping for the evaluation of similarity among the collected days. Within this framework, we present a simple, but robust and fast novel classification pipeline that outperforms the state-of-the-art on food-related image classification with a weighted accuracy and F-score of 70% and 63%, respectively. Later, we identify days composed of nutritional activities that do not describe the habits of the person as anomalies in the daily life of the user with the Isolation Forest method. Furthermore, we show an application for the identification of food-related scenes when the camera wearer eats in isolation. Results have shown the good performance of the proposed model and its relevance to visualize the nutritional habits of individuals.

CVAug 21, 2020
Behavioural pattern discovery from collections of egocentric photo-streams

Martin Menchon, Estefania Talavera, Jose M Massa et al.

The automatic discovery of behaviour is of high importance when aiming to assess and improve the quality of life of people. Egocentric images offer a rich and objective description of the daily life of the camera wearer. This work proposes a new method to identify a person's patterns of behaviour from collected egocentric photo-streams. Our model characterizes time-frames based on the context (place, activities and environment objects) that define the images composition. Based on the similarity among the time-frames that describe the collected days for a user, we propose a new unsupervised greedy method to discover the behavioural pattern set based on a novel semantic clustering approach. Moreover, we present a new score metric to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We validate our method on 104 days and more than 100k images extracted from 7 users. Results show that behavioural patterns can be discovered to characterize the routine of individuals and consequently their lifestyle.

CVJul 3, 2020
Deep learning for scene recognition from visual data: a survey

Alina Matei, Andreea Glavan, Estefania Talavera

The use of deep learning techniques has exploded during the last few years, resulting in a direct contribution to the field of artificial intelligence. This work aims to be a review of the state-of-the-art in scene recognition with deep learning models from visual data. Scene recognition is still an emerging field in computer vision, which has been addressed from a single image and dynamic image perspective. We first give an overview of available datasets for image and video scene recognition. Later, we describe ensemble techniques introduced by research papers in the field. Finally, we give some remarks on our findings and discuss what we consider challenges in the field and future lines of research. This paper aims to be a future guide for model selection for the task of scene recognition.

CVMay 10, 2019
Towards Emotion Retrieval in Egocentric PhotoStream

Estefania Talavera, Petia Radeva, Nicolai Petkov

The availability and use of egocentric data are rapidly increasing due to the growing use of wearable cameras. Our aim is to study the effect (positive, neutral or negative) of egocentric images or events on an observer. Given egocentric photostreams capturing the wearer's days, we propose a method that aims to assign sentiment to events extracted from egocentric photostreams. Such moments can be candidates to retrieve according to their possibility of representing a positive experience for the camera's wearer. The proposed approach obtained a classification accuracy of 75% on the test set, with a deviation of 8%. Our model makes a step forward opening the door to sentiment recognition in egocentric photostreams.

CVMay 10, 2019
Hierarchical approach to classify food scenes in egocentric photo-streams

Estefania Talavera, Maria Leyva-Vallina, Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker et al.

Recent studies have shown that the environment where people eat can affect their nutritional behaviour. In this work, we provide automatic tools for a personalised analysis of a person's health habits by the examination of daily recorded egocentric photo-streams. Specifically, we propose a new automatic approach for the classification of food-related environments, that is able to classify up to 15 such scenes. In this way, people can monitor the context around their food intake in order to get an objective insight into their daily eating routine. We propose a model that classifies food-related scenes organized in a semantic hierarchy. Additionally, we present and make available a new egocentric dataset composed of more than 33000 images recorded by a wearable camera, over which our proposed model has been tested. Our approach obtains an accuracy and F-score of 56\% and 65\%, respectively, clearly outperforming the baseline methods.

CVMay 10, 2019
Towards Unsupervised Familiar Scene Recognition in Egocentric Videos

Estefania Talavera, Nicolai Petkov, Petia Radeva

Nowadays, there is an upsurge of interest in using lifelogging devices. Such devices generate huge amounts of image data; consequently, the need for automatic methods for analyzing and summarizing these data is drastically increasing. We present a new method for familiar scene recognition in egocentric videos, based on background pattern detection through automatically configurable COSFIRE filters. We present some experiments over egocentric data acquired with the Narrative Clip.

CVMay 10, 2019
Unsupervised routine discovery in egocentric photo-streams

Estefania Talavera, Nicolai Petkov, Petia Radeva

The routine of a person is defined by the occurrence of activities throughout different days, and can directly affect the person's health. In this work, we address the recognition of routine related days. To do so, we rely on egocentric images, which are recorded by a wearable camera and allow to monitor the life of the user from a first-person view perspective. We propose an unsupervised model that identifies routine related days, following an outlier detection approach. We test the proposed framework over a total of 72 days in the form of photo-streams covering around 2 weeks of the life of 5 different camera wearers. Our model achieves an average of 76% Accuracy and 68% Weighted F-Score for all the users. Thus, we show that our framework is able to recognise routine related days and opens the door to the understanding of the behaviour of people.

CVMay 10, 2019
Towards Egocentric Person Re-identification and Social Pattern Analysis

Estefania Talavera, Alexandre Cola, Nicolai Petkov et al.

Wearable cameras capture a first-person view of the daily activities of the camera wearer, offering a visual diary of the user behaviour. Detection of the appearance of people the camera user interacts with for social interactions analysis is of high interest. Generally speaking, social events, lifestyle and health are highly correlated, but there is a lack of tools to monitor and analyse them. We consider that egocentric vision provides a tool to obtain information and understand users social interactions. We propose a model that enables us to evaluate and visualize social traits obtained by analysing social interactions appearance within egocentric photostreams. Given sets of egocentric images, we detect the appearance of faces within the days of the camera wearer, and rely on clustering algorithms to group their feature descriptors in order to re-identify persons. Recurrence of detected faces within photostreams allows us to shape an idea of the social pattern of behaviour of the user. We validated our model over several weeks recorded by different camera wearers. Our findings indicate that social profiles are potentially useful for social behaviour interpretation.

CVSep 2, 2018
On the Role of Event Boundaries in Egocentric Activity Recognition from Photostreams

Alejandro Cartas, Estefania Talavera, Petia Radeva et al.

Event boundaries play a crucial role as a pre-processing step for detection, localization, and recognition tasks of human activities in videos. Typically, although their intrinsic subjectiveness, temporal bounds are provided manually as input for training action recognition algorithms. However, their role for activity recognition in the domain of egocentric photostreams has been so far neglected. In this paper, we provide insights of how automatically computed boundaries can impact activity recognition results in the emerging domain of egocentric photostreams. Furthermore, we collected a new annotated dataset acquired by 15 people by a wearable photo-camera and we used it to show the generalization capabilities of several deep learning based architectures to unseen users.

CVAug 29, 2018
MACNet: Multi-scale Atrous Convolution Networks for Food Places Classification in Egocentric Photo-streams

Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Hatem A. Rashwan, Estefania Talavera et al.

First-person (wearable) camera continually captures unscripted interactions of the camera user with objects, people, and scenes reflecting his personal and relational tendencies. One of the preferences of people is their interaction with food events. The regulation of food intake and its duration has a great importance to protect against diseases. Consequently, this work aims to develop a smart model that is able to determine the recurrences of a person on food places during a day. This model is based on a deep end-to-end model for automatic food places recognition by analyzing egocentric photo-streams. In this paper, we apply multi-scale Atrous convolution networks to extract the key features related to food places of the input images. The proposed model is evaluated on an in-house private dataset called "EgoFoodPlaces". Experimental results shows promising results of food places classification recognition in egocentric photo-streams.

CVJul 27, 2017
Serious Games Application for Memory Training Using Egocentric Images

Gabriel Oliveira-Barra, Marc Bolaños, Estefania Talavera et al.

Mild cognitive impairment is the early stage of several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's. In this work, we address the use of lifelogging as a tool to obtain pictures from a patient's daily life from an egocentric point of view. We propose to use them in combination with serious games as a way to provide a non-pharmacological treatment to improve their quality of life. To do so, we introduce a novel computer vision technique that classifies rich and non rich egocentric images and uses them in serious games. We present results over a dataset composed by 10,997 images, recorded by 7 different users, achieving 79% of F1-score. Our model presents the first method used for automatic egocentric images selection applicable to serious games.

CVApr 10, 2017
R-Clustering for Egocentric Video Segmentation

Estefania Talavera, Mariella Dimiccoli, Marc Bolaños et al.

In this paper, we present a new method for egocentric video temporal segmentation based on integrating a statistical mean change detector and agglomerative clustering(AC) within an energy-minimization framework. Given the tendency of most AC methods to oversegment video sequences when clustering their frames, we combine the clustering with a concept drift detection technique (ADWIN) that has rigorous guarantee of performances. ADWIN serves as a statistical upper bound for the clustering-based video segmentation. We integrate both techniques in an energy-minimization framework that serves to disambiguate the decision of both techniques and to complete the segmentation taking into account the temporal continuity of video frames descriptors. We present experiments over egocentric sets of more than 13.000 images acquired with different wearable cameras, showing that our method outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods.

CVMar 29, 2017
Sentiment Recognition in Egocentric Photostreams

Estefania Talavera, Nicola Strisciuglio, Nicolai Petkov et al.

Lifelogging is a process of collecting rich source of information about daily life of people. In this paper, we introduce the problem of sentiment analysis in egocentric events focusing on the moments that compose the images recalling positive, neutral or negative feelings to the observer. We propose a method for the classification of the sentiments in egocentric pictures based on global and semantic image features extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks. We carried out experiments on an egocentric dataset, which we organized in 3 classes on the basis of the sentiment that is recalled to the user (positive, negative or neutral).

AIDec 22, 2015
SR-Clustering: Semantic Regularized Clustering for Egocentric Photo Streams Segmentation

Mariella Dimiccoli, Marc Bolaños, Estefania Talavera et al.

While wearable cameras are becoming increasingly popular, locating relevant information in large unstructured collections of egocentric images is still a tedious and time consuming processes. This paper addresses the problem of organizing egocentric photo streams acquired by a wearable camera into semantically meaningful segments. First, contextual and semantic information is extracted for each image by employing a Convolutional Neural Networks approach. Later, by integrating language processing, a vocabulary of concepts is defined in a semantic space. Finally, by exploiting the temporal coherence in photo streams, images which share contextual and semantic attributes are grouped together. The resulting temporal segmentation is particularly suited for further analysis, ranging from activity and event recognition to semantic indexing and summarization. Experiments over egocentric sets of nearly 17,000 images, show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.