Cédric Leblond-Ménard

Cedric Leblond-Menard, Gabriel Picard-Krashevski, Sofiane Achiche

Although the number of gaze estimation datasets is growing, the application of appearance-based gaze estimation methods is mostly limited to estimating the point of gaze on a screen. This is in part because most datasets are generated in a similar fashion, where the gaze target is on a screen close to camera's origin. In other applications such as assistive robotics or marketing research, the 3D point of gaze might not be close to the camera's origin, meaning models trained on current datasets do not generalize well to these tasks. We therefore suggest generating a textured tridimensional mesh of the face and rendering the training images from a virtual camera at a specific position and orientation related to the application as a mean of augmenting the existing datasets. In our tests, this lead to an average 47% decrease in gaze estimation angular error.

Dominique Beaini, Sofiane Achiche, Fabrice Nonez et al.

In computer vision, the gradient and Laplacian of an image are used in different applications, such as edge detection, feature extraction, and seamless image cloning. Computing the gradient of an image is straightforward since numerical derivatives are available in most computer vision toolboxes. However, the reverse problem is more difficult, since computing an image from its gradient requires to solve the Laplacian equation, also called Poisson equation. Current discrete methods are either slow or require heavy parallel computing. The objective of this paper is to present a novel fast and robust method of solving the image gradient or Laplacian with minimal error, which can be used for gradient domain editing. By using a single convolution based on a numerical Green's function, the whole process is faster and straightforward to implement with different computer vision libraries. It can also be optimized on a GPU using fast Fourier transforms and can easily be generalized for an n dimension image. The tests show that, for images of resolution 801x1200, the proposed GFC can solve 100 Laplacian in parallel in around 1.0 milliseconds ms. This is orders of magnitude faster than our nearest competitor which requires 294ms for a single image. Furthermore, we prove mathematically and demonstrate empirically that the proposed method is the least error solver for gradient domain editing. The developed method is also validated with examples of Poisson blending, gradient removal, and the proposed gradient domain merging GDM. Finally, we present how the GDM can be leveraged in future works for convolutional neural networks CNN.