Abstract: Praxis test is a gesture-based diagnostic test which has been accepted as diagnostically indicative of cortical pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease. Despite being simple, this test is oftentimes skipped by the clinicians. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to investigate the potential of static and dynamic upper-body gestures based on the Praxis test and their potential in a medical framework to automatize the test procedures for computer-assisted cognitive assessment of older adults.
In order to carry out gesture recognition as well as correctness assessment of the performances we have recollected a novel challenging RGB-D gesture video dataset recorded by Kinect v2, which contains 29 specific gestures suggested by clinicians and recorded from both experts and patients performing the gesture set. Moreover, we propose a framework to learn the dynamics of upper-body gestures, considering the videos as sequences of short-term clips of gestures. Our approach first uses body part detection to extract image patches surrounding the hands and then, by means of a fine-tuned convolutional neural network (CNN) model, it learns deep hand features which are then linked to a long short-term memory to capture the temporal dependencies between video frames.
We report the results of four developed methods using different modalities. The experiments show effectiveness of our deep learning based approach in gesture recognition and performance assessment tasks. Satisfaction of clinicians from the assessment reports indicates the impact of framework corresponding to the diagnosis.

Abstract: All known recursive filters based on the geodesic distance affinity are realized by two 1D recursions applied in two orthogonal directions of the image plane. The 2D extension of the filter is not valid and has theoretically drawbacks, which lead to known artifacts. In this paper, a maximum influence propagation method is proposed to approximate the 2D extension for the
geodesic distance-based recursive filter. The method allows to partially overcome the drawbacks of the 1D recursion approach. We show that our improved recursion better approximates the true geodesic distance filter, and the application of this improved filter for image denoising outperforms the existing recursive implementation of the geodesic distance. As an application,
we consider a geodesic distance-based filter for image denoising.
Experimental evaluation of our denoising method demonstrates comparable and for several test images better results, than stateof-the-art approaches, while our algorithm is considerably fasterwith computational complexity O(8P).

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the standard belief propagation (BP) sequential technique proposed in the tree-reweighted sequential method [15] to the fully connected CRF models with the geodesic distance affinity. The proposed method has been applied to the stereo matching problem. Also a new approach to the BP marginal solution is proposed that we call one-view occlusion detection (OVOD). In contrast to the standard winner takes all (WTA) estimation, the proposed OVOD solution allows to find occluded regions in the disparity map and simultaneously improve the matching result. As a result we can perform only
one energy minimization process and avoid the cost calculation for the second view and the left-right check procedure. We show that the OVOD approach considerably improves results for cost augmentation and energy minimization techniques in comparison with the standard one-view affinity space implementation. We apply our method to the Middlebury data set and reach state-ofthe-art especially for median, average and mean squared error metrics.