Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.

Abstract: A novel technique for rank estimation in 3D multibody motion segmentation is proposed. It is based on the study of the frequency spectra of moving rigid objects and does not use or assume a prior knowledge of the objects contained in the scene (i.e. number of objects and motion). The significance of rank estimation on multibody motion segmentation results is shown by using two motion segmentation algorithms over both synthetic and real data.

Abstract: We present a method for the cost estimation of custom hoses from CAD models. They can come in two formats, which are easy to generate: a STL file or the image of a CAD drawing showing several orthogonal projections. The challenges in either cases are, first, to obtain from them a high level 3D description of the shape, and second, to learn a regression function for the prediction of the manufacturing time, based on geometric features of the reconstructed shape. The chosen description is the 3D line along the medial axis of the tube and the diameter of the circular sections along it. In order to extract it from STL files, we have adapted RANSAC, a robust parametric fitting algorithm. As for CAD drawing images, we propose a new technique for 3D reconstruction from data entered on any number of orthogonal projections. The regression function is a Gaussian process, which does not constrain the function to adopt any specific form and is governed by just two parameters. We assess the accuracy of the manufacturing time estimation by k-fold cross validation on 171 STL file models for which the time is provided by an expert. The results show the feasibility of the method, whereby the relative error for 80% of the testing samples is below 15%.