Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.

Abstract: Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer death worldwide and its survival rate depends on the stage in which it is detected on hence the necessity for an early colon screening. There are several screening techniques but colonoscopy is still nowadays the gold standard, although it has some drawbacks such as the miss rate. Our contribution, in the field of intelligent systems for colonoscopy, aims at providing a polyp localization and a polyp segmentation system based on a model of appearance for polyps. To develop both methods we define a model of appearance for polyps, which describes a polyp as enclosed by intensity valleys. The novelty of our contribution resides on the fact that we include in our model aspects of the image formation and we also consider the presence of other elements from the endoluminal scene such as specular highlights and blood vessels, which have an impact on the performance of our methods. In order to develop our polyp localization method we accumulate valley information in order to generate energy maps, which are also used to guide the polyp segmentation. Our methods achieve promising results in polyp localization and segmentation. As we want to explore the usability of our methods we present a comparative analysis between physicians fixations obtained via an eye tracking device and our polyp localization method. The results show that our method is indistinguishable to novice physicians although it is far from expert physicians.

Abstract: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third cause of cancer death world-wide. Currently, the standard approach to reduce CRC-related mortality is to perform regular screening in search for polyps and colonoscopy is the screening tool of choice. The main limitations of this screening procedure are polyp miss- rate and inability to perform visual assessment of polyp malignancy. These drawbacks can be reduced by designing Decision Support Systems (DSS) aim- ing to help clinicians in the different stages of the procedure by providing endoluminal scene segmentation. Thus, in this paper, we introduce an extended benchmark of colonoscopy image segmentation, with the hope of establishing a new strong benchmark for colonoscopy image analysis research. The proposed dataset consists of 4 relevant classes to inspect the endolumninal scene, tar- geting different clinical needs. Together with the dataset and taking advantage of advances in semantic segmentation literature, we provide new baselines by training standard fully convolutional networks (FCN). We perform a compar- ative study to show that FCN significantly outperform, without any further post-processing, prior results in endoluminal scene segmentation, especially with respect to polyp segmentation and localization.