Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.

Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.

Abstract: The interpretation and analysis of wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) recordings is a complex task which requires sophisticated computer aided decision (CAD) systems to help physicians with video screening and, finally, with the diagnosis. Most CAD systems used in capsule endoscopy share a common system design, but use very different image and video representations. As a result, each time a new clinical application of WCE appears, a new CAD system has to be designed from the scratch. This makes the design of new CAD systems very time consuming. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a system for small intestine motility characterization, based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, which circumvents the laborious step of designing specific features for individual motility events. Experimental results show the superiority of the learned features over alternative classifiers constructed using state-of-the-art handcrafted features. In particular, it reaches a mean classification accuracy of 96% for six intestinal motility events, outperforming the other classifiers by a large margin (a 14% relative performance increase).