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G.Thorvaldsen, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, T.Andersen, L.Eikvil, Josep Llados, Alicia Fornes, et al. (2015). A Tale of two Transcriptions. Historical Life Course Studies, 1–19.
Abstract: non-indexed
This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world’s longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project “Five Centuries of Marriages” (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources.
Keywords: Nominative Sources; Census; Vital Records; Computer Vision; Optical Character Recognition; Word Spotting
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). DA-DPM Pedestrian Detection. In ICCV Workshop on Reconstruction meets Recognition.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Gabriel Villalonga, Sebastian Ramos, German Ros, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). 3d Pedestrian Detection via Random Forest.
Abstract: Our demo focuses on showing the extraordinary performance of our novel 3D pedestrian detector along with its simplicity and real-time capabilities. This detector has been designed for autonomous driving applications, but it can also be applied in other scenarios that cover both outdoor and indoor applications.
Our pedestrian detector is based on the combination of a random forest classifier with HOG-LBP features and the inclusion of a preprocessing stage based on 3D scene information in order to precisely determinate the image regions where the detector should search for pedestrians. This approach ends up in a high accurate system that runs real-time as it is required by many computer vision and robotics applications.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection
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Antonio Clavelli. (2014). A computational model of eye guidance, searching for text in real scene images (Dimosthenis Karatzas, Giuseppe Boccignone, & Josep Llados, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Searching for text objects in real scene images is an open problem and a very active computer vision research area. A large number of methods have been proposed tackling the text search as extension of the ones from the document analysis field or inspired by general purpose object detection methods. However the general problem of object search in real scene images remains an extremely challenging problem due to the huge variability in object appearance. This thesis builds on top of the most recent findings in the visual attention literature presenting a novel computational model of eye guidance aiming to better describe text object search in real scene images.
First are presented the relevant state-of-the-art results from the visual attention literature regarding eye movements and visual search. Relevant models of attention are discussed and integrated with recent observations on the role of top-down constraints and the emerging need for a layered model of attention in which saliency is not the only factor guiding attention. Visual attention is then explained by the interaction of several modulating factors, such as objects, value, plans and saliency. Then we introduce our probabilistic formulation of attention deployment in real scene. The model is based on the rationale that oculomotor control depends on two interacting but distinct processes: an attentional process that assigns value to the sources of information and motor process that flexibly links information with action.
In such framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the reward of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects.
In the experimental section the model is tested in laboratory condition, comparing model simulations with data from eye tracking experiments. The comparison is qualitative in terms of observable scan paths and quantitative in terms of statistical similarity of gaze shift amplitude. Experiments are performed using eye tracking data from both a publicly available dataset of face and text and from newly performed eye-tracking experiments on a dataset of street view pictures containing text. The last part of this thesis is dedicated to study the extent to which the proposed model can account for human eye movements in a low constrained setting. We used a mobile eye tracking device and an ad-hoc developed methodology to compare model simulated eye data with the human eye data from mobile eye tracking recordings. Such setting allow to test the model in an incomplete visual information condition, reproducing a close to real-life search task.
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Jon Almazan. (2014). Learning to Represent Handwritten Shapes and Words for Matching and Recognition (Ernest Valveny, & Alicia Fornes, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and for centuries, handwriting had been the most reliable way to preserve knowledge. However, despite the recent development of printing houses and electronic devices, handwriting is still broadly used for taking notes, doing annotations, or sketching ideas.
Transferring the ability of understanding handwritten text or recognizing handwritten shapes to computers has been the goal of many researches due to its huge importance for many different fields. However, designing good representations to deal with handwritten shapes, e.g. symbols or words, is a very challenging problem due to the large variability of these kinds of shapes. One of the consequences of working with handwritten shapes is that we need representations to be robust, i.e., able to adapt to large intra-class variability. We need representations to be discriminative, i.e., able to learn what are the differences between classes. And, we need representations to be efficient, i.e., able to be rapidly computed and compared. Unfortunately, current techniques of handwritten shape representation for matching and recognition do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of learning to represent handwritten shapes aimed at retrieval and recognition tasks. Concretely, on the first part of the thesis, we focus on the general problem of representing any kind of handwritten shape. We first present a novel shape descriptor based on a deformable grid that deals with large deformations by adapting to the shape and where the cells of the grid can be used to extract different features. Then, we propose to use this descriptor to learn statistical models, based on the Active Appearance Model, that jointly learns the variability in structure and texture of a given class. Then, on the second part, we focus on a concrete application, the problem of representing handwritten words, for the tasks of word spotting, where the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images, and recognition. First, we address the segmentation-free problem and propose an unsupervised, sliding-window-based approach that achieves state-of- the-art results in two public datasets. Second, we address the more challenging multi-writer problem, where the variability in words exponentially increases. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace, and where those that represent the same word are close together. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. This leads to a low-dimensional, unified representation of word images and strings, resulting in a method that allows one to perform either image and text searches, as well as image transcription, in a unified framework. We evaluate our methods on different public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
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David Fernandez. (2014). Contextual Word Spotting in Historical Handwritten Documents (Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: There are countless collections of historical documents in archives and libraries that contain plenty of valuable information for historians and researchers. The extraction of this information has become a central task among the Document Analysis researches and practitioners.
There is an increasing interest to digital preserve and provide access to these kind of documents. But only the digitalization is not enough for the researchers. The extraction and/or indexation of information of this documents has had an increased interest among researchers. In many cases, and in particular in historical manuscripts, the full transcription of these documents is extremely dicult due the inherent deciencies: poor physical preservation, dierent writing styles, obsolete languages, etc. Word spotting has become a popular an ecient alternative to full transcription. It inherently involves a high level of degradation in the images. The search of words is holistically
formulated as a visual search of a given query shape in a larger image, instead of recognising the input text and searching the query word with an ascii string comparison. But the performance of classical word spotting approaches depend on the degradation level of the images being unacceptable in many cases . In this thesis we have proposed a novel paradigm called contextual word spotting method that uses the contextual/semantic information to achieve acceptable results whereas classical word spotting does not reach. The contextual word spotting framework proposed in this thesis is a segmentation-based word spotting approach, so an ecient word segmentation is needed. Historical handwritten
documents present some common diculties that can increase the diculties the extraction of the words. We have proposed a line segmentation approach that formulates the problem as nding the central part path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A path nding algorithm is used to nd the optimal path in a graph, previously computed, between the text lines. Once the text lines are extracted, words are localized inside the text lines using a word segmentation technique from the state of the
art. Classical word spotting approaches can be improved using the contextual information of the documents. We have introduced a new framework, oriented to handwritten documents that present a highly structure, to extract information making use of context. The framework is an ecient tool for semi-automatic transcription that uses the contextual information to achieve better results than classical word spotting approaches. The contextual information is
automatically discovered by recognizing repetitive structures and categorizing all the words according to semantic classes. The most frequent words in each semantic cluster are extracted and the same text is used to transcribe all them. The experimental results achieved in this thesis outperform classical word spotting approaches demonstrating the suitability of the proposed ensemble architecture for spotting words in historical handwritten documents using contextual information.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras. (2014). Relational Models for Visual Understanding of Graphical Documents. Application to Architectural Drawings. (Gemma Sanchez, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Graphical documents express complex concepts using a visual language. This language consists of a vocabulary (symbols) and a syntax (structural relations between symbols) that articulate a semantic meaning in a certain context. Therefore, the automatic interpretation by computers of these sort of documents entails three main steps: the detection of the symbols, the extraction of the structural relations between these symbols, and the modeling of the knowledge that permits the extraction of the semantics. Dierent domains in graphical documents include: architectural and engineering drawings, maps, owcharts, etc.
Graphics Recognition in particular and Document Image Analysis in general are
born from the industrial need of interpreting a massive amount of digitalized documents after the emergence of the scanner. Although many years have passed, the graphical document understanding problem still seems to be far from being solved. The main reason is that the vast majority of the systems in the literature focus on very specic problems, where the domain of the document dictates the implementation of the interpretation. As a result, it is dicult to reuse these strategies on dierent data and on dierent contexts, hindering thus the natural progress in the eld.
In this thesis, we face the graphical document understanding problem by proposing several relational models at dierent levels that are designed from a generic perspective. Firstly, we introduce three dierent strategies for the detection of symbols. The first method tackles the problem structurally, wherein general knowledge of the domain guides the detection. The second is a statistical method that learns the graphical appearance of the symbols and easily adapts to the big variability of the problem. The third method is a combination of the previous two methods that inherits their respective strengths, i.e. copes the big variability and does not need annotated data. Secondly, we present two relational strategies that tackle the problem of the visual context extraction. The first one is a full bottom up method that heuristically searches in a graph representation the contextual relations between symbols. Contrarily, the second is syntactic method that models probabilistically the structure of the documents. It automatically learns the model, which guides the inference algorithm to encounter the best structural representation for a given input. Finally, we construct a knowledge-based model consisting of an ontological denition of the domain and real data. This model permits to perform contextual reasoning and to detect semantic inconsistencies within the data. We evaluate the suitability of the proposed contributions in the framework of floor plan interpretation. Since there is no standard in the modeling of these documents there exists an enormous notation variability from plan to plan in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Therefore, floor plan interpretation is a relevant task in the graphical document understanding problem. It is also worth to mention that we make freely available all the resources used in this thesis {the data, the tool used to generate the data, and the evaluation scripts{ with the aim of fostering research in the graphical document understanding task.
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Carles Sanchez. (2014). Tracheal Structure Characterization using Geometric and Appearance Models for Efficient Assessment of Stenosis in Videobronchoscopy (F. Javier Sanchez, Debora Gil, & Jorge Bernal, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Recent advances in endoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures. Among all endoscopic modalities, bronchoscopy is one of the most frequent with around 261 millions of procedures per year. Although the use of bronchoscopy is spread among clinical facilities it presents some drawbacks, being the visual inspection for the assessment of anatomical measurements the most prevalent of them. In
particular, inaccuracies in the estimation of the degree of stenosis (the percentage of obstructed airway) decreases its diagnostic yield and might lead to erroneous treatments. An objective computation of tracheal stenosis in bronchoscopy videos would constitute a breakthrough for this non-invasive technique and a reduction in treatment cost.
This thesis settles the first steps towards on-line reliable extraction of anatomical information from videobronchoscopy for computation of objective measures. In particular, we focus on the computation of the degree of stenosis, which is obtained by comparing the area delimited by a healthy tracheal ring and the stenosed lumen. Reliable extraction of airway structures in interventional videobronchoscopy is a challenging task. This is mainly due to the large variety of acquisition conditions (positions and illumination), devices (different digitalizations) and in videos acquired at the operating room the unpredicted presence of surgical devices (such as probe ends). This thesis contributes to on-line stenosis assessment in several ways. We
propose a parametric strategy for the extraction of lumen and tracheal rings regions based on the characterization of their geometry and appearance that guide a deformable model. The geometric and appearance characterization is based on a physical model describing the way bronchoscopy images are obtained and includes local and global descriptions. In order to ensure a systematic applicability we present a statistical framework to select the optimal
parameters of our method. Experiments perform on the first public annotated database, show that the performance of our method is comparable to the one provided by clinicians and its computation time allows for a on-line implementation in the operating room.
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Antonio Hernandez. (2015). From pixels to gestures: learning visual representations for human analysis in color and depth data sequences (Sergio Escalera, & Stan Sclaroff, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The visual analysis of humans from images is an important topic of interest due to its relevance to many computer vision applications like pedestrian detection, monitoring and surveillance, human-computer interaction, e-health or content-based image retrieval, among others.
In this dissertation we are interested in learning different visual representations of the human body that are helpful for the visual analysis of humans in images and video sequences. To that end, we analyze both RGB and depth image modalities and address the problem from three different research lines, at different levels of abstraction; from pixels to gestures: human segmentation, human pose estimation and gesture recognition.
First, we show how binary segmentation (object vs. background) of the human body in image sequences is helpful to remove all the background clutter present in the scene. The presented method, based on Graph cuts optimization, enforces spatio-temporal consistency of the produced segmentation masks among consecutive frames. Secondly, we present a framework for multi-label segmentation for obtaining much more detailed segmentation masks: instead of just obtaining a binary representation separating the human body from the background, finer segmentation masks can be obtained separating the different body parts.
At a higher level of abstraction, we aim for a simpler yet descriptive representation of the human body. Human pose estimation methods usually rely on skeletal models of the human body, formed by segments (or rectangles) that represent the body limbs, appropriately connected following the kinematic constraints of the human body. In practice, such skeletal models must fulfill some constraints in order to allow for efficient inference, while actually limiting the expressiveness of the model. In order to cope with this, we introduce a top-down approach for predicting the position of the body parts in the model, using a mid-level part representation based on Poselets.
Finally, we propose a framework for gesture recognition based on the bag of visual words framework. We leverage the benefits of RGB and depth image modalities by combining modality-specific visual vocabularies in a late fusion fashion. A new rotation-variant depth descriptor is presented, yielding better results than other state-of-the-art descriptors. Moreover, spatio-temporal pyramids are used to encode rough spatial and temporal structure. In addition, we present a probabilistic reformulation of Dynamic Time Warping for gesture segmentation in video sequences. A Gaussian-based probabilistic model of a gesture is learnt, implicitly encoding possible deformations in both spatial and time domains.
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Hongxing Gao. (2015). Focused Structural Document Image Retrieval in Digital Mailroom Applications (Josep Llados, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Marçal Rusiñol, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: In this work, we develop a generic framework that is able to handle the document retrieval problem in various scenarios such as searching for full page matches or retrieving the counterparts for specific document areas, focusing on their structural similarity or letting their visual resemblance to play a dominant role. Based on the spatial indexing technique, we propose to search for matches of local key-region pairs carrying both structural and visual information from the collection while a scheme allowing to adjust the relative contribution of structural and visual similarity is presented.
Based on the fact that the structure of documents is tightly linked with the distance among their elements, we firstly introduce an efficient detector named Distance Transform based Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (DTMSER). We illustrate that this detector is able to efficiently extract the structure of a document image as a dendrogram (hierarchical tree) of multi-scale key-regions that roughly correspond to letters, words and paragraphs. We demonstrate that, without benefiting from the structure information, the key-regions extracted by the DTMSER algorithm achieve better results comparing with state-of-the-art methods while much less amount of key-regions are employed.
We subsequently propose a pair-wise Bag of Words (BoW) framework to efficiently embed the explicit structure extracted by the DTMSER algorithm. We represent each document as a list of key-region pairs that correspond to the edges in the dendrogram where inclusion relationship is encoded. By employing those structural key-region pairs as the pooling elements for generating the histogram of features, the proposed method is able to encode the explicit inclusion relations into a BoW representation. The experimental results illustrate that the pair-wise BoW, powered by the embedded structural information, achieves remarkable improvement over the conventional BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW methods.
To handle various retrieval scenarios in one framework, we propose to directly query a series of key-region pairs, carrying both structure and visual information, from the collection. We introduce the spatial indexing techniques to the document retrieval community to speed up the structural relationship computation for key-region pairs. We firstly test the proposed framework in a full page retrieval scenario where structurally similar matches are expected. In this case, the pair-wise querying method achieves notable improvement over the BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW frameworks. Furthermore, we illustrate that the proposed method is also able to handle focused retrieval situations where the queries are defined as a specific interesting partial areas of the images. We examine our method on two types of focused queries: structure-focused and exact queries. The experimental results show that, the proposed generic framework obtains nearly perfect precision on both types of focused queries while it is the first framework able to tackle structure-focused queries, setting a new state of the art in the field.
Besides, we introduce a line verification method to check the spatial consistency among the matched key-region pairs. We propose a computationally efficient version of line verification through a two step implementation. We first compute tentative localizations of the query and subsequently employ them to divide the matched key-region pairs into several groups, then line verification is performed within each group while more precise bounding boxes are computed. We demonstrate that, comparing with the standard approach (based on RANSAC), the line verification proposed generally achieves much higher recall with slight loss on precision on specific queries.
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Antonio Esteban Lansaque. (2014). 3D reconstruction and recognition using structured ligth (Vol. 179). Master's thesis, , .
Abstract: This work covers the problem of 3D reconstruction, recognition and 6DOF pose estimation. The goal of this project is to reconstruct a 3D scene and to align an object model of the industrial pieces onto the reconstructed scene. The reconstruction algorithm is based on stereo techniques and the recognition algorithm is based on SHOT descriptors computed on a set of uniform keypoints. Correspondences are used to estimate a first 6DOF transformation that maps the model onto the scene and then ICP algorithm is used to refine the transformation. In order to check the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, several experiments were performed. These experiments were conducted on a lab environment in order to get results under the same conditions in all of them. Although obtained results are not real time results, the proposed algorithm ends up with high rates of object recognition.
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Ricard Balague. (2014). Exploring the combination of color cues for intrinsic image decomposition (Vol. 178). Master's thesis, , .
Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.
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Sebastian Ramos. (2014). Vision-based Detection of Road Hazards for Autonomous Driving. Master's thesis, , .
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Alejandro Gonzalez Alzate, Gabriel Villalonga, German Ros, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2015). 3D-Guided Multiscale Sliding Window for Pedestrian Detection. In Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Proceedings of 7th Iberian Conference , ibPRIA 2015 (Vol. 9117, pp. 560–568).
Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection
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Joost Van de Weijer, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2015). An Overview of Color Name Applications in Computer Vision. In Computational Color Imaging Workshop.
Abstract: In this article we provide an overview of color name applications in computer vision. Color names are linguistic labels which humans use to communicate color. Computational color naming learns a mapping from pixels values to color names. In recent years color names have been applied to a wide variety of computer vision applications, including image classification, object recognition, texture classification, visual tracking and action recognition. Here we provide an overview of these results which show that in general color names outperform photometric invariants as a color representation.
Keywords: color features; color names; object recognition
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