Abstract: IF=1.77 (2010)
Social interactions are a very important component in peopleís lives. Social network analysis has become a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from multimodal dyadic interactions. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Timesí Blogging Heads opinion blog.
The Social Network is represented as an oriented graph, whose directed links are determined by the Influence Model. The linksí weights are a measure of the ìinfluenceî a person has over the other. The states of the Influence Model encode automatically extracted audio/visual features from our videos using state-of-the art algorithms. Our results are reported in terms of accuracy of audio/visual data fusion for speaker segmentation and centrality measures used to characterize the extracted social network.

Abstract: IF = 3.32
Many facial-analysis approaches rely on robust and accurate automatic facial landmarking to correctly function. In this paper, we describe a statistical method for automatic facial-landmark localization. Our landmarking relies on a parsimonious mixture model of Gabor wavelet features, computed in coarse-to-fine fashion and complemented with a shape prior. We assess the accuracy and the robustness of the proposed approach in extensive cross-database conditions conducted on four face data sets (Face Recognition Grand Challenge, Cohn-Kanade, Bosphorus, and BioID). Our method has 99.33% accuracy on the Bosphorus database and 97.62% accuracy on the BioID database on the average, which improves the state of the art. We show that the method is not significantly affected by low-resolution images, small rotations, facial expressions, and natural occlusions such as beard and mustache. We further test the goodness of the landmarks in a facial expression recognition application and report landmarking-induced improvement over baseline on two separate databases for video-based expression recognition (Cohn-Kanade and BU-4DFE).

Abstract: HPF is a plugin for the computation of clinical scores under Osirix.
This manual provides a basic guide for experienced clinical staff. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical background in which this plugin is based.
Next, in chapter 2 we provide basic instructions for installing and uninstalling this plugin. chapter 3we shows a step-by-step scenario to compute clinical scores from tagged-MRI images with HPF. Finally, in chapter 4 we provide a quick guide for plugin developers

Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%

Abstract: Graphs are the most powerful, expressive and convenient data structures but there is a lack of efficient computational tools and algorithms for processing them. The embedding of graphs into numeric vector spaces permits them to access the state-of-the-art computational efficient statistical models and tools. In this paper we take forward our work on explicit graph embedding and present an improvement to our earlier proposed method, named “fuzzy multilevel graph embedding – FMGE”, through feature selection technique. FMGE achieves the embedding of attributed graphs into low dimensional vector spaces by performing a multilevel analysis of graphs and extracting a set of global, structural and elementary level features. Feature selection permits FMGE to select the subset of most discriminating features and to discard the confusing ones for underlying graph dataset. Experimental results for graph classification experimentation on IAM letter, GREC and fingerprint graph databases, show improvement in the performance of FMGE.

Abstract: Graph embeddings in vector spaces aim at assigning a pattern vector to every graph so that the problems of graph classification and clustering can be solved by using data processing algorithms originally developed for statistical feature vectors. An important requirement graph features should fulfil is that they reproduce as much as possible the properties among objects in the graph domain. In particular, it is usually desired that distances between pairs of graphs in the graph domain closely resemble those between their corresponding vectorial representations. In this work, we analyse relations between the edit distance in the graph domain and the L1 distance of the attribute statistics based embedding, for which good classification performance has been reported on various datasets. We show that there is actually a high correlation between the two kinds of distances provided that the corresponding parameter values that account for balancing the weight between node and edge based features are properly selected.

Abstract: Feature matching is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision, having multiple applications such as tracking, image classification and retrieval, shape recognition and stereo fusion. In numerous domains, it is useful to represent the local structure of the matching features to increase the matching accuracy or to make the correspondence invariant to certain transformations (affine, homography, etc. . . ). However, encoding this knowledge requires complicating the model by establishing high-order relationships between the model elements, and therefore increasing the complexity of the optimization problem.
The importance of many-to-many matching is sometimes dismissed in the literature. Most methods are restricted to perform one-to-one matching, and are usually validated on synthetic, or non-realistic datasets. In a real challenging environment, with scale, pose and illumination variations of the object of interest, as well as the presence of occlusions, clutter, and noisy observations, many-to-many matching is necessary to achieve satisfactory results. As a consequence, finding the most likely many-to-many correspondence often involves a challenging combinatorial optimization process.
In this work, we design and demonstrate matching algorithms that compute many-to-many correspondences, applied to several challenging problems. Our goal is to make use of high-order representations to improve the expressive power of the matching, at the same time that we make feasible the process of inference or optimization of such models. We effectively use graphical models as our preferred representation because they provide an elegant probabilistic framework to tackle structured prediction problems.
We introduce a matching-based tracking algorithm which performs matching between frames of a video sequence in order to solve the difficult problem of headlight tracking at night-time. We also generalise this algorithm to solve the problem of data association applied to various tracking scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of such approach in real video sequences and we show that our tracking algorithm can be used to improve the accuracy of a headlight classification system.
In the second part of this work, we move from single (point) matching to dense (region) matching and we introduce a new hierarchical image representation. We make use of such model to develop a high-order many-to-many matching between pairs of images. We show that the use of high-order models in comparison to simpler models improves not only the accuracy of the results, but also the convergence speed of the inference algorithm.
Finally, we keep exploiting the idea of region matching to design a fully unsupervised image co-segmentation algorithm that is able to perform competitively with state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our method also overcomes the typical drawbacks of some of the past works, such as avoiding the necessity of variate appearances on the image backgrounds. The region matching in this case is applied to effectively exploit inter-image information. We also extend this work to perform co-segmentation of videos, being the first time that such problem is addressed, as a way to perform video object segmentation

Abstract: Facial trait judgments are an important information cue for people. Recent works in the Psychology field have stated the basis of face evaluation, defining a set of traits that we evaluate from faces (e.g. dominance, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, attractiveness, threatening or intelligence among others). We rapidly infer information from others faces, usually after a short period of time (< 1000ms) we perceive a certain degree of dominance or trustworthiness of another person from the face. Although these perceptions are not necessarily accurate, they influence many important social outcomes (such as the results of the elections or the court decisions). This topic has also attracted the attention of Computer Vision scientists, and recently a computational model to automatically predict trait evaluations from faces has been proposed. These systems try to mimic the human perception by means of applying machine learning classifiers to a set of labeled data. In this paper we perform an experimental study on the specific facial features that trigger the social inferences. Using previous results from the literature, we propose to use simple similarity maps to evaluate which regions of the face influence the most the trait inferences. The correlation analysis is performed using only appearance, and the results from the experiments suggest that each trait is correlated with specific facial characteristics.