F. Javier Sanchez, Jorge Bernal, Cristina Sanchez Montes, Cristina Rodriguez de Miguel, & Gloria Fernandez Esparrach. (2017). Bright spot regions segmentation and classification for specular highlights detection in colonoscopy videos. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, , 1–20.
Abstract: A novel specular highlights detection method in colonoscopy videos is presented. The method is based on a model of appearance de ning specular
highlights as bright spots which are highly contrasted with respect to adjacent regions. Our approach proposes two stages; segmentation, and then classi cation
of bright spot regions. The former de nes a set of candidate regions obtained through a region growing process with local maxima as initial region seeds. This process creates a tree structure which keeps track, at each growing iteration, of the region frontier contrast; nal regions provided depend on restrictions over contrast value. Non-specular regions are ltered through a classi cation stage performed by a linear SVM classi er using model-based features from each region. We introduce a new validation database with more than 25; 000 regions along with their corresponding pixel-wise annotations. We perform a comparative study against other approaches. Results show that our method is superior to other approaches, with our segmented regions being
closer to actual specular regions in the image. Finally, we also present how our methodology can also be used to obtain an accurate prediction of polyp histology.
Keywords: Specular highlights; bright spot regions segmentation; region classification; colonoscopy
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Alejandro Cartas, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2017). Batch-based activity recognition from egocentric photo-streams. In 1st International workshop on Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing.
Abstract: Activity recognition from long unstructured egocentric photo-streams has several applications in assistive technology such as health monitoring and frailty detection, just to name a few. However, one of its main technical challenges is to deal with the low frame rate of wearable photo-cameras, which causes abrupt appearance changes between consecutive frames. In consequence, important discriminatory low-level features from motion such as optical flow cannot be estimated. In this paper, we present a batch-driven approach for training a deep learning architecture that strongly rely on Long short-term units to tackle this problem. We propose two different implementations of the same approach that process a photo-stream sequence using batches of fixed size with the goal of capturing the temporal evolution of high-level features. The main difference between these implementations is that one explicitly models consecutive batches by overlapping them. Experimental results over a public dataset acquired by three users demonstrate the validity of the proposed architectures to exploit the temporal evolution of convolutional features over time without relying on event boundaries.
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Eirikur Agustsson, Radu Timofte, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Isabelle Guyon, & Rasmus Rothe. (2017). Apparent and real age estimation in still images with deep residual regressors on APPA-REAL database. In 12th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Abstract: After decades of research, the real (biological) age estimation from a single face image reached maturity thanks to the availability of large public face databases and impressive accuracies achieved by recently proposed methods.
The estimation of “apparent age” is a related task concerning the age perceived by human observers. Significant advances have been also made in this new research direction with the recent Looking At People challenges. In this paper we make several contributions to age estimation research. (i) We introduce APPA-REAL, a large face image database with both real and apparent age annotations. (ii) We study the relationship between real and apparent age. (iii) We develop a residual age regression method to further improve the performance. (iv) We show that real age estimation can be successfully tackled as an apparent age estimation followed by an apparent to real age residual regression. (v) We graphically reveal the facial regions on which the CNN focuses in order to perform apparent and real age estimation tasks.
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2017). Improved Recursive Geodesic Distance Computation for Edge Preserving Filter. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 26(8), 3696–3706.
Abstract: All known recursive filters based on the geodesic distance affinity are realized by two 1D recursions applied in two orthogonal directions of the image plane. The 2D extension of the filter is not valid and has theoretically drawbacks, which lead to known artifacts. In this paper, a maximum influence propagation method is proposed to approximate the 2D extension for the
geodesic distance-based recursive filter. The method allows to partially overcome the drawbacks of the 1D recursion approach. We show that our improved recursion better approximates the true geodesic distance filter, and the application of this improved filter for image denoising outperforms the existing recursive implementation of the geodesic distance. As an application,
we consider a geodesic distance-based filter for image denoising.
Experimental evaluation of our denoising method demonstrates comparable and for several test images better results, than stateof-the-art approaches, while our algorithm is considerably fasterwith computational complexity O(8P).
Keywords: Geodesic distance filter; color image filtering; image enhancement
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Simone Balocco, Francesco Ciompi, Juan Rigla, Xavier Carrillo, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2017). Intra-Coronary Stent localization In Intravascular Ultrasound Sequences, A Preliminary Study. In International workshop on Computing and Visualization for Intravascular Imaging and Computer Assisted Stenting (CVII-STENT). LNCS.
Abstract: An intraluminal coronary stent is a metal scaold deployed in a stenotic artery during Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI).
Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a catheter-based imaging technique generally used for assessing the correct placement of the stent. All the approaches proposed so far for the stent analysis only focused on the struts detection, while this paper proposes a novel approach to detect the boundaries and the position of the stent along the pullback.
The pipeline of the method requires the identi cation of the stable frames
of the sequence and the reliable detection of stent struts. Using this data,
a measure of likelihood for a frame to contain a stent is computed. Then,
a robust binary representation of the presence of the stent in the pullback
is obtained applying an iterative and multi-scale approximation of the signal to symbols using the SAX algorithm. Results obtained comparing the automatic results versus the manual annotation of two observers on 80 IVUS in-vivo sequences shows that the method approaches the inter-observer variability scores.
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2017). All the people around me: face clustering in egocentric photo streams. In 24th International Conference on Image Processing.
Abstract: arxiv1703.01790
Given an unconstrained stream of images captured by a wearable photo-camera (2fpm), we propose an unsupervised bottom-up approach for automatic clustering appearing faces into the individual identities present in these data. The problem is challenging since images are acquired under real world conditions; hence the visible appearance of the people in the images undergoes intensive variations. Our proposed pipeline consists of first arranging the photo-stream into events, later, localizing the appearance of multiple people in them, and
finally, grouping various appearances of the same person across different events. Experimental results performed on a dataset acquired by wearing a photo-camera during one month, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the considered purpose.
Keywords: face discovery; face clustering; deepmatching; bag-of-tracklets; egocentric photo-streams
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Umut Guclu, Yagmur Gucluturk, Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Jordi Gonzalez, et al. (2017). End-to-end semantic face segmentation with conditional random fields as convolutional, recurrent and adversarial networks.
Abstract: arXiv:1703.03305
Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of related yet distinct advances in semantic segmentation. Here, we tackle this problem by leveraging the respective strengths of these advances. That is, we formulate a conditional random field over a four-connected graph as end-to-end trainable convolutional and recurrent networks, and estimate them via an adversarial process. Importantly, our model learns not only unary potentials but also pairwise
potentials, while aggregating multi-scale contexts and controlling higher-order inconsistencies.
We evaluate our model on two standard benchmark datasets for semantic face segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results on both of them.
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Suman Ghosh, & Ernest Valveny. (2017). Visual attention models for scene text recognition. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.
Abstract: arXiv:1706.01487
In this paper we propose an approach to lexicon-free recognition of text in scene images. Our approach relies on a LSTM-based soft visual attention model learned from convolutional features. A set of feature vectors are derived from an intermediate convolutional layer corresponding to different areas of the image. This permits encoding of spatial information into the image representation. In this way, the framework is able to learn how to selectively focus on different parts of the image. At every time step the recognizer emits one character using a weighted combination of the convolutional feature vectors according to the learned attention model. Training can be done end-to-end using only word level annotations. In addition, we show that modifying the beam search algorithm by integrating an explicit language model leads to significantly better recognition results. We validate the performance of our approach on standard SVT and ICDAR'03 scene text datasets, showing state-of-the-art performance in unconstrained text recognition.
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Suman Ghosh, & Ernest Valveny. (2017). R-PHOC: Segmentation-Free Word Spotting using CNN. In 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.
Abstract: arXiv:1707.01294
This paper proposes a region based convolutional neural network for segmentation-free word spotting. Our network takes as input an image and a set of word candidate bound- ing boxes and embeds all bounding boxes into an embedding space, where word spotting can be casted as a simple nearest neighbour search between the query representation and each of the candidate bounding boxes. We make use of PHOC embedding as it has previously achieved significant success in segmentation- based word spotting. Word candidates are generated using a simple procedure based on grouping connected components using some spatial constraints. Experiments show that R-PHOC which operates on images directly can improve the current state-of- the-art in the standard GW dataset and performs as good as PHOCNET in some cases designed for segmentation based word spotting.
Keywords: Convolutional neural network; Image segmentation; Artificial neural network; Nearest neighbor search
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J. Chazalon, P. Gomez-Kramer, Jean-Christophe Burie, M.Coustaty, S.Eskenazi, Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman, et al. (2017). SmartDoc 2017 Video Capture: Mobile Document Acquisition in Video Mode. In 1st International Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis.
Abstract: As mobile document acquisition using smartphones is getting more and more common, along with the continuous improvement of mobile devices (both in terms of computing power and image quality), we can wonder to which extent mobile phones can replace desktop scanners. Modern applications can cope with perspective distortion and normalize the contrast of a document page captured with a smartphone, and in some cases like bottle labels or posters, smartphones even have the advantage of allowing the acquisition of non-flat or large documents. However, several cases remain hard to handle, such as reflective documents (identity cards, badges, glossy magazine cover, etc.) or large documents for which some regions require an important amount of detail. This paper introduces the SmartDoc 2017 benchmark (named “SmartDoc Video Capture”), which aims at
assessing whether capturing documents using the video mode of a smartphone could solve those issues. The task under evaluation is both a stitching and a reconstruction problem, as the user can move the device over different parts of the document to capture details or try to erase highlights. The material released consists of a dataset, an evaluation method and the associated tool, a sample method, and the tools required to extend the dataset. All the components are released publicly under very permissive licenses, and we particularly cared about maximizing the ease of
understanding, usage and improvement.
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Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, David Castells, & Jordi Carrabina. (2017). CYBERH: Cyber-Physical Systems in Health for Personalized Assistance. In International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing.
Abstract: Assistance systems for e-Health applications have some specific requirements that demand of new methods for data gathering, analysis and modeling able to deal with SmallData:
1) systems should dynamically collect data from, both, the environment and the user to issue personalized recommendations; 2) data analysis should be able to tackle a limited number of samples prone to include non-informative data and possibly evolving in time due to changes in patient condition; 3) algorithms should run in real time with possibly limited computational resources and fluctuant internet access.
Electronic medical devices (and CyberPhysical devices in general) can enhance the process of data gathering and analysis in several ways: (i) acquiring simultaneously multiple sensors data instead of single magnitudes (ii) filtering data; (iii) providing real-time implementations condition by isolating tasks in individual processors of multiprocessors Systems-on-chip (MPSoC) platforms and (iv) combining information through sensor fusion
techniques.
Our approach focus on both aspects of the complementary role of CyberPhysical devices and analysis of SmallData in the process of personalized models building for e-Health applications. In particular, we will address the design of Cyber-Physical Systems in Health for Personalized Assistance (CyberHealth) in two specific application cases: 1) A Smart Assisted Driving System (SADs) for dynamical assessment of the driving capabilities of Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) people; 2) An Intelligent Operating Room (iOR) for improving the yield of bronchoscopic interventions for in-vivo lung cancer diagnosis.
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Meysam Madadi. (2017). Human Segmentation, Pose Estimation and Applications (Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Automatic analyzing humans in photographs or videos has great potential applications in computer vision, including medical diagnosis, sports, entertainment, movie editing and surveillance, just to name a few. Body, face and hand are the most studied components of humans. Body has many variabilities in shape and clothing along with high degrees of freedom in pose. Face has many muscles causing many visible deformity, beside variable shape and hair style. Hand is a small object, moving fast and has high degrees of freedom. Adding human characteristics to all aforementioned variabilities makes human analysis quite a challenging task.
In this thesis, we developed human segmentation in different modalities. In a first scenario, we segmented human body and hand in depth images using example-based shape warping. We developed a shape descriptor based on shape context and class probabilities of shape regions to extract nearest neighbors. We then considered rigid affine alignment vs. nonrigid iterative shape warping. In a second scenario, we segmented face in RGB images using convolutional neural networks (CNN). We modeled conditional random field with recurrent neural networks. In our model pair-wise kernels are not fixed and learned during training. We trained the network end-to-end using adversarial networks which improved hair segmentation by a high margin.
We also worked on 3D hand pose estimation in depth images. In a generative approach, we fitted a finger model separately for each finger based on our example-based rigid hand segmentation. We minimized an energy function based on overlapping area, depth discrepancy and finger collisions. We also applied linear models in joint trajectory space to refine occluded joints based on visible joints error and invisible joints trajectory smoothness. In a CNN-based approach, we developed a tree-structure network to train specific features for each finger and fused them for global pose consistency. We also formulated physical and appearance constraints as loss functions.
Finally, we developed a number of applications consisting of human soft biometrics measurement and garment retexturing. We also generated some datasets in this thesis consisting of human segmentation, synthetic hand pose, garment retexturing and Italian gestures.
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Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu, Marc Perez, Hugo Jair Escalante, Xavier Baro, Isabelle Guyon, et al. (2017). Visualizing Apparent Personality Analysis with Deep Residual Networks. In Chalearn Workshop on Action, Gesture, and Emotion Recognition: Large Scale Multimodal Gesture Recognition and Real versus Fake expressed emotions at ICCV (pp. 3101–3109).
Abstract: Automatic prediction of personality traits is a subjective task that has recently received much attention. Specifically, automatic apparent personality trait prediction from multimodal data has emerged as a hot topic within the filed of computer vision and, more particularly, the so called “looking
at people” sub-field. Considering “apparent” personality traits as opposed to real ones considerably reduces the subjectivity of the task. The real world applications are encountered in a wide range of domains, including entertainment, health, human computer interaction, recruitment and security. Predictive models of personality traits are useful for individuals in many scenarios (e.g., preparing for job interviews, preparing for public speaking). However, these predictions in and of themselves might be deemed to be untrustworthy without human understandable supportive evidence. Through a series of experiments on a recently released benchmark dataset for automatic apparent personality trait prediction, this paper characterizes the audio and
visual information that is used by a state-of-the-art model while making its predictions, so as to provide such supportive evidence by explaining predictions made. Additionally, the paper describes a new web application, which gives feedback on apparent personality traits of its users by combining
model predictions with their explanations.
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Zhijie Fang, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2017). On-Board Detection of Pedestrian Intentions. SENS - Sensors, 17(10), 2193.
Abstract: Avoiding vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes is a critical requirement for nowadays advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) and future self-driving vehicles. Accordingly, detecting pedestrians from raw sensor data has a history of more than 15 years of research, with vision playing a central role.
During the last years, deep learning has boosted the accuracy of image-based pedestrian detectors.
However, detection is just the first step towards answering the core question, namely is the vehicle going to crash with a pedestrian provided preventive actions are not taken? Therefore, knowing as soon as possible if a detected pedestrian has the intention of crossing the road ahead of the vehicle is
essential for performing safe and comfortable maneuvers that prevent a crash. However, compared to pedestrian detection, there is relatively little literature on detecting pedestrian intentions. This paper aims to contribute along this line by presenting a new vision-based approach which analyzes the
pose of a pedestrian along several frames to determine if he or she is going to enter the road or not. We present experiments showing 750 ms of anticipation for pedestrians crossing the road, which at a typical urban driving speed of 50 km/h can provide 15 additional meters (compared to a pure pedestrian detector) for vehicle automatic reactions or to warn the driver. Moreover, in contrast with state-of-the-art methods, our approach is monocular, neither requiring stereo nor optical flow information.
Keywords: pedestrian intention; ADAS; self-driving
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, Sergio Escalera, Huamin Ren, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Elham Etemad. (2017). Locality Regularized Group Sparse Coding for Action Recognition. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 158, 106–114.
Abstract: Bag of visual words (BoVW) models are widely utilized in image/ video representation and recognition. The cornerstone of these models is the encoding stage, in which local features are decomposed over a codebook in order to obtain a representation of features. In this paper, we propose a new encoding algorithm by jointly encoding the set of local descriptors of each sample and considering the locality structure of descriptors. The proposed method takes advantages of locality coding such as its stability and robustness to noise in descriptors, as well as the strengths of the group coding strategy by taking into account the potential relation among descriptors of a sample. To efficiently implement our proposed method, we consider the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework, which results in quadratic complexity in the problem size. The method is employed for a challenging classification problem: action recognition by depth cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art on the considered datasets.
Keywords: Bag of words; Feature encoding; Locality constrained coding; Group sparse coding; Alternating direction method of multipliers; Action recognition
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