Abstract: Historical documents suffer from different types of degradation and noise such as background variation, uneven illumination or dark spots. In case of double-sided documents, another common problem is that the back side of the document usually interferes with the front side because of the transparency of the document or ink bleeding. This effect is called the show through phenomenon. Many methods are developed to solve these problems, and in the case of show-through, by scanning and matching both the front and back sides of the document. In contrast, our approach is designed to use only one side of the scanned document. We hypothesize that show-trough are low contrast components, while foreground components are high contrast ones. A Multiresolution Contrast (MC) decomposition is presented in order to estimate the contrast of features at different spatial scales. We cancel the show-through phenomenon by thresholding these low contrast components. This decomposition is also able to enhance the image removing shadowed areas by weighting spatial scales. Results show that the enhanced images improve the readability of the documents, allowing scholars both to recover unreadable words and to solve ambiguities.

Abstract: Human beings can become experts in performing specific vision tasks, for example, doctors analysing medical images, or botanists studying leaves. With sufficient knowledge and experience, people can become very efficient at such tasks. When attempting to perform these tasks with a machine vision system, it would be highly beneficial to be able to replicate the process which the expert undergoes. Advances in eye-tracking technology can provide data to allow us to discover the manner in which an expert studies an image. This paper presents a first step towards utilizing these data for computer vision purposes. A growing-neural-gas algorithm is used to learn a set of Gabor filters which give high responses to image regions which a human expert fixated on. These filters can then be used to identify regions in other images which are likely to be useful for a given vision task. The algorithm is evaluated by learning filters for locating specific areas of plant leaves.

Abstract: Humans can effortlessly perceive faces, follow them over space and time, and decode their rich content, such as pose, identity and expression. However, despite many decades of research on automatic facial perception in areas like face detection, expression recognition, pose estimation and face recognition, and despite many successes, a complete solution remains elusive. This thesis is dedicated to three problems in automatic face perception, namely face detection, face tracking and pose estimation.
In face detection, an initial simple model is presented that uses pixel-based heuristics to segment skin locations and hand-crafted rules to determine the locations of the faces present in an image. Different colorspaces are studied to judge whether a colorspace transformation can aid skin color detection. The output of this study is used in the design of a more complex face detector that is able to successfully generalize to different scenarios.
In face tracking, a framework that combines estimation and control in a joint scheme is presented to track a face with a single pan-tilt-zoom camera. While this work is mainly motivated by tracking faces, it can be easily applied atop of any detector to track different objects. The applicability of this method is demonstrated on simulated as well as real-life scenarios.
The last and most important part of this thesis is dedicate to monocular head pose estimation. In this part, a method based on partial least squares (PLS) regression is proposed to estimate pose and solve the alignment problem simultaneously. The contributions of this work are two-fold: 1) demonstrating that the proposed method achieves better than state-of-the-art results on the estimation problem and 2) developing a technique to reduce misalignment based on the learned PLS factors that outperform multiple instance learning (MIL) without the need for any re-training or the inclusion of misaligned samples in the training process, as normally done in MIL.

Abstract: In general, discretization in the motion vector domain yields an intractable number of labels. In this paper we propose an approach that can reduce general optical flow to the constrained matching problem by pre-estimating a 2D disparity labeling map of the desired discrete motion vector function. One of the goals of the proposed paper is estimating coarse distribution of motion vectors and then utilizing this distribution as global constraints for discrete optical flow estimation. This pre-estimation is done with a simple frame-to-frame correlation technique also known as the digital symmetric-phase-only-filter (SPOF). We discover a strong correlation between the output of the SPOF and the motion vector distribution of the related optical flow. The two step matching paradigm for optical flow estimation is applied: pixel accuracy (integer flow), and subpixel accuracy estimation. The matching problem is solved by global optimization. Experiments on the Middlebury optical flow datasets confirm our intuitive assumptions about strong correlation between motion vector distribution of optical flow and maximal peaks of SPOF outputs. The overall performance of the proposed method is promising and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Middlebury benchmark.

Abstract: In order to provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability for restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions.
This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoids degenerated medial axis segments. Second, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to syn- thetic shapes of known medial geometry. We also show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume.

Abstract: In the next forty years, the number of people living with dementia is expected to triple. In the last stages, people affected by this disease become dependent. This hinders the autonomy of the patient and has a huge social impact in time, money and effort. Given this scenario, we propose an ubiquitous system capable of recognizing daily specific actions. The system fuses and synchronizes data obtained from two complementary modalities – ambient and egocentric. The ambient approach consists in a fixed RGB-Depth camera for user and object recognition and user-object interaction, whereas the egocentric point of view is given by a personal area network (PAN) formed by a few wearable sensors and a smartphone, used for gesture recognition. The system processes multi-modal data in real-time, performing paralleled task recognition and modality synchronization, showing high performance recognizing subjects, objects, and interactions, showing its reliability to be applied in real case scenarios.

Abstract: In this article we provide an analysis of existing methods for the incorporation of color in bag-of-words based image representations. We propose a list of desired properties on which bases fusing methods can be compared. We discuss existing methods and indicate shortcomings of the two well-known fusing methods, namely early and late fusion. Several recent works have addressed these shortcomings by exploiting top-down information in the bag-of-words pipeline: color attention which is motivated from human vision, and Portmanteau vocabularies which are based on information theoretic compression of product vocabularies. We point out several remaining challenges in cue fusion and provide directions for future research.

Abstract: In this chapter we describe an application for efficient error-free labeling of medical images. In this scenario, the compilation of a complete training set for building a realistic model of a given class of samples is not an easy task, making the process tedious and time consuming. For this reason, there is a need for interactive labeling applications that minimize the effort of the user while providing error-free labeling. We propose a new algorithm that is based on data similarity in feature space. This method actively explores data in order to find the best label-aligned clustering and exploits it to reduce the labeler effort, that is measured by the number of “clicks. Moreover, error-free labeling is guaranteed by the fact that all data and their labels proposals are visually revised by en expert.