Eduardo Tusa, Arash Akbarinia, Raquel Gil Rodriguez, & Corina Barbalata. (2015). Real-Time Face Detection and Tracking Utilising OpenMP and ROS. In 3rd Asia-Pacific Conference on Computer Aided System Engineering (pp. 179–184).
Abstract: The first requisite of a robot to succeed in social interactions is accurate human localisation, i.e. subject detection and tracking. Later, it is estimated whether an interaction partner seeks attention, for example by interpreting the position and orientation of the body. In computer vision, these cues usually are obtained in colour images, whose qualities are degraded in ill illuminated social scenes. In these scenarios depth sensors offer a richer representation. Therefore, it is important to combine colour and depth information. The
second aspect that plays a fundamental role in the acceptance of social robots is their real-time-ability. Processing colour and depth images is computationally demanding. To overcome this we propose a parallelisation strategy of face detection and tracking based on two different architectures: message passing and shared memory. Our results demonstrate high accuracy in
low computational time, processing nine times more number of frames in a parallel implementation. This provides a real-time social robot interaction.
Keywords: RGB-D; Kinect; Human Detection and Tracking; ROS; OpenMP
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M. Visani, V.C.Kieu, Alicia Fornes, & N.Journet. (2013). The ICDAR 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1439–1443).
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated both at staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario: old music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of images using two kinds of degradations: local noise and 3D distortions. This paper describes the dataset, distortion methods, evaluation metrics, the participant's methods and the obtained results.
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Alicia Fornes, V.C.Kieu, M. Visani, N.Journet, & Anjan Dutta. (2014). The ICDAR/GREC 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In B.Lamiroy, & J.-M. Ogier (Eds.), Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges (Vol. 8746, pp. 207–220). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.
Keywords: Competition; Graphics recognition; Music scores; Writer identification; Staff removal
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Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Augmenting Video Surveillance Footage with Virtual Agents for Incremental Event Evaluation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(6), 878–889.
Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.
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Souhail Bakkali, Sanket Biswas, Zuheng Ming, Mickael Coustaty, Marçal Rusiñol, Oriol Ramos Terrades, et al. (2023). TransferDoc: A Self-Supervised Transferable Document Representation Learning Model Unifying Vision and Language.
Abstract: The field of visual document understanding has witnessed a rapid growth in emerging challenges and powerful multi-modal strategies. However, they rely on an extensive amount of document data to learn their pretext objectives in a ``pre-train-then-fine-tune'' paradigm and thus, suffer a significant performance drop in real-world online industrial settings. One major reason is the over-reliance on OCR engines to extract local positional information within a document page. Therefore, this hinders the model's generalizability, flexibility and robustness due to the lack of capturing global information within a document image. We introduce TransferDoc, a cross-modal transformer-based architecture pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion using three novel pretext objectives. TransferDoc learns richer semantic concepts by unifying language and visual representations, which enables the production of more transferable models. Besides, two novel downstream tasks have been introduced for a ``closer-to-real'' industrial evaluation scenario where TransferDoc outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
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Antonio Clavelli, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2009). Text Segmentation in Colour Posters from the Spanish Civil War Era. In 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 181–185).
Abstract: The extraction of textual content from colour documents of a graphical nature is a complicated task. The text can be rendered in any colour, size and orientation while the existence of complex background graphics with repetitive patterns can make its localization and segmentation extremely difficult.
Here, we propose a new method for extracting textual content from such colour images that makes no assumption as to the size of the characters, their orientation or colour, while it is tolerant to characters that do not follow a straight baseline. We evaluate this method on a collection of documents with historical
connotations: the Posters from the Spanish Civil War.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo, Sebastian Sudholt, Alicia Fornes, Jordi Cucurull, A. Fink, & Josep Llados. (2016). Handwritten Word Image Categorization with Convolutional Neural Networks and Spatial Pyramid Pooling. In Joint IAPR International Workshops on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR) and Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR) (Vol. 10029, pp. 543–552). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: The extraction of relevant information from historical document collections is one of the key steps in order to make these documents available for access and searches. The usual approach combines transcription and grammars in order to extract semantically meaningful entities. In this paper, we describe a new method to obtain word categories directly from non-preprocessed handwritten word images. The method can be used to directly extract information, being an alternative to the transcription. Thus it can be used as a first step in any kind of syntactical analysis. The approach is based on Convolutional Neural Networks with a Spatial Pyramid Pooling layer to deal with the different shapes of the input images. We performed the experiments on a historical marriage record dataset, obtaining promising results.
Keywords: Document image analysis; Word image categorization; Convolutional neural networks; Named entity detection
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Pierdomenico Fiadino, Victor Ponce, Juan Antonio Torrero-Gonzalez, & Marc Torrent-Moreno. (2017). Call Detail Records for Human Mobility Studies: Taking Stock of the Situation in the “Always Connected Era". In Workshop on Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning for Data Communication Networks (pp. 43–48).
Abstract: The exploitation of cellular network data for studying human mobility has been a popular research topic in the last decade. Indeed, mobile terminals could be considered ubiquitous sensors that allow the observation of human movements on large scale without the need of relying on non-scalable techniques, such as surveys, or dedicated and expensive monitoring infrastructures. In particular, Call Detail Records (CDRs), collected by operators for billing purposes,
have been extensively employed due to their rather large availability, compared to other types of cellular data (e.g., signaling). Despite the interest aroused around this topic, the research community has generally agreed about the scarcity of information provided by CDRs: the position of mobile terminals is logged when some kind of activity (calls, SMS, data connections) occurs, which translates in a picture of mobility somehow biased by the activity degree of users.
By studying two datasets collected by a Nation-wide operator in 2014 and 2016, we show that the situation has drastically changed in terms of data volume and quality. The increase of flat data plans and the higher penetration of “
always connected” terminals have driven up the number of recorded CDRs, providing higher temporal accuracy for users’ locations.
Keywords: mobile networks; call detail records; human mobility
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Javier Vazquez, C. Alejandro Parraga, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2009). Color Constancy Algorithms: Psychophysical Evaluation on a New Dataset. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 53(3), 031105–9.
Abstract: The estimation of the illuminant of a scene from a digital image has been the goal of a large amount of research in computer vision. Color constancy algorithms have dealt with this problem by defining different heuristics to select a unique solution from within the feasible set. The performance of these algorithms has shown that there is still a long way to go to globally solve this problem as a preliminary step in computer vision. In general, performance evaluation has been done by comparing the angular error between the estimated chromaticity and the chromaticity of a canonical illuminant, which is highly dependent on the image dataset. Recently, some workers have used high-level constraints to estimate illuminants; in this case selection is based on increasing the performance on the subsequent steps of the systems. In this paper we propose a new performance measure, the perceptual angular error. It evaluates the performance of a color constancy algorithm according to the perceptual preferences of humans, or naturalness (instead of the actual optimal solution) and is independent of the visual task. We show the results of a new psychophysical experiment comparing solutions from three different color constancy algorithms. Our results show that in more than a half of the judgments the preferred solution is not the one closest to the optimal solution. Our experiments were performed on a new dataset of images acquired with a calibrated camera with an attached neutral grey sphere, which better copes with the illuminant variations of the scene.
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Raquel Justo, Leila Ben Letaifa, Cristina Palmero, Eduardo Gonzalez-Fraile, Anna Torp Johansen, Alain Vazquez, et al. (2020). Analysis of the Interaction between Elderly People and a Simulated Virtual Coach, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. AIHC - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 11(12), 6125–6140.
Abstract: The EMPATHIC project develops and validates new interaction paradigms for personalized virtual coaches (VC) to promote healthy and independent aging. To this end, the work presented in this paper is aimed to analyze the interaction between the EMPATHIC-VC and the users. One of the goals of the project is to ensure an end-user driven design, involving senior users from the beginning and during each phase of the project. Thus, the paper focuses on some sessions where the seniors carried out interactions with a Wizard of Oz driven, simulated system. A coaching strategy based on the GROW model was used throughout these sessions so as to guide interactions and engage the elderly with the goals of the project. In this interaction framework, both the human and the system behavior were analyzed. The way the wizard implements the GROW coaching strategy is a key aspect of the system behavior during the interaction. The language used by the virtual agent as well as his or her physical aspect are also important cues that were analyzed. Regarding the user behavior, the vocal communication provides information about the speaker’s emotional status, that is closely related to human behavior and which can be extracted from the speech and language analysis. In the same way, the analysis of the facial expression, gazes and gestures can provide information on the non verbal human communication even when the user is not talking. In addition, in order to engage senior users, their preferences and likes had to be considered. To this end, the effect of the VC on the users was gathered by means of direct questionnaires. These analyses have shown a positive and calm behavior of users when interacting with the simulated virtual coach as well as some difficulties of the system to develop the proposed coaching strategy.
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Adarsh Tiwari, Sanket Biswas, & Josep Llados. (2023). Can Pre-trained Language Models Help in Understanding Handwritten Symbols? In 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 14193, 199–211).
Abstract: The emergence of transformer models like BERT, GPT-2, GPT-3, RoBERTa, T5 for natural language understanding tasks has opened the floodgates towards solving a wide array of machine learning tasks in other modalities like images, audio, music, sketches and so on. These language models are domain-agnostic and as a result could be applied to 1-D sequences of any kind. However, the key challenge lies in bridging the modality gap so that they could generate strong features beneficial for out-of-domain tasks. This work focuses on leveraging the power of such pre-trained language models and discusses the challenges in predicting challenging handwritten symbols and alphabets.
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Gerard Canal, Cecilio Angulo, & Sergio Escalera. (2015). Gesture based Human Multi-Robot interaction. In IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IJCNN2015.
Abstract: The emergence of robot applications for nontechnical users implies designing new ways of interaction between robotic platforms and users. The main goal of this work is the development of a gestural interface to interact with robots
in a similar way as humans do, allowing the user to provide information of the task with non-verbal communication. The gesture recognition application has been implemented using the Microsoft’s KinectTM v2 sensor. Hence, a real-time algorithm based on skeletal features is described to deal with both, static
gestures and dynamic ones, being the latter recognized using a weighted Dynamic Time Warping method. The gesture recognition application has been implemented in a multi-robot case.
A NAO humanoid robot is in charge of interacting with the users and respond to the visual signals they produce. Moreover, a wheeled Wifibot robot carries both the sensor and the NAO robot, easing navigation when necessary. A broad set of user tests have been carried out demonstrating that the system is, indeed, a
natural approach to human robot interaction, with a fast response and easy to use, showing high gesture recognition rates.
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Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2020). Learning Graph Edit Distance by Graph NeuralNetworks.
Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words~\ie~keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.
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Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2021). Learning graph edit distance by graph neural networks. PR - Pattern Recognition, 120, 108132.
Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words i.e. keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.
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Victor M. Campello, Polyxeni Gkontra, Cristian Izquierdo, Carlos Martin-Isla, Alireza Sojoudi, Peter M. Full, et al. (2021). Multi-Centre, Multi-Vendor and Multi-Disease Cardiac Segmentation: The M&Ms Challenge. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 40(12), 3543–3554.
Abstract: The emergence of deep learning has considerably advanced the state-of-the-art in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) segmentation. Many techniques have been proposed over the last few years, bringing the accuracy of automated segmentation close to human performance. However, these models have been all too often trained and validated using cardiac imaging samples from single clinical centres or homogeneous imaging protocols. This has prevented the development and validation of models that are generalizable across different clinical centres, imaging conditions or scanner vendors. To promote further research and scientific benchmarking in the field of generalizable deep learning for cardiac segmentation, this paper presents the results of the Multi-Centre, Multi-Vendor and Multi-Disease Cardiac Segmentation (M&Ms) Challenge, which was recently organized as part of the MICCAI 2020 Conference. A total of 14 teams submitted different solutions to the problem, combining various baseline models, data augmentation strategies, and domain adaptation techniques. The obtained results indicate the importance of intensity-driven data augmentation, as well as the need for further research to improve generalizability towards unseen scanner vendors or new imaging protocols. Furthermore, we present a new resource of 375 heterogeneous CMR datasets acquired by using four different scanner vendors in six hospitals and three different countries (Spain, Canada and Germany), which we provide as open-access for the community to enable future research in the field.
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