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Author Francesco Ciompi; Oriol Pujol; Carlo Gatta; Oriol Rodriguez-Leor; J. Mauri; Petia Radeva
Title Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging Abbreviated Journal IJCI
Volume 26 Issue 7 Pages 763–779
Keywords
Abstract Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1569-5794 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes MILAB;HUPBA Approved no
Call Number BCNPCL @ bcnpcl @ CPG2010 Serial 1305
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Author Simone Balocco; O. Basset; G. Courbebaisse; E. Boni; Alejandro F. Frangi; P. Tortoli; C. Cachard
Title Estimation Of Viscoelastic Properties Of Vessel Walls Using a Computational Model and Doppler Ultrasound Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Physics in Medicine and Biology Abbreviated Journal PMB
Volume 55 Issue 12 Pages 3557–3575
Keywords
Abstract Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes MILAB Approved no
Call Number BCNPCL @ bcnpcl @ BBC2010 Serial 1312
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Author Simone Balocco; O. Camara; E. Vivas; T. Sola; L. Guimaraens; H. A. van Andel; C. B. Majoie; J. M. Pozo; B. H. Bijnens; Alejandro F. Frangi
Title Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Medical Physics Abbreviated Journal MEDPHYS
Volume 37 Issue 4 Pages 1689–1706
Keywords
Abstract PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior.
METHODS:
A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations.
RESULTS:
Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes MILAB Approved no
Call Number BCNPCL @ bcnpcl @ BCV2010 Serial 1313
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Author Simone Balocco; Carlo Gatta; Oriol Pujol; J. Mauri; Petia Radeva
Title SRBF: Speckle Reducing Bilateral Filtering Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology Abbreviated Journal UMB
Volume 36 Issue 8 Pages 1353-1363
Keywords
Abstract Speckle noise negatively affects medical ultrasound image shape interpretation and boundary detection. Speckle removal filters are widely used to selectively remove speckle noise without destroying important image features to enhance object boundaries. In this article, a fully automatic bilateral filter tailored to ultrasound images is proposed. The edge preservation property is obtained by embedding noise statistics in the filter framework. Consequently, the filter is able to tackle the multiplicative behavior modulating the smoothing strength with respect to local statistics. The in silico experiments clearly showed that the speckle reducing bilateral filter (SRBF) has superior performances to most of the state of the art filtering methods. The filter is tested on 50 in vivo US images and its influence on a segmentation task is quantified. The results using SRBF filtered data sets show a superior performance to using oriented anisotropic diffusion filtered images. This improvement is due to the adaptive support of SRBF and the embedded noise statistics, yielding a more homogeneous smoothing. SRBF results in a fully automatic, fast and flexible algorithm potentially suitable in wide ranges of speckle noise sizes, for different medical applications (IVUS, B-mode, 3-D matrix array US).
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes MILAB;HUPBA Approved no
Call Number BCNPCL @ bcnpcl @ BGP2010 Serial 1314
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Author Sergio Escalera; R. M. Martinez; Jordi Vitria; Petia Radeva; Maria Teresa Anguera
Title Deteccion automatica de la dominancia en conversaciones diadicas Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Escritos de Psicologia Abbreviated Journal EP
Volume 3 Issue 2 Pages 41–45
Keywords Dominance detection; Non-verbal communication; Visual features
Abstract Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1989-3809 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes HUPBA; OR; MILAB;MV Approved no
Call Number BCNPCL @ bcnpcl @ EMV2010 Serial 1315
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Author Wenjuan Gong; Andrew Bagdanov; Xavier Roca; Jordi Gonzalez
Title Automatic Key Pose Selection for 3D Human Action Recognition Type Conference Article
Year 2010 Publication 6th International Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects Abbreviated Journal
Volume 6169 Issue Pages 290–299
Keywords
Abstract This article describes a novel approach to the modeling of human actions in 3D. The method we propose is based on a “bag of poses” model that represents human actions as histograms of key-pose occurrences over the course of a video sequence. Actions are first represented as 3D poses using a sequence of 36 direction cosines corresponding to the angles 12 joints form with the world coordinate frame in an articulated human body model. These pose representations are then projected to three-dimensional, action-specific principal eigenspaces which we refer to as aSpaces. We introduce a method for key-pose selection based on a local-motion energy optimization criterion and we show that this method is more stable and more resistant to noisy data than other key-poses selection criteria for action recognition.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer Verlag Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0302-9743 ISBN 978-3-642-14060-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference AMDO
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number DAG @ dag @ GBR2010 Serial 1317
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Author Alicia Fornes; Josep Llados; Gemma Sanchez; Xavier Otazu; Horst Bunke
Title A Combination of Features for Symbol-Independent Writer Identification in Old Music Scores Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition Abbreviated Journal IJDAR
Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 243-259
Keywords
Abstract The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer-Verlag Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1433-2833 ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; CAT;CIC Approved no
Call Number FLS2010b Serial 1319
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Author Susana Alvarez; Anna Salvatella; Maria Vanrell; Xavier Otazu
Title 3D Texton Spaces for color-texture retrieval Type Conference Article
Year 2010 Publication 7th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition Abbreviated Journal
Volume 6111 Issue Pages 354–363
Keywords
Abstract Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer Berlin Heidelberg Place of Publication Editor A.C. Campilho and M.S. Kamel
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0302-9743 ISBN 978-3-642-13771-6 Medium
Area Expedition Conference ICIAR
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number CAT @ cat @ ASV2010a Serial 1325
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Author C. Alejandro Parraga; Robert Benavente; Maria Vanrell
Title Towards a general model of colour categorization which considers context Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Perception. ECVP Abstract Supplement Abbreviated Journal PER
Volume 39 Issue Pages 86
Keywords
Abstract In two previous experiments [Parraga et al, 2009 J. of Im. Sci. and Tech 53(3) 031106; Benavente et al,2009 Perception 38 ECVP Supplement, 36] the boundaries of basic colour categories were measured.
In the first experiment, samples were presented in isolation (ie on a dark background) and boundaries were measured using a yes/no paradigm. In the second, subjects adjusted the chromaticity of a sample presented on a random Mondrian background to find the boundary between pairs of adjacent colours.
Results from these experiments showed significant di erences but it was not possible to conclude whether this discrepancy was due to the absence/presence of a colourful background or to the di erences in the paradigms used. In this work, we settle this question by repeating the first experiment (ie samples presented on a dark background) using the second paradigm. A comparison of results shows that
although boundary locations are very similar, boundaries measured in context are significantly di erent(more di use) than those measured in isolation (confirmed by a Student’s t-test analysis on the subject’s answers statistical distributions). In addition, we completed the mapping of colour name space by measuring the boundaries between chromatic colours and the achromatic centre. With these results we
completed our parametric fuzzy-sets model of colour naming space.
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Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number CAT @ cat @ PBV2010b Serial 1326
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Author Ignasi Rius
Title Motion Priors for Efficient Bayesian Tracking in Human Sequence Evaluation Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Recovering human motion by visual analysis is a challenging computer vision research
area with a lot of potential applications. Model-based tracking approaches, and in
particular particle lters, formulate the problem as a Bayesian inference task whose
aim is to sequentially estimate the distribution of the parameters of a human body
model over time. These approaches strongly rely on good dynamical and observation
models to predict and update congurations of the human body according to measurements from the image data. However, it is very dicult to design observation
models which extract useful and reliable information from image sequences robustly.
This results specially challenging in monocular tracking given that only one viewpoint
from the scene is available. Therefore, to overcome these limitations strong motion
priors are needed to guide the exploration of the state space.
The work presented in this Thesis is aimed to retrieve the 3D motion parameters
of a human body model from incomplete and noisy measurements of a monocular
image sequence. These measurements consist of the 2D positions of a reduced set of
joints in the image plane. Towards this end, we present a novel action-specic model
of human motion which is trained from several databases of real motion-captured
performances of an action, and is used as a priori knowledge within a particle ltering
scheme.
Body postures are represented by means of a simple and compact stick gure
model which uses direction cosines to represent the direction of body limbs in the 3D
Cartesian space. Then, for a given action, Principal Component Analysis is applied to
the training data to perform dimensionality reduction over the highly correlated input
data. Before the learning stage of the action model, the input motion performances
are synchronized by means of a novel dense matching algorithm based on Dynamic
Programming. The algorithm synchronizes all the motion sequences of the same
action class, nding an optimal solution in real-time.
Then, a probabilistic action model is learnt, based on the synchronized motion
examples, which captures the variability and temporal evolution of full-body motion
within a specic action. In particular, for each action, the parameters learnt are: a
representative manifold for the action consisting of its mean performance, the standard deviation from the mean performance, the mean observed direction vectors from
each motion subsequence of a given length and the expected error at a given time
instant.
Subsequently, the action-specic model is used as a priori knowledge on human
motion which improves the eciency and robustness of the overall particle filtering tracking framework. First, the dynamic model guides the particles according to similar
situations previously learnt. Then, the state space is constrained so only feasible
human postures are accepted as valid solutions at each time step. As a result, the
state space is explored more eciently as the particle set covers the most probable
body postures.
Finally, experiments are carried out using test sequences from several motion
databases. Results point out that our tracker scheme is able to estimate the rough
3D conguration of a full-body model providing only the 2D positions of a reduced
set of joints. Separate tests on the sequence synchronization method and the subsequence probabilistic matching technique are also provided.
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-9-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Riu2010 Serial 1331
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Author Ivan Huerta
Title Foreground Object Segmentation and Shadow Detection for Video Sequences in Uncontrolled Environments Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract This Thesis is mainly divided in two parts. The first one presents a study of motion
segmentation problems. Based on this study, a novel algorithm for mobile-object
segmentation from a static background scene is also presented. This approach is
demonstrated robust and accurate under most of the common problems in motion
segmentation. The second one tackles the problem of shadows in depth. Firstly, a
bottom-up approach based on a chromatic shadow detector is presented to deal with
umbra shadows. Secondly, a top-down approach based on a tracking system has been
developed in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection.
In our first contribution, a case analysis of motion segmentation problems is presented by taking into account the problems associated with different cues, namely
colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is a hybrid architecture which
handles the main problems observed in such a case analysis, by fusing (i) the knowledge from these three cues and (ii) a temporal difference algorithm. On the one hand,
we enhance the colour and edge models to solve both global/local illumination changes
(shadows and highlights) and camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is
exploited to cope with a very challenging problem such as the camouflage in chroma.
On the other hand, the intensity cue is also applied when colour and edge cues are not
available, such as when beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference
is included to segment motion when these three cues are not available, such as that
background not visible during the training period. Lastly, the approach is enhanced
for allowing ghost detection. As a result, our approach obtains very accurate and robust motion segmentation in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, as quantitatively and
qualitatively demonstrated in the experimental results, by comparing our approach
with most best-known state-of-the-art approaches.
Motion Segmentation has to deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting
moving objects. Most segmentation approaches dealing with shadow detection are
typically restricted to penumbra shadows. Therefore, such techniques cannot cope
well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadows are usually detected as part
of moving objects.
Firstly, a bottom-up approach for detection and removal of chromatic moving
shadows in surveillance scenarios is proposed. Secondly, a top-down approach based
on kalman filters to detect and track shadows has been developed in order to enhance
the chromatic shadow detection. In the Bottom-up part, the shadow detection approach applies a novel technique based on gradient and colour models for separating
chromatic moving shadows from moving objects.
Well-known colour and gradient models are extended and improved into an invariant colour cone model and an invariant gradient model, respectively, to perform
automatic segmentation while detecting potential shadows. Hereafter, the regions corresponding to potential shadows are grouped by considering ”a bluish effect” and an
edge partitioning. Lastly, (i) temporal similarities between local gradient structures
and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are
analysed for all potential shadow regions in order to finally identify umbra shadows.
In the top-down process, after detection of objects and shadows both are tracked
using Kalman filters, in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection, when it
fails to detect a shadow. Firstly, this implies a data association between the blobs
(foreground and shadow) and Kalman filters. Secondly, an event analysis of the different data association cases is performed, and occlusion handling is managed by a
Probabilistic Appearance Model (PAM). Based on this association, temporal consistency is looked for the association between foregrounds and shadows and their
respective Kalman Filters. From this association several cases are studied, as a result
lost chromatic shadows are correctly detected. Finally, the tracking results are used
as feedback to improve the shadow and object detection.
Unlike other approaches, our method does not make any a-priori assumptions
about camera location, surface geometries, surface textures, shapes and types of
shadows, objects, and background. Experimental results show the performance and
accuracy of our approach in different shadowed materials and illumination conditions.
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-3-3 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number ISE @ ise @ Hue2010 Serial 1332
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Author Carles Fernandez
Title Understanding Image Sequences: the Role of Ontologies in Cognitive Vision Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The increasing ubiquitousness of digital information in our daily lives has positioned
video as a favored information vehicle, and given rise to an astonishing generation of
social media and surveillance footage. This raises a series of technological demands
for automatic video understanding and management, which together with the compromising attentional limitations of human operators, have motivated the research
community to guide its steps towards a better attainment of such capabilities. As
a result, current trends on cognitive vision promise to recognize complex events and
self-adapt to different environments, while managing and integrating several types of
knowledge. Future directions suggest to reinforce the multi-modal fusion of information sources and the communication with end-users.
In this thesis we tackle the problem of recognizing and describing meaningful
events in video sequences from different domains, and communicating the resulting
knowledge to end-users by means of advanced interfaces for human–computer interaction. This problem is addressed by designing the high-level modules of a cognitive
vision framework exploiting ontological knowledge. Ontologies allow us to define the
relevant concepts in a domain and the relationships among them; we prove that the
use of ontologies to organize, centralize, link, and reuse different types of knowledge
is a key factor in the materialization of our objectives.
The proposed framework contributes to: (i) automatically learn the characteristics
of different scenarios in a domain; (ii) reason about uncertain, incomplete, or vague
information from visual –camera’s– or linguistic –end-user’s– inputs; (iii) derive plausible interpretations of complex events from basic spatiotemporal developments; (iv)
facilitate natural interfaces that adapt to the needs of end-users, and allow them to
communicate efficiently with the system at different levels of interaction; and finally,
(v) find mechanisms to guide modeling processes, maintain and extend the resulting
models, and to exploit multimodal resources synergically to enhance the former tasks.
We describe a holistic methodology to achieve these goals. First, the use of prior
taxonomical knowledge is proved useful to guide MAP-MRF inference processes in
the automatic identification of semantic regions, with independence of a particular scenario. Towards the recognition of complex video events, we combine fuzzy
metric-temporal reasoning with SGTs, thus assessing high-level interpretations from
spatiotemporal data. Here, ontological resources like T–Boxes, onomasticons, or factual databases become useful to derive video indexing and retrieval capabilities, and
also to forward highlighted content to smart user interfaces. There, we explore the
application of ontologies to discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic principles, or scene augmentation techniques towards advanced communication by means of natural language dialogs and synthetic visualizations. Ontologies become fundamental to
coordinate, adapt, and reuse the different modules in the system.
The suitability of our ontological framework is demonstrated by a series of applications that especially benefit the field of smart video surveillance, viz. automatic generation of linguistic reports about the content of video sequences in multiple natural
languages; content-based filtering and summarization of these reports; dialogue-based
interfaces to query and browse video contents; automatic learning of semantic regions
in a scenario; and tools to evaluate the performance of components and models in the
system, via simulation and augmented reality.
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-2-6 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Fer2010a Serial 1333
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Author Joan Mas
Title A Syntactic Pattern Recognition Approach based on a Distribution Tolerant Adjacency Grammar and a Spatial Indexed Parser. Application to Sketched Document Recognition Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Sketch recognition is a discipline which has gained an increasing interest in the last
20 years. This is due to the appearance of new devices such as PDA, Tablet PC’s
or digital pen & paper protocols. From the wide range of sketched documents we
focus on those that represent structured documents such as: architectural floor-plans,
engineering drawing, UML diagrams, etc. To recognize and understand these kinds
of documents, first we have to recognize the different compounding symbols and then
we have to identify the relations between these elements. From the way that a sketch
is captured, there are two categories: on-line and off-line. On-line input modes refer
to draw directly on a PDA or a Tablet PC’s while off-line input modes refer to scan
a previously drawn sketch.
This thesis is an overlapping of three different areas on Computer Science: Pattern
Recognition, Document Analysis and Human-Computer Interaction. The aim of this
thesis is to interpret sketched documents independently on whether they are captured
on-line or off-line. For this reason, the proposed approach should contain the following
features. First, as we are working with sketches the elements present in our input
contain distortions. Second, as we would work in on-line or off-line input modes, the
order in the input of the primitives is indifferent. Finally, the proposed method should
be applied in real scenarios, its response time must be slow.
To interpret a sketched document we propose a syntactic approach. A syntactic
approach is composed of two correlated components: a grammar and a parser. The
grammar allows describing the different elements on the document as well as their
relations. The parser, given a document checks whether it belongs to the language
generated by the grammar or not. Thus, the grammar should be able to cope with
the distortions appearing on the instances of the elements. Moreover, it would be
necessary to define a symbol independently of the order of their primitives. Concerning to the parser when analyzing 2D sentences, it does not assume an order in the
primitives. Then, at each new primitive in the input, the parser searches among the
previous analyzed symbols candidates to produce a valid reduction.
Taking into account these features, we have proposed a grammar based on Adjacency Grammars. This kind of grammars defines their productions as a multiset
of symbols rather than a list. This allows describing a symbol without an order in
their components. To cope with distortion we have proposed a distortion model.
This distortion model is an attributed estimated over the constraints of the grammar and passed through the productions. This measure gives an idea on how far is the
symbol from its ideal model. In addition to the distortion on the constraints other
distortions appear when working with sketches. These distortions are: overtracing,
overlapping, gaps or spurious strokes. Some grammatical productions have been defined to cope with these errors. Concerning the recognition, we have proposed an
incremental parser with an indexation mechanism. Incremental parsers analyze the
input symbol by symbol given a response to the user when a primitive is analyzed.
This makes incremental parser suitable to work in on-line as well as off-line input
modes. The parser has been adapted with an indexation mechanism based on a spatial division. This indexation mechanism allows setting the primitives in the space
and reducing the search to a neighbourhood.
A third contribution is a grammatical inference algorithm. This method given a
set of symbols captures the production describing it. In the field of formal languages,
different approaches has been proposed but in the graphical domain not so much work
is done in this field. The proposed method is able to capture the production from
a set of symbol although they are drawn in different order. A matching step based
on the Haussdorff distance and the Hungarian method has been proposed to match
the primitives of the different symbols. In addition the proposed approach is able to
capture the variability in the parameters of the constraints.
From the experimental results, we may conclude that we have proposed a robust
approach to describe and recognize sketches. Moreover, the addition of new symbols
to the alphabet is not restricted to an expert. Finally, the proposed approach has
been used in two real scenarios obtaining a good performance.
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Gemma Sanchez;Josep Llados
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-4-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG Approved no
Call Number DAG @ dag @ Mas2010 Serial 1334
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Author Francisco Javier Orozco
Title Human Emotion Evaluation on Facial Image Sequences Type Book Whole
Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Psychological evidence has emphasized the importance of affective behaviour understanding due to its high impact in nowadays interaction humans and computers. All
type of affective and behavioural patterns such as gestures, emotions and mental
states are highly displayed through the face, head and body. Therefore, this thesis is
focused to analyse affective behaviours on head and face. To this end, head and facial
movements are encoded by using appearance based tracking methods. Specifically,
a wise combination of deformable models captures rigid and non-rigid movements of
different kinematics; 3D head pose, eyebrows, mouth, eyelids and irises are taken into
account as basis for extracting features from databases of video sequences. This approach combines the strengths of adaptive appearance models, optimization methods
and backtracking techniques.
For about thirty years, computer sciences have addressed the investigation on
human emotions to the automatic recognition of six prototypic emotions suggested
by Darwin and systematized by Paul Ekman in the seventies. The Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) which uses discrete movements of the face (called Action
units or AUs) to code the six facial emotions named anger, disgust, fear, happy-Joy,
sadness and surprise. However, human emotions are much complex patterns that
have not received the same attention from computer scientists.
Simon Baron-Cohen proposed a new taxonomy of emotions and mental states
without a system coding of the facial actions. These 426 affective behaviours are
more challenging for the understanding of human emotions. Beyond of classically
classifying the six basic facial expressions, more subtle gestures, facial actions and
spontaneous emotions are considered here. By assessing confidence on the recognition
results, exploring spatial and temporal relationships of the features, some methods are
combined and enhanced for developing new taxonomy of expressions and emotions.
The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computer vision system, including both facial feature extraction, expression recognition and emotion understanding
by building a bottom-up reasoning process. Building a detailed taxonomy of human
affective behaviours is an interesting challenge for head-face-based image analysis
methods. In this paper, we exploit the strengths of Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) to enhance an on-line head-face tracker. A relationship between head pose and
local facial movements is studied according to their cognitive interpretation on affective expressions and emotions. Active Shape Models are synthesized for AAMs based
on CCA-regression. Head pose and facial actions are fused into a maximally correlated space in order to assess expressiveness, confidence and classification in a CBR system. The CBR solutions are also correlated to the cognitive features, which allow
avoiding exhaustive search when recognizing new head-face features. Subsequently,
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayesian Networks are applied for learning the
spatial relationships of facial expressions. Similarly, the temporal evolution of facial
expressions, emotion and mental states are analysed based on Factorized Dynamic
Bayesian Networks (FaDBN).
As results, the bottom-up system recognizes six facial expressions, six basic emotions and six mental states, plus enhancing this categorization with confidence assessment at each level, intensity of expressions and a complete taxonomy
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Jordi Gonzalez;Xavier Roca
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-936529-3-7 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Oro2010 Serial 1335
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Author Joan Mas; Josep Llados; Gemma Sanchez; J.A. Jorge
Title A syntactic approach based on distortion-tolerant Adjacency Grammars and a spatial-directed parser to interpret sketched diagrams Type Journal Article
Year 2010 Publication Pattern Recognition Abbreviated Journal PR
Volume 43 Issue 12 Pages 4148–4164
Keywords Syntactic Pattern Recognition; Symbol recognition; Diagram understanding; Sketched diagrams; Adjacency Grammars; Incremental parsing; Spatial directed parsing
Abstract This paper presents a syntactic approach based on Adjacency Grammars (AG) for sketch diagram modeling and understanding. Diagrams are a combination of graphical symbols arranged according to a set of spatial rules defined by a visual language. AG describe visual shapes by productions defined in terms of terminal and non-terminal symbols (graphical primitives and subshapes), and a set functions describing the spatial arrangements between symbols. Our approach to sketch diagram understanding provides three main contributions. First, since AG are linear grammars, there is a need to define shapes and relations inherently bidimensional using a sequential formalism. Second, our parsing approach uses an indexing structure based on a spatial tessellation. This serves to reduce the search space when finding candidates to produce a valid reduction. This allows order-free parsing of 2D visual sentences while keeping combinatorial explosion in check. Third, working with sketches requires a distortion model to cope with the natural variations of hand drawn strokes. To this end we extended the basic grammar with a distortion measure modeled on the allowable variation on spatial constraints associated with grammar productions. Finally, the paper reports on an experimental framework an interactive system for sketch analysis. User tests performed on two real scenarios show that our approach is usable in interactive settings.
Address (down)
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Elsevier Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG Approved no
Call Number DAG @ dag @ MLS2010 Serial 1336
Permanent link to this record