Abstract: Generally the bag-of-words based image representation follows a bottom-up paradigm. The subsequent stages of the process: feature detection, feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, combining multiple cues such as shape and color often provides below-expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using multiple cues by separating the shape and color cue. Color is used to guide attention by means of a top-down category-specific attention map. The color attention map is then further deployed to modulate the shape features by taking more features from regions within an image that are likely to contain an object instance. This procedure leads to a category-specific image histogram representation for each category. Furthermore, we argue that the method combines the advantages of both early and late fusion. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on three data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer ( color predominance), Flower (color and shape parity), and PASCAL VOC Challenge 2007 (shape predominance). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all three data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for combining color and shape information.

Abstract: Image matching has been a central research topic in computer vision over the last decades. Typical approaches to correspondence involve matching feature points between images. In this paper, we present a novel problem for establishing correspondences between a sparse set of image features and a previously learned subspace model. We formulate the matching task as an energy minimization, and jointly optimize over all possible feature assignments and parameters of the subspace model. This problem is in general NP-hard. We propose a convex relaxation approximation, and develop two optimization strategies: naïve gradient-descent and quadratic programming. Alternatively, we reformulate the optimization criterion as a sparse eigenvalue problem, and solve it using a recently proposed backward greedy algorithm. Experimental results on facial feature detection show that the quadratic programming solution provides better selection mechanism for relevant features.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate four graph distance measures. The analysis is performed for document retrieval tasks. For this aim, different kind of documents are used which include line drawings (symbols), ancient documents (ornamental letters), shapes and trademark-logos. The experimental results show that the performance of each grahp distance measure depends on the kind of data and the graph representation technique.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate four graph distance measures. The analysis is performed for document retrieval tasks. For this aim, different kind of documents are used including line drawings (symbols), ancient documents (ornamental letters), shapes and trademark-logos. The experimental results show that the performance of each graph distance measure depends on the kind of data and the graph representation technique.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a new approach to recognize symbols by the use of a concept lattice. We propose to build a concept lattice in terms of graphical patterns. Each model symbol is decomposed in a set of composing graphical patterns taken as primitives. Each one of these primitives is described by boundary moment invariants. The obtained concept lattice relates which symbolic patterns compose a given graphical symbol. A Hasse diagram is derived from the context and is used to recognize symbols affected by noise. We present some preliminary results over a variation of the dataset of symbols from the GREC 2005 symbol recognition contest.

Abstract: In this paper we present a pixel-level object categorization method suitable to be applied under real-time constraints. Since pixels are categorized using a bag of features scheme, the major bottleneck of such an approach would be the feature pooling in local histograms of visual words. Therefore, we propose to bypass this time-consuming step and directly obtain the score from a linear Support Vector Machine classifier. This is achieved by creating an integral image of the components of the SVM which can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 10 additions and 2 products, regardless of its size. Besides, we evaluated the performance of two efficient feature quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means and the Extremely Randomized Forest. All experiments have been done in the Graz02 database, showing comparable, or even better results to related work with a lower computational cost.

Abstract: The measure of lumen volume on radial arteries can be used to evaluate the vessel response to different vasodilators. In this paper, we present a framework for automatic lumen segmentation in longitudinal cut images of radial artery from Intravascular ultrasound sequences. The segmentation is tackled as a classification problem where the contextual information is exploited by means of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). A multi-class classification framework is proposed, and inference is achieved by combining binary CRFs according to the Error-Correcting-Output-Code technique. The results are validated against manually segmented sequences. Finally, the method is compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers.