Abstract: Digital libraries store images which can be highly degraded and to index this kind of images we resort to word spotting as our information retrieval system. Information retrieval for handwritten document images is more challenging due to the difficulties in complex layout analysis, large variations of writing styles, and degradation or low quality of historical manuscripts. This paper presents a simple innovative learning-free method for word spotting from large scale historical documents combining Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and spatial sampling. This method offers three advantages: firstly, it operates in completely learning free paradigm which is very different from unsupervised learning methods, secondly, the computational time is significantly low because of the LBP features, which are very fast to compute, and thirdly, the method can be used in scenarios where annotations are not available. Finally, we compare the results of our proposed retrieval method with other methods in the literature and we obtain the best results in the learning free paradigm.

Abstract: Automatic analysis of visual art, such as paintings, is a challenging inter-disciplinary research problem. Conventional approaches only rely on global scene characteristics by encoding holistic information for computational painting categorization.We argue that such approaches are sub-optimal and that discriminative common visual structures provide complementary information for painting classification. We present an approach that encodes both the global scene layout and discriminative latent common structures for computational painting categorization. The region of interests are automatically extracted, without any manual part labeling, by training class-specific deformable part-based models. Both holistic and region-of-interests are then described using multi-scale dense convolutional features. These features are pooled separately using Fisher vector encoding and concatenated afterwards in a single image representation. Experiments are performed on a challenging dataset with 91 different painters and 13 diverse painting styles. Our approach outperforms the standard method, which only employs the global scene characteristics. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming a recent multi-scale deep features based approach [11] by 6.4% and 3.8% respectively on artist and style classification.

Abstract: Part detection is an important aspect of object recognition. Most approaches apply object proposals to generate hundreds of possible part bounding box candidates which are then evaluated by part classifiers. Recently several methods have investigated directly regressing to a limited set of bounding boxes from deep neural network representation. However, for object parts such methods may be unfeasible due to their relatively small size with respect to the image. We propose a hierarchical method for object and part detection. In a single network we first detect the object and then regress to part location proposals based only on the feature representation inside the object. Experiments show that our hierarchical approach outperforms a network which directly regresses the part locations. We also show that our approach obtains part detection accuracy comparable or better than state-of-the-art on the CUB-200 bird and Fashionista clothing item datasets with only a fraction of the number of part proposals.

Abstract: Bronchoscopy biopsy can be used to diagnose lung cancer without risking complications of other interventions like transthoracic needle aspiration. During bronchoscopy, the clinician has to navigate through the bronchial tree to the target lesion. A main drawback is the difficulty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path. The usual guidance using fluoroscopy implies repeated radiation of the clinician, while alternative systems (like electromagnetic navigation) require specific equipment that increases intervention costs. We propose to compute the navigated path using anatomical landmarks extracted from the sole analysis of videobronchoscopy images. Such landmarks allow matching the current exploration to the path previously planned on a CT to indicate clinician whether the planning is being correctly followed or not. We present a feasibility study of our landmark based CT-video matching using bronchoscopic videos simulated on a virtual bronchoscopy interactive interface.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the detection of counterfeit photocopy banknotes. The main difficulty is to work on a real industrial scenario without any constraint about the acquisition device and with a single image. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: first the adaptation and performance evaluation of existing approaches to classify the genuine and photocopy banknotes using background texture printing analysis, which have not been applied into this context before. Second, a new dataset of Euro banknotes images acquired with several cameras under different luminance conditions to evaluate these methods. Experiments on the proposed algorithms show that mixing SIFT features and sparse coding dictionaries achieves quasi perfect classification using a linear SVM with the created dataset. Approaches using dictionaries to cover all possible texture variations have demonstrated to be robust and outperform the state-of-the-art methods using the proposed benchmark.

Abstract: We propose a real-time pedestrian detection system for the embedded Nvidia Tegra X1 GPU-CPU hybrid platform. The pipeline is composed by the following state-of-the-art algorithms: Histogram of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features extracted from the input image; Pyramidal Sliding Window technique for foreground segmentation; and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Results show a 8x speedup in the target Tegra X1 platform and a better performance/watt ratio than desktop CUDA platforms in study.