Abstract: Three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) allows to visualize and obtain volumetric measurements of coronary lesions through an exploration of the cross sections and longitudinal views of arteries. However, the visualization and subsequent morpho-geometric measurements in IVUS longitudinal cuts are subject to distortion caused by periodic image/vessel motion around the IVUS catheter. Usually, to overcome the image motion artifact ECG-gating and image-gated approaches are proposed, leading to slowing the pullback acquisition or disregarding part of IVUS data. In this paper, we argue that the image motion is due to 3-D vessel geometry as well as cardiac dynamics, and propose a dynamic model based on the tracking of an elliptical vessel approximation to recover the rigid transformation and align IVUS images without loosing any IVUS data. We report an extensive validation with synthetic simulated data and in vivo IVUS sequences of 30 patients achieving an average reduction of the image artifact of 97% in synthetic data and 79% in real-data. Our study shows that IVUS alignment improves longitudinal analysis of the IVUS data and is a necessary step towards accurate reconstruction and volumetric measurements of 3-D IVUS.

Abstract: We describe a general framework for the recognition of distorted images of lineal shapes, which relies on three items: a model to represent lineal shapes and their deformations, a model for the generation of distorted binary images and the combination of both models in a common probabilistic framework, where the generation of deformations is related to an internal energy, and the generation of binary images to an external energy. Then, recognition consists in the minimization of a global energy function, performed by using the EM algorithm. This general framework has been applied to the recognition of hand-drawn lineal symbols in graphic documents.

Abstract: A generic method for floor plan analysis and interpretation is presented in this article. The method, which is mainly inspired by the way engineers draw and interpret floor plans, applies two recognition steps in a bottom-up manner. First, basic building blocks, i.e., walls, doors, and windows are detected using a statistical patch-based segmentation approach. Second, a graph is generated, and structural pattern recognition techniques are applied to further locate the main entities, i.e., rooms of the building. The proposed approach is able to analyze any type of floor plan regardless of the notation used. We have evaluated our method on different publicly available datasets of real architectural floor plans with different notations. The overall detection and recognition accuracy is about 95 %, which is significantly better than any other state-of-the-art method. Our approach is generic enough such that it could be easily adopted to the recognition and interpretation of any other printed machine-generated structured documents.

Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of aligning two video sequences. Such alignment refers to synchronization, i.e., the establishment of temporal correspondence between frames of the first and second video, followed by spatial registration of all the temporally corresponding frames. Video synchronization and alignment have been attempted before, but most often in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, restrictive assumptions have been applied, including linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of any solutions developed. We intend to solve the more general problem of aligning video sequences recorded by independently moving cameras that follow similar trajectories, based only on the fusion of image intensity and GPS information. The novelty of our approach is to pose the synchronization as a MAP inference problem on a Bayesian network including the observations from these two sensor types, which have been proved complementary. Alignment results are presented in the context of videos recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times, for different road types. In addition, we explore two applications of the proposed video alignment method, both based on change detection between aligned videos. One is the detection of vehicles, which could be of use in ADAS. The other is online difference spotting videos of surveillance rounds.

Abstract: Human detection is fundamental in many machine vision applications, like video surveillance, driving assistance, action recognition and scene understanding. However in most of these applications real-time performance is necessary and this is not achieved yet by current detection methods.
This paper presents a new method for human detection based on a multiresolution cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that can highly reduce the computational cost of detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed of HOG features at different resolutions, from coarse at the first level to fine at the last one.
In contrast to previous methods, our approach uses a non-uniform stride of the sliding window that is defined by the feature resolution and allows the detection to be incrementally refined as going from coarse-to-fine resolution. In this way, the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the fewer number of features computed at the first levels of the cascade, but also to the reduced number of windows that need to be evaluated at the coarse resolution. Experimental results show that our method reaches a detection rate comparable with the state-of-the-art of detectors based on HOG features, while at the same time the detection search is up to 23 times faster.

Abstract: A novel technique for missing data matrix rank estimation is presented. It is focused on matrices of trajectories, where every element of the matrix corresponds to an image coordinate from a feature point of a rigid moving object at a given frame; missing data are represented as empty entries. The objective of the proposed approach is to estimate the rank of a missing data matrix in order to fill in empty entries with some matrix completion method, without using or assuming neither the number of objects contained in the scene nor the kind of their motion. The key point of the proposed technique consists in studying the frequency behaviour of the individual trajectories, which are seen as 1D signals. The main assumption is that due to the rigidity of the moving objects, the frequency content of the trajectories will be similar after filling in their missing entries. The proposed rank estimation approach can be used in different computer vision problems, where the rank of a missing data matrix needs to be estimated. Experimental results with synthetic and real data are provided in order to empirically show the good performance of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.