Abstract: The amount of multimodal devices that surround us is growing everyday. In this context, human interaction and communication have become a focus of attention and a hot topic of research. A crucial element in human relations is the evaluation of individuals with respect to facial traits, what is called a first impression. Studies based on appearance have suggested that personality can be expressed by appearance and the observer may use such information to form judgments. In the context of rapid facial evaluation, certain personality traits seem to have a more pronounced effect on the relations and perceptions inside groups. The perception of dominance has been shown to be an active part of social roles at different stages of life, and even play a part in mate selection. The aim of this paper is to study to what extent this information is learnable from the point of view of computer science. Specifically we intend to determine if judgments of dominance can be learned by machine learning techniques. We implement two different descriptors in order to assess this. The first is the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and the second is a probabilistic appearance descriptor based on the frequencies of grouped binary tests. State of the art classification rules validate the performance of both descriptors, with respect to the prediction task. Experimental results show that machine learning techniques can predict judgments of dominance rather accurately (accuracies up to 90%) and that the HOG descriptor may characterize appropriately the information necessary for such task.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier's graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.

Abstract: Evaluation of the performance and limitations of medical imaging algorithms is essential to estimate their impact in social, economic or clinical aspects. However, validation of medical imaging techniques is a challenging task due to the variety of imaging and clinical problems involved, as well as, the difficulties for systematically extracting a reliable solely ground truth. Although specific validation protocols are reported in any medical imaging paper, there are still two major concerns: definition of standardized methodologies transversal to all problems and generalization of conclusions to the whole clinical data set.
We claim that both issues would be fully solved if we had a statistical model relating ground truth and the output of computational imaging techniques. Such a statistical model could conclude to what extent the algorithm behaves like the ground truth from the analysis of a sampling of the validation data set. We present a statistical inference framework reporting the agreement and describing the relationship of two quantities. We show its transversality by applying it to validation of two different tasks: contour segmentation and landmark correspondence.

Abstract: Camera-based person detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications. The task is diffcult because the great variety of backgrounds (scenarios, illumination) in which persons are present, as well as their intra-class variability (pose, clothe, occlusion). In fact, the class person is one of the included in the popular PASCAL visual object classes (VOC) challenge. A breakthrough for this challenge, regarding person detection, is due to Felzenszwalb et al. These authors proposed a part-based detector that relies on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and latent support vector machines (LatSVM) to learn a model of the whole human body and its constitutive parts, as well as their relative position. Since the approach of Felzenszwalb et al. appeared new variants have been proposed, usually giving rise to more complex models. In this paper, we focus on an issue that has not attracted suficient interest up to now. In particular, we refer to the fact that HOG is usually computed from RGB color space, but other possibilities exist and deserve the corresponding investigation. In this paper we challenge RGB space with the opponent color space (OPP), which is inspired in the human vision system.We will compute the HOG on top of OPP, then we train and test the part-based human classifer by Felzenszwalb et al. using PASCAL VOC challenge protocols and person database. Our experiments demonstrate that OPP outperforms RGB. We also investigate possible differences among types of scenarios: indoor, urban and countryside. Interestingly, our experiments suggest that the beneficts of OPP with respect to RGB mainly come for indoor and countryside scenarios, those in which the human visual system was designed by evolution.

Abstract: This paper presents a patient-sensitive simulation strategy capable of using the most efficient way the high-performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players: Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists and Cardiologists, each one mastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme but focusing on the CMS side presents a massively parallel implementation of computational electrophysiology applied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem: equations, numerical issues, the algorithm and parallel implementation. The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains up to very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems but also for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly well suited for solving this highly transient problems, with very short time-scale.

Abstract: In this paper we present a methodology for the automatic detection of media-adventitia border (MAb) in Intravascular Ultrasound. A robust computation of the MAb is achieved through a holistic approach where the position of the MAb with respect to other tissues of the vessel is used. A learned quality measure assures that the resulting MAb is optimal with respect to all other tissues. The mean distance error computed through a set of 140 images is 0.2164 (±0.1326) mm.