Abstract: Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue, obtaining a reliable ground truth. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available study cases due to the complex procedure of histological analysis. In this work we propose a novel semi-supervised approach to enhance the in-vitro training set by including examples from in-vivo coronary plaques data set. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is applied on in-vivo data and plaque characterization performances are evaluated by Leave-One-Patient-Out cross-validation technique. Supervised data inclusion improves global classification accuracy from 89.39% to 91.82%.

Abstract: Document classification is an important task in all the processes related to document storage and retrieval. In the case of complex documents, structural features are needed to achieve a correct classification. Unfortunately, physical layout analysis is error prone. In this paper we present a pre-segmentation step based on a divide & conquer strategy that can be used to improve the page segmentation results, independently of the segmentation algorithm used. This pre-segmentation step is evaluated in classification and retrieval using the selective CRLA algorithm for layout segmentation together with a clustering based on the voronoi area diagram, and tested on two different databases, MARG and Girona Archives.

Abstract: 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 the detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed by features at different resolution, from coarse for the first level to fine for the last one.
Considering that the spatial stride of the sliding window search is affected by the HOG features size, unlike previous methods based on Adaboost cascades, we can adopt a spatial stride inversely proportional to the features resolution. This produces that the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the low number of features that need to be computed in the first levels, but also to the lower number of detection windows that needs to be evaluated.
Experimental results shows that our method permits a detection rate comparable with the state of the art, but at the same time a gain in the speed of the detection search of 10-20 times depending on the cascade configuration.

Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive thresholding approach intended to increase the number of detected corners, while reducing the amount of those ones corresponding to noisy data. The proposed approach works by using the classical Harris corner detector algorithm and overcome the difficulty in finding a general threshold that work well for all the images in a given data set by proposing a novel adaptive thresholding scheme. Initially, two thresholds are used to discern between strong corners and flat regions. Then, a region based criteria is used to discriminate between weak corners and noisy points in the midway interval. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a better capability to reject false corners and, at the same time, to detect weak ones. Comparisons with the state of the art are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: A device, system and method for automatic detection of contractile activity of a body lumen in an image frame is provided, wherein image frames during contractile activity are captured and/or image frames including contractile activity are automatically detected, such as through pattern recognition and/or feature extraction to trace image frames including contractions, e.g., with wrinkle patterns. A manual procedure of annotation of contractions, e.g. tonic contractions in capsule endoscopy, may consist of the visualization of the whole video by a specialist, and the labeling of the contraction frames. Embodiments of the present invention may be suitable for implementation in an in vivo imaging system.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for multi-modal image retrieval in multi-labelled images. A multi-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model sketches and text as input query modalities into a common embedding space, which is then further aligned with the image feature space. Our architecture also relies on a salient object detection through a supervised LSTM-based visual attention model learned from convolutional features. Both the alignment between the queries and the image and the supervision of the attention on the images are obtained by generalizing the Hungarian Algorithm using different loss functions. This permits encoding the object-based features and its alignment with the query irrespective of the availability of the co-occurrence of different objects in the training set. We validate the performance of our approach on standard single/multi-object datasets, showing state-of-the art performance in every dataset.