Abstract: Colonoscopy is the gold standard for colon cancer screening though still some polyps are missed, thus preventing early disease detection and treatment. Several computational systems have been proposed to assist polyp detection during colonoscopy but so far without consistent evaluation. The lack
of publicly available annotated databases has made it difficult to compare methods and to assess if they achieve performance levels acceptable for clinical use. The Automatic Polyp Detection subchallenge, conducted as part of the Endoscopic Vision Challenge (http://endovis.grand-challenge.org) at the international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted
Intervention (MICCAI) in 2015, was an effort to address this need. In this paper, we report the results of this comparative evaluation of polyp detection methods, as well as describe additional experiments to further explore differences between methods. We define performance metrics and provide evaluation databases that allow comparison of multiple methodologies. Results show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the state of the art. Nevertheless it is also demonstrated that combining different methodologies can lead to an improved overall performance.

Abstract: Kidney stone formation is a common disease and the incidence rate is constantly increasing worldwide. It has been shown that the classification of kidney stones can lead to an important reduction of the recurrence rate. The classification of kidney stones by human experts on the basis of certain visual color and texture features is one of the most employed techniques. However, the knowledge of how to analyze kidney stones is not widespread, and the experts learn only after being trained on a large number of samples of the different classes. In this paper we describe a new device specifically designed for capturing images of expelled kidney stones, and a method to learn and apply the experts knowledge with regard to their classification. We show that with off the shelf components, a carefully selected set of features and a state of the art classifier it is possible to automate this difficult task to a good degree. We report results on a collection of 454 kidney stones, achieving an overall accuracy of 63% for a set of eight classes covering almost all of the kidney stones taxonomy. Moreover, for more than 80% of samples the real class is the first or the second most probable class according to the system, being then the patient recommendations for the two top classes similar. This is the first attempt towards the automatic visual classification of kidney stones, and based on the current results we foresee better accuracies with the increase of the dataset size.

Abstract: In somatic cells, chromosomes occupy specific nuclear regions called chromosome territories which are involved in the
maintenance and regulation of the genome. Preliminary data in male germ cells also suggest the importance of chromosome
territoriality in cell functionality. Nevertheless, the specific characteristics of testicular tissue (presence of different
cell types with different morphological characteristics, in different stages of development and with different ploidy)
makes difficult to achieve conclusive results. In this study we have developed a methodology to approach the threedimensional
study of all chromosome territories in male germ cells from C57BL/6J mice (Mus musculus). The method
includes the following steps: i) Optimized cell fixation to obtain an optimal preservation of the three-dimensionality cell
morphology, ii) Chromosome identification by FISH (Chromoprobe Multiprobe® OctoChrome™ Murine System; Cytocell)
and confocal microscopy (TCS-SP5, Leica Microsystems), iii) Cell type identification by immunofluorescence
iv) Image analysis using Matlab scripts, v) Numerical data extraction related to chromosome features, chromosome
radial position and chromosome relative position. This methodology allows the unequivocally identification and the
analysis of the chromosome territories of all spermatogenic stages. Results will provide information about the features
that determine chromosomal position, preferred associations between chromosomes, and the relationship between chromosome
positioning and genome regulation.

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of recipe-oriented image-ingredient correlation learning with multi-attributes for recipe retrieval and exploration. Existing methods mainly focus on food visual information for recognition while we model visual information, textual content (e.g., ingredients), and attributes (e.g., cuisine and course) together to solve extended recipe-oriented problems, such as multimodal cuisine classification and attribute-enhanced food image retrieval. As a solution, we propose a multimodal multitask deep belief network (M3TDBN) to learn joint image-ingredient representation regularized by different attributes. By grouping ingredients into visible ingredients (which are visible in the food image, e.g., “chicken” and “mushroom”) and nonvisible ingredients (e.g., “salt” and “oil”), M3TDBN is capable of learning both midlevel visual representation between images and visible ingredients and nonvisual representation. Furthermore, in order to utilize different attributes to improve the intermodality correlation, M3TDBN incorporates multitask learning to make different attributes collaborate each other. Based on the proposed M3TDBN, we exploit the derived deep features and the discovered correlations for three extended novel applications: 1) multimodal cuisine classification; 2) attribute-augmented cross-modal recipe image retrieval; and 3) ingredient and attribute inference from food images. The proposed approach is evaluated on the constructed Yummly dataset and the evaluation results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches on hand pose estimation from depth images have reported promising results under quite controlled considerations. In this paper we propose a two-step pipeline for recovering the hand pose from a sequence of depth images. The pipeline has been designed to deal with images taken from any viewpoint and exhibiting a high degree of finger occlusion. In a first step we initialize the hand pose using a part-based model, fitting a set of hand components in the depth images. In a second step we consider temporal data and estimate the parameters of a trained bilinear model consisting of shape and trajectory bases. Results on a synthetic, highly-occluded dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most recent pose recovering approaches, including those based on CNNs.

Abstract: Interest in automatic action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last few years. This is due in part to the large number of application domains for this type of technology. As in many other computer vision areas, deep learning based methods have quickly become a reference methodology for obtaining state-of-the-art performance in both tasks. This chapter is a survey of current deep learning based methodologies for action and gesture recognition in sequences of images. The survey reviews both fundamental and cutting edge methodologies reported in the last few years. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning for approaching both tasks. Details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions are reviewed. Also, we summarize and discuss the main works proposed so far with particular interest on how they treat the temporal dimension of data, their highlighting features, and opportunities and challenges for future research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first survey in the topic. We foresee this survey will become a reference in this ever dynamic field of research.

Abstract: Computer vision technologies are at the core of different advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and will play a key role in oncoming autonomous vehicles too. One of the main challenges for such technologies is to perceive the driving environment, i.e. to detect and track relevant driving information in a reliable manner (e.g. pedestrians in the vehicle route, free space to drive through). Nowadays it is clear that machine learning techniques are essential for developing such a visual perception for driving. In particular, the standard working pipeline consists of collecting data (i.e. on-board images), manually annotating the data (e.g. drawing bounding boxes around pedestrians), learning a discriminative data representation taking advantage of such annotations (e.g. a deformable part-based model, a deep convolutional neural network), and then assessing the reliability of such representation with the acquired data. In the last two decades most of the research efforts focused on representation learning (first, designing descriptors and learning classifiers; later doing it end-to-end). Hence, collecting data and, especially, annotating it, is essential for learning good representations. While this has been the case from the very beginning, only after the disruptive appearance of deep convolutional neural networks that it became a serious issue due to their data hungry nature. In this context, the problem is that manual data annotation is a tiresome work prone to errors. Accordingly, in the late 00’s we initiated a research line consisting of training visual models using photo-realistic computer graphics, especially focusing on assisted and autonomous driving. In this paper, we summarize such a work and show how it has become a new tendency with increasing acceptance.