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Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados. (2010). Symbol Spotting in Digital Libraries:Focused Retrieval over Graphic-rich Document Collections. Springer.
Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed. Keywords: Focused Retrieval , Graphical Pattern Indexation,Graphics Recognition ,Pattern Recognition , Performance Evaluation , Symbol Description ,Symbol Spotting
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, F. Serratosa, K. Riesen, & Horst Bunke. (2010). Generalized Median Graph Computation by Means of Graph Embedding in Vector Spaces. PR - Pattern Recognition, 43(4), 1642–1655.
Abstract: The median graph has been presented as a useful tool to represent a set of graphs. Nevertheless its computation is very complex and the existing algorithms are restricted to use limited amount of data. In this paper we propose a new approach for the computation of the median graph based on graph embedding. Graphs are embedded into a vector space and the median is computed in the vector domain. We have designed a procedure based on the weighted mean of a pair of graphs to go from the vector domain back to the graph domain in order to obtain a final approximation of the median graph. Experiments on three different databases containing large graphs show that we succeed to compute good approximations of the median graph. We have also applied the median graph to perform some basic classification tasks achieving reasonable good results. These experiments on real data open the door to the application of the median graph to a number of more complex machine learning algorithms where a representative of a set of graphs is needed.
Keywords: Graph matching; Weighted mean of graphs; Median graph; Graph embedding; Vector spaces
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Antonio Lopez, Joan Serrat, Cristina Cañero, Felipe Lumbreras, & T. Graf. (2010). Robust lane markings detection and road geometry computation. IJAT - International Journal of Automotive Technology, 11(3), 395–407.
Abstract: Detection of lane markings based on a camera sensor can be a low-cost solution to lane departure and curve-over-speed warnings. A number of methods and implementations have been reported in the literature. However, reliable detection is still an issue because of cast shadows, worn and occluded markings, variable ambient lighting conditions, for example. We focus on increasing detection reliability in two ways. First, we employed an image feature other than the commonly used edges: ridges, which we claim addresses this problem better. Second, we adapted RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane lines to the image features, based on both ridgeness and ridge orientation. In addition, the model was fitted for the left and right lane lines simultaneously to enforce a consistent result. Four measures of interest for driver assistance applications were directly computed from the fitted parametric model at each frame: lane width, lane curvature, and vehicle yaw angle and lateral offset with regard the lane medial axis. We qualitatively assessed our method in video sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. We also quantitatively assessed it on synthetic but realistic video sequences for which road geometry and vehicle trajectory ground truth are known.
Keywords: lane markings
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David Geronimo, Angel Sappa, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Stereo-based Candidate Generation for Pedestrian Protection Systems. In Binocular Vision: Development, Depth Perception and Disorders (189–208). NOVA Publishers.
Abstract: This chapter describes a stereo-based algorithm that provides candidate image windows to a latter 2D classification stage in an on-board pedestrian detection system. The proposed algorithm, which consists of three stages, is based on the use of both stereo imaging and scene prior knowledge (i.e., pedestrians are on the ground) to reduce the candidate searching space. First, a successful road surface fitting algorithm provides estimates on the relative ground-camera pose. This stage directs the search toward the road area thus avoiding irrelevant regions like the sky. Then, three different schemes are used to scan the estimated road surface with pedestrian-sized windows: (a) uniformly distributed through the road surface (3D); (b) uniformly distributed through the image (2D); (c) not uniformly distributed but according to a quadratic function (combined 2D-3D). Finally, the set of candidate windows is reduced by analyzing their 3D content. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm, together with statistics of searching space reduction are provided.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 26(7), 763–779.
Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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Simone Balocco, O. Basset, G. Courbebaisse, E. Boni, Alejandro F. Frangi, P. Tortoli, et al. (2010). Estimation Of Viscoelastic Properties Of Vessel Walls Using a Computational Model and Doppler Ultrasound. PMB - Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55(12), 3557–3575.
Abstract: Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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Simone Balocco, O. Camara, E. Vivas, T. Sola, L. Guimaraens, H. A. van Andel, et al. (2010). Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo. MEDPHYS - Medical Physics, 37(4), 1689–1706.
Abstract: PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior. METHODS: A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations. RESULTS: Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm. CONCLUSIONS: Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results. |
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). SRBF: Speckle Reducing Bilateral Filtering. UMB - Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 36(8), 1353–1363.
Abstract: Speckle noise negatively affects medical ultrasound image shape interpretation and boundary detection. Speckle removal filters are widely used to selectively remove speckle noise without destroying important image features to enhance object boundaries. In this article, a fully automatic bilateral filter tailored to ultrasound images is proposed. The edge preservation property is obtained by embedding noise statistics in the filter framework. Consequently, the filter is able to tackle the multiplicative behavior modulating the smoothing strength with respect to local statistics. The in silico experiments clearly showed that the speckle reducing bilateral filter (SRBF) has superior performances to most of the state of the art filtering methods. The filter is tested on 50 in vivo US images and its influence on a segmentation task is quantified. The results using SRBF filtered data sets show a superior performance to using oriented anisotropic diffusion filtered images. This improvement is due to the adaptive support of SRBF and the embedded noise statistics, yielding a more homogeneous smoothing. SRBF results in a fully automatic, fast and flexible algorithm potentially suitable in wide ranges of speckle noise sizes, for different medical applications (IVUS, B-mode, 3-D matrix array US).
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Sergio Escalera, R. M. Martinez, Jordi Vitria, Petia Radeva, & Maria Teresa Anguera. (2010). Deteccion automatica de la dominancia en conversaciones diadicas. EP - Escritos de Psicologia, 3(2), 41–45.
Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.
Keywords: Dominance detection; Non-verbal communication; Visual features
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Wenjuan Gong, Andrew Bagdanov, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Automatic Key Pose Selection for 3D Human Action Recognition. In 6th International Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (Vol. 6169, 290–299). Springer Verlag.
Abstract: This article describes a novel approach to the modeling of human actions in 3D. The method we propose is based on a “bag of poses” model that represents human actions as histograms of key-pose occurrences over the course of a video sequence. Actions are first represented as 3D poses using a sequence of 36 direction cosines corresponding to the angles 12 joints form with the world coordinate frame in an articulated human body model. These pose representations are then projected to three-dimensional, action-specific principal eigenspaces which we refer to as aSpaces. We introduce a method for key-pose selection based on a local-motion energy optimization criterion and we show that this method is more stable and more resistant to noisy data than other key-poses selection criteria for action recognition.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gemma Sanchez, Xavier Otazu, & Horst Bunke. (2010). A Combination of Features for Symbol-Independent Writer Identification in Old Music Scores. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 13(4), 243–259.
Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.
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Susana Alvarez, Anna Salvatella, Maria Vanrell, & Xavier Otazu. (2010). 3D Texton Spaces for color-texture retrieval. In A.C. Campilho and M.S. Kamel (Ed.), 7th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 6111, 354–363). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Robert Benavente, & Maria Vanrell. (2010). Towards a general model of colour categorization which considers context. PER - Perception. ECVP Abstract Supplement, 39, 86.
Abstract: In two previous experiments [Parraga et al, 2009 J. of Im. Sci. and Tech 53(3) 031106; Benavente et al,2009 Perception 38 ECVP Supplement, 36] the boundaries of basic colour categories were measured.
In the first experiment, samples were presented in isolation (ie on a dark background) and boundaries were measured using a yes/no paradigm. In the second, subjects adjusted the chromaticity of a sample presented on a random Mondrian background to find the boundary between pairs of adjacent colours. Results from these experiments showed significant di erences but it was not possible to conclude whether this discrepancy was due to the absence/presence of a colourful background or to the di erences in the paradigms used. In this work, we settle this question by repeating the first experiment (ie samples presented on a dark background) using the second paradigm. A comparison of results shows that although boundary locations are very similar, boundaries measured in context are significantly di erent(more di use) than those measured in isolation (confirmed by a Student’s t-test analysis on the subject’s answers statistical distributions). In addition, we completed the mapping of colour name space by measuring the boundaries between chromatic colours and the achromatic centre. With these results we completed our parametric fuzzy-sets model of colour naming space. |
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Ignasi Rius. (2010). Motion Priors for Efficient Bayesian Tracking in Human Sequence Evaluation (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Recovering human motion by visual analysis is a challenging computer vision research
area with a lot of potential applications. Model-based tracking approaches, and in particular particle lters, formulate the problem as a Bayesian inference task whose aim is to sequentially estimate the distribution of the parameters of a human body model over time. These approaches strongly rely on good dynamical and observation models to predict and update con gurations of the human body according to measurements from the image data. However, it is very di cult to design observation models which extract useful and reliable information from image sequences robustly. This results specially challenging in monocular tracking given that only one viewpoint from the scene is available. Therefore, to overcome these limitations strong motion priors are needed to guide the exploration of the state space. The work presented in this Thesis is aimed to retrieve the 3D motion parameters of a human body model from incomplete and noisy measurements of a monocular image sequence. These measurements consist of the 2D positions of a reduced set of joints in the image plane. Towards this end, we present a novel action-speci c model of human motion which is trained from several databases of real motion-captured performances of an action, and is used as a priori knowledge within a particle ltering scheme. Body postures are represented by means of a simple and compact stick gure model which uses direction cosines to represent the direction of body limbs in the 3D Cartesian space. Then, for a given action, Principal Component Analysis is applied to the training data to perform dimensionality reduction over the highly correlated input data. Before the learning stage of the action model, the input motion performances are synchronized by means of a novel dense matching algorithm based on Dynamic Programming. The algorithm synchronizes all the motion sequences of the same action class, nding an optimal solution in real-time. Then, a probabilistic action model is learnt, based on the synchronized motion examples, which captures the variability and temporal evolution of full-body motion within a speci c action. In particular, for each action, the parameters learnt are: a representative manifold for the action consisting of its mean performance, the standard deviation from the mean performance, the mean observed direction vectors from each motion subsequence of a given length and the expected error at a given time instant. Subsequently, the action-speci c model is used as a priori knowledge on human motion which improves the e ciency and robustness of the overall particle filtering tracking framework. First, the dynamic model guides the particles according to similar situations previously learnt. Then, the state space is constrained so only feasible human postures are accepted as valid solutions at each time step. As a result, the state space is explored more e ciently as the particle set covers the most probable body postures. Finally, experiments are carried out using test sequences from several motion databases. Results point out that our tracker scheme is able to estimate the rough 3D con guration of a full-body model providing only the 2D positions of a reduced set of joints. Separate tests on the sequence synchronization method and the subsequence probabilistic matching technique are also provided. |
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Ivan Huerta. (2010). Foreground Object Segmentation and Shadow Detection for Video Sequences in Uncontrolled Environments (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: This Thesis is mainly divided in two parts. The first one presents a study of motion
segmentation problems. Based on this study, a novel algorithm for mobile-object segmentation from a static background scene is also presented. This approach is demonstrated robust and accurate under most of the common problems in motion segmentation. The second one tackles the problem of shadows in depth. Firstly, a bottom-up approach based on a chromatic shadow detector is presented to deal with umbra shadows. Secondly, a top-down approach based on a tracking system has been developed in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection. In our first contribution, a case analysis of motion segmentation problems is presented by taking into account the problems associated with different cues, namely colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is a hybrid architecture which handles the main problems observed in such a case analysis, by fusing (i) the knowledge from these three cues and (ii) a temporal difference algorithm. On the one hand, we enhance the colour and edge models to solve both global/local illumination changes (shadows and highlights) and camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is exploited to cope with a very challenging problem such as the camouflage in chroma. On the other hand, the intensity cue is also applied when colour and edge cues are not available, such as when beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference is included to segment motion when these three cues are not available, such as that background not visible during the training period. Lastly, the approach is enhanced for allowing ghost detection. As a result, our approach obtains very accurate and robust motion segmentation in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, as quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrated in the experimental results, by comparing our approach with most best-known state-of-the-art approaches. Motion Segmentation has to deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting moving objects. Most segmentation approaches dealing with shadow detection are typically restricted to penumbra shadows. Therefore, such techniques cannot cope well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadows are usually detected as part of moving objects. Firstly, a bottom-up approach for detection and removal of chromatic moving shadows in surveillance scenarios is proposed. Secondly, a top-down approach based on kalman filters to detect and track shadows has been developed in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection. In the Bottom-up part, the shadow detection approach applies a novel technique based on gradient and colour models for separating chromatic moving shadows from moving objects. Well-known colour and gradient models are extended and improved into an invariant colour cone model and an invariant gradient model, respectively, to perform automatic segmentation while detecting potential shadows. Hereafter, the regions corresponding to potential shadows are grouped by considering ”a bluish effect” and an edge partitioning. Lastly, (i) temporal similarities between local gradient structures and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are analysed for all potential shadow regions in order to finally identify umbra shadows. In the top-down process, after detection of objects and shadows both are tracked using Kalman filters, in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection, when it fails to detect a shadow. Firstly, this implies a data association between the blobs (foreground and shadow) and Kalman filters. Secondly, an event analysis of the different data association cases is performed, and occlusion handling is managed by a Probabilistic Appearance Model (PAM). Based on this association, temporal consistency is looked for the association between foregrounds and shadows and their respective Kalman Filters. From this association several cases are studied, as a result lost chromatic shadows are correctly detected. Finally, the tracking results are used as feedback to improve the shadow and object detection. Unlike other approaches, our method does not make any a-priori assumptions about camera location, surface geometries, surface textures, shapes and types of shadows, objects, and background. Experimental results show the performance and accuracy of our approach in different shadowed materials and illumination conditions. |