Abstract: Motion perception is an amazing innate ability of the creatures on the planet. This adroitness entails a functional advantage that enables species to compete better in the wild. The motion perception ability is usually employed at different levels, allowing from the simplest interaction with the ’physis’ up to the most transcendental survival tasks. Among the five classical perception system , vision is the most widely used in the motion perception field. Millions years of evolution have led to a highly specialized visual system in humans, which is characterized by a tremendous accuracy as well as an extraordinary robustness. Although humans and an immense diversity of species can distinguish moving object with a seeming simplicity, it has proven to be a difficult and non trivial problem from a computational perspective. In the field of Computer Vision, the detection of moving objects is a challenging and fundamental research area. This can be referred to as the ’origin’ of vast and numerous vision-based research sub-areas. Nevertheless, from the bottom to the top of this hierarchical analysis, the foundations still relies on when and where motion has occurred in an image. Pixels corresponding to moving objects in image sequences can be identified by measuring changes in their values. However, a pixel’s value (representing a combination of color and brightness) could also vary due to other factors such as: variation in scene illumination, camera noise and nonlinear sensor responses among others. The challenge lies in detecting if the changes in pixels’ value are caused by a genuine object movement or not. An additional challenging aspect in motion detection is represented by moving cast shadows. The paradox arises because a moving object and its cast shadow share similar motion patterns. However, a moving cast shadow is not a moving object. In fact, a shadow represents a photometric illumination effect caused by the relative position of the object with respect to the light sources. Shadow detection methods are mainly divided in two domains depending on the application field. One normally consists of static images where shadows are casted by static objects, whereas the second one is referred to image sequences where shadows are casted by moving objects. For the first case, shadows can provide additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object as well as the localization of the light source. Although the previous information can be extracted from static images as well as video sequences, the main focus in the second area is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance. In this context, a shadow can severely affect with the analysis and interpretation of the scene. The work done in the thesis is focused on the second case, thus it addresses the problem of detection and removal of moving cast shadows in video sequences in order to enhance the detection of moving object.

Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems. Current evaluation metrics provide an average score that does not consider performance variability across the query set. In this manner, conclusions lack of any statistical significance, yielding poor inference to cases outside the query set and possibly unfair comparisons. We propose to apply statistical methods in order to obtain a more informative measure for problems in which different query classes can be identified. In this context, we assess the performance variability on two levels: overall variability across the whole query set and specific query class-related variability. To this end, we estimate confidence bands for precision-recall curves, and we apply ANOVA in order to assess the significance of the performance across different query classes.

Abstract: The structure of document images plays a signicant role in document analysis thus considerable eorts have been made towards extracting and understanding document structure, usually in the form of layout analysis approaches. In this paper, we rst employ Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) to eciently extract stable document structural elements in terms of a dendrogram of key-regions. Then a fast structural matching method is proposed to query the structure of document (dendrogram) based on a spatial database which facilitates the formulation of advanced spatial queries. The experiments demonstrate a signicant improvement in a document retrieval scenario when compared to the use of typical Bag of Words (BoW) and pyramidal BoW descriptors.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.

Abstract: We explore the potential of the use of blood vessels as anatomical landmarks for developing image registration methods in colonoscopy images. An unequivocal representation of blood vessels could be used to guide follow-up methods to track lesions over different interventions. We propose a graph-based representation to characterize network structures, such as blood vessels, based on the use of intersections and endpoints. We present a study consisting of the assessment of the minimal performance a keypoint detector should achieve so that the structure can still be recognized. Experimental results prove that, even by achieving a loss of 35% of the keypoints, the descriptive power of the associated graphs to the vessel pattern is still high enough to recognize blood vessels.

Abstract: Intrinsic characterization of scenes is often the best way to overcome the illumination variability artifacts that complicate most computer vision problems, from 3D reconstruction to object or material recognition. This paper examines the deficiency of existing intrinsic image models to accurately account for the effects of illuminant color and sensor characteristics in the estimation of intrinsic images and presents a generic framework which incorporates insights from color constancy research to the intrinsic image decomposition problem. The proposed mathematical formulation includes information about the color of the illuminant and the effects of the camera sensors, both of which modify the observed color of the reflectance of the objects in the scene during the acquisition process. By modeling these effects, we get a “truly intrinsic” reflectance image, which we call absolute reflectance, which is invariant to changes of illuminant or camera sensors. This model allows us to represent a wide range of intrinsic image decompositions depending on the specific assumptions on the geometric properties of the scene configuration and the spectral properties of the light source and the acquisition system, thus unifying previous models in a single general framework. We demonstrate that even partial information about sensors improves significantly the estimated reflectance images, thus making our method applicable for a wide range of sensors. We validate our general intrinsic image framework experimentally with both synthetic data and natural images.

Abstract: This paper presents an image database of historical handwritten marriages records stored in the archives of Barcelona cathedral, and the corresponding meta-data addressed to evaluate the performance of document analysis algorithms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a complete ground truth which covers the whole pipeline of handwriting
recognition research, from layout analysis to recognition and understanding. Second, it is the first dataset in the emerging area of genealogical document analysis, where documents are manuscripts pseudo-structured with specific lexicons and the interest is beyond pure transcriptions but context dependent.

Abstract: This paper presents an effective unsupervised sparse feature learning algorithm to train deep convolutional networks on hyperspectral images. Deep convolutional hierarchical representations are learned and then used for pixel classification. Features in lower layers present less abstract representations of data, while higher layers represent more abstract and complex characteristics. We successfully illustrate the performance of the extracted representations in a challenging AVIRIS hyperspectral image classification problem, compared to standard dimensionality reduction methods like principal component analysis (PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA). The proposed method largely outperforms the previous state-ofthe-art results on the same experimental setting. Results show that single layer networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels. Regarding the deep architecture, we can conclude that: (1) additional layers in a deep architecture significantly improve the performance w.r.t. single layer variants; (2) the max-pooling step in each layer is mandatory to achieve satisfactory results; and (3) the performance gain w.r.t. the number of layers is upper bounded, since the spatial resolution is reduced at each pooling, resulting in too spatially coarse output features.