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Marçal Rusiñol, Agnes Borras, & Josep Llados. (2010). Relational Indexing of Vectorial Primitives for Symbol Spotting in Line-Drawing Images. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(3), 188–201.
Abstract: This paper presents a symbol spotting approach for indexing by content a database of line-drawing images. As line-drawings are digital-born documents designed by vectorial softwares, instead of using a pixel-based approach, we present a spotting method based on vector primitives. Graphical symbols are represented by a set of vectorial primitives which are described by an off-the-shelf shape descriptor. A relational indexing strategy aims to retrieve symbol locations into the target documents by using a combined numerical-relational description of 2D structures. The zones which are likely to contain the queried symbol are validated by a Hough-like voting scheme. In addition, a performance evaluation framework for symbol spotting in graphical documents is proposed. The presented methodology has been evaluated with a benchmarking set of architectural documents achieving good performance results.
Keywords: Document image analysis and recognition, Graphics recognition, Symbol spotting ,Vectorial representations, Line-drawings
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, O. Pujol, Petia Radeva, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2009). Blurred Shape Model for Binary and Grey-level Symbol Recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(15), 1424–1433.
Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.
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Mehdi Mirza-Mohammadi, Sergio Escalera, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Contextual-Guided Bag-of-Visual-Words Model for Multi-class Object Categorization. In 13th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (Vol. 5702, 748–756). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Bag-of-words model (BOW) is inspired by the text classification problem, where a document is represented by an unsorted set of contained words. Analogously, in the object categorization problem, an image is represented by an unsorted set of discrete visual words (BOVW). In these models, relations among visual words are performed after dictionary construction. However, close object regions can have far descriptions in the feature space, being grouped as different visual words. In this paper, we present a method for considering geometrical information of visual words in the dictionary construction step. Object interest regions are obtained by means of the Harris-Affine detector and then described using the SIFT descriptor. Afterward, a contextual-space and a feature-space are defined, and a merging process is used to fuse feature words based on their proximity in the contextual-space. Moreover, we use the Error Correcting Output Codes framework to learn the new dictionary in order to perform multi-class classification. Results show significant classification improvements when spatial information is taken into account in the dictionary construction step.
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Javier Vazquez, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). Ordinal pairwise method for natural images comparison. PER - Perception, 38, 180.
Abstract: 38(Suppl.)ECVP Abstract Supplement
We developed a new psychophysical method to compare different colour appearance models when applied to natural scenes. The method was as follows: two images (processed by different algorithms) were displayed on a CRT monitor and observers were asked to select the most natural of them. The original images were gathered by means of a calibrated trichromatic digital camera and presented one on top of the other on a calibrated screen. The selection was made by pressing on a 6-button IR box, which allowed observers to consider not only the most natural but to rate their selection. The rating system allowed observers to register how much more natural was their chosen image (eg, much more, definitely more, slightly more), which gave us valuable extra information on the selection process. The results were analysed considering both the selection as a binary choice (using Thurstone's law of comparative judgement) and using Bradley-Terry method for ordinal comparison. Our results show a significant difference in the rating scales obtained. Although this method has been used in colour constancy algorithm comparisons, its uses are much wider, eg to compare algorithms of image compression, rendering, recolouring, etc.
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Robert Benavente, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). Colour categories boundaries are better defined in contextual conditions. PER - Perception, 38, 36.
Abstract: In a previous experiment [Parraga et al, 2009 Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 53(3)] the boundaries between basic colour categories were measured by asking subjects to categorize colour samples presented in isolation (ie on a dark background) using a YES/NO paradigm. Results showed that some boundaries (eg green – blue) were very diffuse and the subjects' answers presented bimodal distributions, which were attributed to the emergence of non-basic categories in those regions (eg turquoise). To confirm these results we performed a new experiment focussed on the boundaries where bimodal distributions were more evident. In this new experiment rectangular colour samples were presented surrounded by random colour patches to simulate contextual conditions on a calibrated CRT monitor. The names of two neighbouring colours were shown at the bottom of the screen and subjects selected the boundary between these colours by controlling the chromaticity of the central patch, sliding it across these categories' frontier. Results show that in this new experimental paradigm, the formerly uncertain inter-colour category boundaries are better defined and the dispersions (ie the bimodal distributions) that occurred in the previous experiment disappear. These results may provide further support to Berlin and Kay's basic colour terms theory.
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Javier Vazquez, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). A new cone activation-based natural images dataset. PER - Perception, 36, 180.
Abstract: We generated a new dataset of digital natural images where each colour plane corresponds to the human LMS (long-, medium-, short-wavelength) cone activations. The images were chosen to represent five different visual environments (eg forest, seaside, mountain snow, urban, motorways) and were taken under natural illumination at different times of day. At the bottom-left corner of each picture there was a matte grey ball of approximately constant spectral reflectance (across the camera's response spectrum,) and nearly Lambertian reflective properties, which allows to compute (and remove, if necessary) the illuminant's colour and intensity. The camera (Sigma Foveon SD10) was calibrated by measuring its sensor's spectral responses using a set of 31 spectrally narrowband interference filters. This allowed conversion of the final camera-dependent RGB colour space into the Smith and Pokorny (1975) cone activation space by means of a polynomial transformation, optimised for a set of 1269 Munsell chip reflectances. This new method is an improvement over the usual 3 × 3 matrix transformation which is only accurate for spectrally-narrowband colours. The camera-to-LMS transformation can be recalculated to consider other non-human visual systems. The dataset is available to download from our website.
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Joost Van de Weijer, Cordelia Schmid, Jakob Verbeek, & Diane Larlus. (2009). Learning Color Names for Real-World Applications. TIP - IEEE Transaction in Image Processing, 18(7), 1512–1524.
Abstract: Color names are required in real-world applications such as image retrieval and image annotation. Traditionally, they are learned from a collection of labelled color chips. These color chips are labelled with color names within a well-defined experimental setup by human test subjects. However naming colors in real-world images differs significantly from this experimental setting. In this paper, we investigate how color names learned from color chips compare to color names learned from real-world images. To avoid hand labelling real-world images with color names we use Google Image to collect a data set. Due to limitations of Google Image this data set contains a substantial quantity of wrongly labelled data. We propose several variants of the PLSA model to learn color names from this noisy data. Experimental results show that color names learned from real-world images significantly outperform color names learned from labelled color chips for both image retrieval and image annotation.
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Mikhail Mozerov, Ignasi Rius, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Nonlinear synchronization for automatic learning of 3D pose variability in human motion sequences. EURASIPJ - EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, .
Abstract: Article ID 507247
A dense matching algorithm that solves the problem of synchronizing prerecorded human motion sequences, which show different speeds and accelerations, is proposed. The approach is based on minimization of MRF energy and solves the problem by using Dynamic Programming. Additionally, an optimal sequence is automatically selected from the input dataset to be a time-scale pattern for all other sequences. The paper utilizes an action specific model which automatically learns the variability of 3D human postures observed in a set of training sequences. The model is trained using the public CMU motion capture dataset for the walking action, and a mean walking performance is automatically learnt. Additionally, statistics about the observed variability of the postures and motion direction are also computed at each time step. The synchronized motion sequences are used to learn a model of human motion for action recognition and full-body tracking purposes.
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Jordi Gonzalez, Dani Rowe, J. Varona, & Xavier Roca. (2009). Understanding Dynamic Scenes based on Human Sequence Evaluation. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 27(10), 1433–1444.
Abstract: In this paper, a Cognitive Vision System (CVS) is presented, which explains the human behaviour of monitored scenes using natural-language texts. This cognitive analysis of human movements recorded in image sequences is here referred to as Human Sequence Evaluation (HSE) which defines a set of transformation modules involved in the automatic generation of semantic descriptions from pixel values. In essence, the trajectories of human agents are obtained to generate textual interpretations of their motion, and also to infer the conceptual relationships of each agent w.r.t. its environment. For this purpose, a human behaviour model based on Situation Graph Trees (SGTs) is considered, which permits both bottom-up (hypothesis generation) and top-down (hypothesis refinement) analysis of dynamic scenes. The resulting system prototype interprets different kinds of behaviour and reports textual descriptions in multiple languages.
Keywords: Image Sequence Evaluation; High-level processing of monitored scenes; Segmentation and tracking in complex scenes; Event recognition in dynamic scenes; Human motion understanding; Human behaviour interpretation; Natural-language text generation; Realistic demonstrators
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Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2009). Exploiting Natural Language Generation in Scene Interpretation. In Human–Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence (Vol. 4, 71–93). Elsevier Science and Tech.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2009). Three-Dimensional Face Pose Detection and Tracking Using Monocular Videos: Tool and Application. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics part B, 39(4), 935–944.
Abstract: Recently, we have proposed a real-time tracker that simultaneously tracks the 3-D head pose and facial actions in monocular video sequences that can be provided by low quality cameras. This paper has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3-D face pose initialization scheme for the real-time tracker by adopting a 2-D face detector and an eigenface system. Second, we use the proposed methods-the initialization and tracking-for enhancing the human-machine interaction functionality of an AIBO robot. More precisely, we show how the orientation of the robot's camera (or any active vision system) can be controlled through the estimation of the user's head pose. Applications based on head-pose imitation such as telepresence, virtual reality, and video games can directly exploit the proposed techniques. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.
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Oriol Ramos Terrades, Ernest Valveny, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2009). Optimal Classifier Fusion in a Non-Bayesian Probabilistic Framework. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 31(9), 1630–1644.
Abstract: The combination of the output of classifiers has been one of the strategies used to improve classification rates in general purpose classification systems. Some of the most common approaches can be explained using the Bayes' formula. In this paper, we tackle the problem of the combination of classifiers using a non-Bayesian probabilistic framework. This approach permits us to derive two linear combination rules that minimize misclassification rates under some constraints on the distribution of classifiers. In order to show the validity of this approach we have compared it with other popular combination rules from a theoretical viewpoint using a synthetic data set, and experimentally using two standard databases: the MNIST handwritten digit database and the GREC symbol database. Results on the synthetic data set show the validity of the theoretical approach. Indeed, results on real data show that the proposed methods outperform other common combination schemes.
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Angel Sappa, Niki Aifanti, Sotiris Malassiotis, & Michael G. Strintzis. (2009). Prior Knowledge Based Motion Model Representation. In Horst Bunke, JuanJose Villanueva, & Gemma Sanchez (Eds.), Progress in Computer Vision and Image Analysis (Vol. 16).
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Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2009). Predicting Missing Ratings in Recommender Systems: Adapted Factorization Approach. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 14(1), 89–108.
Abstract: The paper presents a factorization-based approach to make predictions in recommender systems. These systems are widely used in electronic commerce to help customers find products according to their preferences. Taking into account the customer's ratings of some products available in the system, the recommender system tries to predict the ratings the customer would give to other products in the system. The proposed factorization-based approach uses all the information provided to compute the predicted ratings, in the same way as approaches based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The main advantage of this technique versus SVD-based approaches is that it can deal with missing data. It also has a smaller computational cost. Experimental results with public data sets are provided to show that the proposed adapted factorization approach gives better predicted ratings than a widely used SVD-based approach.
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Arnau Ramisa, Adriana Tapus, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Robust Vision-Based Localization using Combinations of Local Feature Regions Detectors. AR - Autonomous Robots, 27(4), 373–385.
Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.
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