Abstract: Understanding the content of the images is one of the greatest challenges of computer vision. Recognition of objects appearing in images, identifying and interpreting their actions are the main purposes of Image Understanding. This thesis seeks to identify what is present in a picture by categorizing and locating all the objects in the scene.
Images are composed by pixels, and one possibility consists of assigning to each pixel an object category, which is commonly known as semantic segmentation. By incorporating information as a contextual cue, we are able to resolve the ambiguity within categories at the pixel-level. We propose three levels of scale in order to resolve such ambiguity.
Another possibility to represent the objects is the object detection task. In this case, the aim is to recognize and localize the whole object by accurately placing a bounding box around it. We present two new approaches. The first one is focused on improving the object representation of deformable part models with the concept of factorized appearances. The second approach addresses the issue of reducing the computational cost for multi-class recognition. The results given have been validated on several commonly used datasets, reaching international recognition and state-of-the-art within the field

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art person detectors have been proven reliable and achieve very good detection rates. However, the performance is often far from real time, which limits their use to low resolution images only. In this paper, we deal with candidate window generation problem for person detection, i.e. we want to reduce the computational complexity of a person detector by reducing the number of regions that has to be evaluated. We base our work on Alexe’s paper [1], which introduced several pre-attention cues for generic object detection. We evaluate these cues in the context of person detection and show that their performance degrades rapidly for scenes containing multiple objects of interest such as pictures from urban environment. We extend this set by new cues, which better suits our class-specific task. The cues are designed to be simple and efficient, so that they can be used in the pre-attention phase of a more complex sliding window based person detector.

Abstract: Poster
Studies on volumetric brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) showed neuroanatomical abnormalities in pediatric Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In particular, the diminished right caudate volume is one of the most replicated findings among ADHD samples in morphometric MRI studies. In this paper, we propose a fully-automatic method for internal caudate nucleus segmentation based on machine learning. Moreover, the ratio between right caudate body volume and the bilateral caudate body volume is applied in a ADHD diagnostic test. We separately validate the automatic internal segmentation of caudate in head and body structures and the diagnostic test using real data from ADHD and control subjects. As a result, we show accurate internal caudate segmentation and similar performance among the proposed automatic diagnostic test and the manual annotation.

Abstract: In this paper we present the importance of including the user in the loop in a handwritten word spotting framework. Several off-the-shelf query fusion and relevance feedback strategies have been tested in the handwritten word spotting context. The increase in terms of precision when the user is included in the loop is assessed using two datasets of historical handwritten documents and a baseline word spotting approach based on a bag-of-visual-words model.

Abstract: In the last years, intrinsic image decomposition has gained attention. Most of the state-of-the-art methods are based on the assumption that reflectance changes come along with strong image edges. Recently, user intervention in the recovery problem has proved to be a remarkable source of improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that aims to overcome the shortcomings of pure edge-based methods by introducing strong surface descriptors, such as the color-name descriptor which introduces high-level considerations resembling top-down intervention. We also use a second surface descriptor, termed color-shade, which allows us to include physical considerations derived from the image formation model capturing gradual color surface variations. Both color cues are combined by means of a Markov Random Field. The method is quantitatively tested on the MIT ground truth dataset using different error metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a fully automatic method which identifies every bifurcation in an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequence, the corresponding frames, the angular orientation with respect to the IVUS acquisition, and the extension. This goal is reached using a two-level classification scheme: first, a classifier is applied to a set of textural features extracted from each image of a sequence. A comparison among three state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers (AdaBoost, random forest, and support vector machine) is performed to identify the most suitable method for the branching detection task. Second, the results are improved by exploiting contextual information using a multiscale stacked sequential learning scheme. The results are then successively refined using a-priori information about branching dimensions and geometry. The proposed approach provides a robust tool for the quick review of pullback sequences, facilitating the evaluation of the lesion at bifurcation sites. The proposed method reaches an F-Measure score of 86.35%, while the F-Measure scores for inter- and intraobserver variability are 71.63% and 76.18%, respectively. The obtained results are positive. Especially, considering the branching detection task is very challenging, due to high variability in bifurcation dimensions and appearance.