Abstract: Graphical symbol recognition and spotting recently have become an important research activity. In this work we present a descriptor for symbols, especially for line drawings. The descriptor is based on the graph representation of graphical objects. We construct graphs from the vectorized information of the binarized images, where the critical points detected by the vectorization algorithm are considered as nodes and the lines joining them are considered as edges. Graph paths between two nodes in a graph are the finite sequences of nodes following the order from the starting to the final node. The occurrences of different graph paths in a given graph is an important feature, as they capture the geometrical and structural attributes of a graph. So the graph representing a symbol can efficiently be represent by the occurrences of its different paths. Their occurrences in a symbol can be obtained in terms of a histogram counting the number of some fixed prototype paths, we call the histogram as the Bag-of-GraphPaths (BOGP). These BOGP histograms are used as a descriptor to measure the distance among the symbols in vector space. We use the descriptor for three applications, they are: (1) classification of the graphical symbols, (2) spotting of the architectural symbols on floorplans, (3) classification of the historical handwritten words.

Abstract: Staff removal is an important preprocessing step of the Optical Music Recognition (OMR). The process aims to remove the stafflines from a musical document and retain only the musical symbols, later these symbols are used effectively to identify the music information. This paper proposes a simple but robust method to remove stafflines from printed musical scores. In the proposed methodology we have considered a staffline segment as a horizontal linkage of vertical black runs with uniform height. We have used the neighbouring properties of a staffline segment to validate it as a true segment. We have considered the dataset along with the deformations described in for evaluation purpose. From experimentation we have got encouraging results.

Abstract: Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is an emerging task in computer vision, allowing to retrieve natural images relevant to sketch queries that might not been seen in the training phase. Existing works either require aligned sketch-image pairs or inefficient memory fusion layer for mapping the visual information to a semantic space. In this work, we propose a semantically aligned paired cycle-consistent generative (SEM-PCYC) model for zero-shot SBIR, where each branch maps the visual information to a common semantic space via an adversarial training. Each of these branches maintains a cycle consistency that only requires supervision at category levels, and avoids the need of highly-priced aligned sketch-image pairs. A classification criteria on the generators' outputs ensures the visual to semantic space mapping to be discriminating. Furthermore, we propose to combine textual and hierarchical side information via a feature selection auto-encoder that selects discriminating side information within a same end-to-end model. Our results demonstrate a significant boost in zero-shot SBIR performance over the state-of-the-art on the challenging Sketchy and TU-Berlin datasets.

Abstract: Due to its complex geometry, the basal ring is often omitted when putting different heart geometries into correspondence. In this paper, we present the first results on a new mapping of the left ventricle basal rings onto a normalized coordinate system using a fold-over free approach to the solution to the Laplacian. To guarantee correspondences between different basal rings, we imposed some internal constrained positions at anatomical landmarks in the normalized coordinate system. To prevent internal fold-overs, constraints are handled by cutting the volume into regions defined by anatomical features and mapping each piece of the volume separately. Initial results presented in this paper indicate that our method is able to handle internal constrains without introducing fold-overs and thus guarantees one-to-one mappings between different basal ring geometries.

Abstract: The availability of open, ground-truthed datasets and clear performance metrics is a crucial factor in the development of an application domain. The domain of colour text image analysis (real scenes, Web and spam images, scanned colour documents) has traditionally suffered from a lack of a comprehensive performance evaluation framework. Such a framework is extremely difficult to specify, and corresponding pixel-level accurate information tedious to define. In this paper we discuss the challenges and technical issues associated with developing such a framework. Then, we describe a complete framework for the evaluation of text extraction methods at multiple levels, provide a detailed ground-truth specification and present a case study on how this framework can be used in a real-life situation.

Abstract: Bronchoscopy allows to examine the patient airways for detection of lesions and sampling of tissues without surgery. A main drawback in lung cancer diagnosis is the diculty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path to the nodule that has to be biopsied. The most extended guidance uses uoroscopy which implies repeated radiation of clinical sta and patients. Alternatives such as virtual bronchoscopy or electromagnetic navigation are very expensive and not completely robust to blood, mocus or deformations as to be extensively used. We propose a method that extracts and tracks stable lumen regions at dierent levels of the bronchial tree. The tracked regions are stored in a tree that encodes the anatomical structure of the scene which can be useful to retrieve the path to the lesion that the clinician should follow to do the biopsy. We present a multi-expert validation of our anatomical landmark extraction in 3 intra-operative ultrathin explorations.