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Arnau Ramisa, Shrihari Vasudevan, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Evaluation of the SIFT Object Recognition Method in Mobile Robots: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. In 12th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 202, pp. 9–18).
Abstract: General object recognition in mobile robots is of primary importance in order to enhance the representation of the environment that robots will use for their reasoning processes. Therefore, we contribute reduce this gap by evaluating the SIFT Object Recognition method in a challenging dataset, focusing on issues relevant to mobile robotics. Resistance of the method to the robotics working conditions was found, but it was limited mainly to well-textured objects.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2009). Exploring Arterial Dynamics and Structures in IntraVascular Ultrasound Sequences (Debora Gil, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death in developed countries. Most of them are caused by arterial (specially coronary) diseases, mainly caused by plaque accumulation. Such pathology narrows blood flow (stenosis) and affects artery bio- mechanical elastic properties (atherosclerosis). In the last decades, IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) has become a usual imaging technique for the diagnosis and follow up of arterial diseases. IVUS is a catheter-based imaging technique which shows a sequence of cross sections of the artery under study. Inspection of a single image gives information about the percentage of stenosis. Meanwhile, inspection of longitudinal views provides information about artery bio-mechanical properties, which can prevent a fatal outcome of the cardiovascular disease. On one hand, dynamics of arteries (due to heart pumping among others) is a major artifact for exploring tissue bio-mechanical properties. On the other one, manual stenosis measurements require a manual tracing of vessel borders, which is a time-consuming task and might suffer from inter-observer variations. This PhD thesis proposes several image processing tools for exploring vessel dy- namics and structures. We present a physics-based model to extract, analyze and correct vessel in-plane rigid dynamics and to retrieve cardiac phase. Furthermore, we introduce a deterministic-statistical method for automatic vessel borders detection. In particular, we address adventitia layer segmentation. An accurate validation pro- tocol to ensure reliable clinical applicability of the methods is a crucial step in any proposal of an algorithm. In this thesis we take special care in designing a valida- tion protocol for each approach proposed and we contribute to the in vivo dynamics validation with a quantitative and objective score to measure the amount of motion suppressed.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Debora Gil, Eduard Fernandez-Nofrerias, Petia Radeva, & Enric Marti. (2009). Approaching Artery Rigid Dynamics in IVUS. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 28(11), 1670–1680.
Abstract: Tissue biomechanical properties (like strain and stress) are playing an increasing role in diagnosis and long-term treatment of intravascular coronary diseases. Their assessment strongly relies on estimation of vessel wall deformation. Since intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences allow visualizing vessel morphology and reflect its dynamics, this technique represents a useful tool for evaluation of tissue mechanical properties. Image misalignment introduced by vessel-catheter motion is a major artifact for a proper tracking of tissue deformation. In this work, we focus on compensating and assessing IVUS rigid in-plane motion due to heart beating. Motion parameters are computed by considering both the vessel geometry and its appearance in the image. Continuum mechanics laws serve to introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; whereas results in in vivo pullbacks show the reliability of the presented methodologies in clinical cases.
Keywords: Fourier analysis; intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) dynamics; longitudinal motion; quality measures; tissue deformation.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Andrew Bagdanov, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2009). Towards Real-Time Human Action Recognition. In 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 5524). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This work presents a novel approach to human detection based action-recognition in real-time. To realize this goal our method first detects humans in different poses using a correlation-based approach. Recognition of actions is done afterward based on the change of the angular values subtended by various body parts. Real-time human detection and action recognition are very challenging, and most state-of-the-art approaches employ complex feature extraction and classification techniques, which ultimately becomes a handicap for real-time recognition. Our correlation-based method, on the other hand, is computationally efficient and uses very simple gradient-based features. For action recognition angular features of body parts are extracted using a skeleton technique. Results for action recognition are comparable with the present state-of-the-art.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2009). Natural Facial Expression Recognition Using Dynamic and Static Schemes. In 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 5875, 730–739). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Affective computing is at the core of a new paradigm in HCI and AI represented by human-centered computing. Within this paradigm, it is expected that machines will be enabled with perceiving capabilities, making them aware about users’ affective state. The current paper addresses the problem of facial expression recognition from monocular videos sequences. We propose a dynamic facial expression recognition scheme, which is proven to be very efficient. Furthermore, it is conveniently compared with several static-based systems adopting different magnitude of facial expression. We provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM). We also provide performance evaluations using arbitrary test video sequences.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Jordi Vitria, & D. Gatica-Perez. (2009). You are Fired! Nonverbal Role Analysis in Competitive Meetings. In IEEE International Conference on Audio, Speech and Signal Processing (1949–1952).
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of social interaction analysis in competitive meetings, using nonverbal cues. For our study, we made use of ldquoThe Apprenticerdquo reality TV show, which features a competition for a real, highly paid corporate job. Our analysis is centered around two tasks regarding a person's role in a meeting: predicting the person with the highest status and predicting the fired candidates. The current study was carried out using nonverbal audio cues. Results obtained from the analysis of a full season of the show, representing around 90 minutes of audio data, are very promising (up to 85.7% of accuracy in the first case and up to 92.8% in the second case). Our approach is based only on the nonverbal interaction dynamics during the meeting without relying on the spoken words.
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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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C. Alejandro Parraga, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2009). Psychophysical measurements to model inter-colour regions of colour-naming space. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 53(3), 031106 (8 pages).
Abstract: JCR Impact Factor 2009: 0.391
In this paper, we present a fuzzy-set of parametric functions which segment the CIE lab space into eleven regions which correspond to the group of common universal categories present in all evolved languages as identified by anthropologists and linguists. The set of functions is intended to model a color-name assignment task by humans and differs from other models in its emphasis on the inter-color boundary regions, which were explicitly measured by means of a psychophysics experiment. In our particular implementation, the CIE lab space was segmented into eleven color categories using a Triple Sigmoid as the fuzzy sets basis, whose parameters are included in this paper. The model’s parameters were adjusted according to the psychophysical results of a yes/no discrimination paradigm where observers had to choose (English) names for isoluminant colors belonging to regions in-between neighboring categories. These colors were presented on a calibrated CRT monitor (14-bit x 3 precision). The experimental results show that inter- color boundary regions are much less defined than expected and color samples other than those near the most representatives are needed to define the position and shape of boundaries between categories. The extended set of model parameters is given as a table.
Keywords: image processing; Analysis
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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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Carlo Gatta, Juan Diego Gomez, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Toward robust myocardial blush grade estimation in contrast angiography. In 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 5524, 249–256). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The assessment of Myocardial Blush Grade after primary angioplasty is a precious diagnostic tool to understand if the patient needs further medication or the use of specifics drugs. Unfortunately, the assessment of MBG is difficult for non highly specialized staff. Experimental data show that there is poor correlation between MBG assessment of low and high specialized staff, thus reducing its applicability. This paper proposes a method able to achieve an objective measure of MBG, or a set of parameters that correlates with the MBG. The method tracks the blush area starting from just one single frame tagged by the physician. As a consequence, the blush area is kept isolated from contaminating phenomena such as diaphragm and arteries movements. We also present a method to extract four parameters that are expected to correlate with the MBG. Preliminary results show that the method is capable of extracting interesting information regarding the behavior of the myocardial perfusion.
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Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. M. Ferre, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Fast Rigid Registration of Vascular Structures in IVUS Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 13(6), 106–1011.
Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) technology permits visualization of high-resolution images of internal vascular structures. IVUS is a unique image-guiding tool to display longitudinal view of the vessels, and estimate the length and size of vascular structures with the goal of accurate diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to pulsatile contraction and expansion of the heart, the captured images are affected by different motion artifacts that make visual inspection difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that aligns vascular structures and strongly reduces the saw-shaped oscillation, simplifying the inspection of longitudinal cuts; it reduces the motion artifacts caused by the displacement of the catheter in the short-axis plane and the catheter rotation due to vessel tortuosity. The algorithm prototype aligns 3.16 frames/s and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with similar computational cost. The speed of the algorithm is crucial since it allows to inspect the corrected sequence during patient intervention. Moreover, we improved an indirect methodology for IVUS rigid registration algorithm evaluation.
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Carlo Gatta, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Bilateral Enhancers. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 3161–3165).
Abstract: Ten years ago the concept of bilateral filtering (BF) became popular in the image processing community. The core of the idea is to blend the effect of a spatial filter, as e.g. the Gaussian filter, with the effect of a filter that acts on image values. The two filters acts on orthogonal domains of a picture: the 2D lattice of the image support and the intensity (or color) domain. The BF approach is an intuitive way to blend these two filters giving rise to algorithms that perform difficult tasks requiring a relatively simple design. In this paper we extend the concept of BF, proposing the bilateral enhancers (BE). We show how to design proper functions to obtain an edge-preserving smoothing and a selective sharpening. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm can perform edge-preserving smoothing and selective sharpening simultaneously in a single filtering.
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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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Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2009). An iterative multiresolution scheme for SFM with missing data. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 34(3), 240–258.
Abstract: Several techniques have been proposed for tackling the Structure from Motion problem through factorization in the case of missing data. However, when the percentage of unknown data is high, most of them may not perform as well as expected. Focussing on this problem, an iterative multiresolution scheme, which aims at recovering missing entries in the originally given input matrix, is proposed. Information recovered following a coarse-to-fine strategy is used for filling in the missing entries. The objective is to recover, as much as possible, missing data in the given matrix.
Thus, when a factorization technique is applied to the partially or totally filled in matrix, instead of to the originally given input one, better results will be obtained. An evaluation study about the robustness to missing and noisy data is reported.
Experimental results obtained with synthetic and real video sequences are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.
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D. Jayagopi, Bogdan Raducanu, & D. Gatica-Perez. (2009). Characterizing conversational group dynamics using nonverbal behaviour. In 10th IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (370–373).
Abstract: This paper addresses the novel problem of characterizing conversational group dynamics. It is well documented in social psychology that depending on the objectives a group, the dynamics are different. For example, a competitive meeting has a different objective from that of a collaborative meeting. We propose a method to characterize group dynamics based on the joint description of a group members' aggregated acoustical nonverbal behaviour to classify two meeting datasets (one being cooperative-type and the other being competitive-type). We use 4.5 hours of real behavioural multi-party data and show that our methodology can achieve a classification rate of upto 100%.
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