Francisco Alvaro, Francisco Cruz, Joan Andreu Sanchez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Jose Miguel Bemedi. (2013). Page Segmentation of Structured Documents Using 2D Stochastic Context-Free Grammars. In 6th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 7887, pp. 133–140). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we define a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for page segmentation of structured documents. Two sets of text classification features are used to perform an initial classification of each zone of the page. Then, the page segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a grammar. This approach is compared to Conditional Random Fields and results show significant improvements in several cases. Furthermore, grammars provide a detailed segmentation that allowed a semantic evaluation which also validates this model.
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Francisco Cruz, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2013). Handwritten Line Detection via an EM Algorithm. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 718–722).
Abstract: In this paper we present a handwritten line segmentation method devised to work on documents composed of several paragraphs with multiple line orientations. The method is based on a variation of the EM algorithm for the estimation of a set of regression lines between the connected components that compose the image. We evaluated our method on the ICDAR2009 handwriting segmentation contest dataset with promising results that overcome most of the presented methods. In addition, we prove the usability of the presented method by performing line segmentation on the George Washington database obtaining encouraging results.
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Francisco Javier Orozco, Ognjen Rudovic, Jordi Gonzalez, & Maja Pantic. (2013). Hierarchical On-line Appearance-Based Tracking for 3D Head Pose, Eyebrows, Lips, Eyelids and Irises. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 31(4), 322–340.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an On-line Appearance-Based Tracker (OABT) for simultaneous tracking of 3D head pose, lips, eyebrows, eyelids and irises in monocular video sequences. In contrast to previously proposed tracking approaches, which deal with face and gaze tracking separately, our OABT can also be used for eyelid and iris tracking, as well as 3D head pose, lips and eyebrows facial actions tracking. Furthermore, our approach applies an on-line learning of changes in the appearance of the tracked target. Hence, the prior training of appearance models, which usually requires a large amount of labeled facial images, is avoided. Moreover, the proposed method is built upon a hierarchical combination of three OABTs, which are optimized using a Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm (LMA) enhanced with line-search procedures. This, in turn, makes the proposed method robust to changes in lighting conditions, occlusions and translucent textures, as evidenced by our experiments. Finally, the proposed method achieves head and facial actions tracking in real-time.
Keywords: On-line appearance models; Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm; Line-search optimization; 3D face tracking; Facial action tracking; Eyelid tracking; Iris tracking
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Gemma Roig, Xavier Boix, R. de Nijs, Sebastian Ramos, K. Kühnlenz, & Luc Van Gool. (2013). Active MAP Inference in CRFs for Efficient Semantic Segmentation. In 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 2312–2319).
Abstract: Most MAP inference algorithms for CRFs optimize an energy function knowing all the potentials. In this paper, we focus on CRFs where the computational cost of instantiating the potentials is orders of magnitude higher than MAP inference. This is often the case in semantic image segmentation, where most potentials are instantiated by slow classifiers fed with costly features. We introduce Active MAP inference 1) to on-the-fly select a subset of potentials to be instantiated in the energy function, leaving the rest of the parameters of the potentials unknown, and 2) to estimate the MAP labeling from such incomplete energy function. Results for semantic segmentation benchmarks, namely PASCAL VOC 2010 [5] and MSRC-21 [19], show that Active MAP inference achieves similar levels of accuracy but with major efficiency gains.
Keywords: Semantic Segmentation
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German Ros, J. Guerrero, Angel Sappa, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). VSLAM pose initialization via Lie groups and Lie algebras optimization. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (pp. 5740–5747).
Abstract: We present a novel technique for estimating initial 3D poses in the context of localization and Visual SLAM problems. The presented approach can deal with noise, outliers and a large amount of input data and still performs in real time in a standard CPU. Our method produces solutions with an accuracy comparable to those produced by RANSAC but can be much faster when the percentage of outliers is high or for large amounts of input data. On the current work we propose to formulate the pose estimation as an optimization problem on Lie groups, considering their manifold structure as well as their associated Lie algebras. This allows us to perform a fast and simple optimization at the same time that conserve all the constraints imposed by the Lie group SE(3). Additionally, we present several key design concepts related with the cost function and its Jacobian; aspects that are critical for the good performance of the algorithm.
Keywords: SLAM
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German Ros, J. Guerrero, Angel Sappa, Daniel Ponsa, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Fast and Robust l1-averaging-based Pose Estimation for Driving Scenarios. In 24th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Robust visual pose estimation is at the core of many computer vision applications, being fundamental for Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry problems. During the last decades, many approaches have been proposed to solve these problems, being RANSAC one of the most accepted and used. However, with the arrival of new challenges, such as large driving scenarios for autonomous vehicles, along with the improvements in the data gathering frameworks, new issues must be considered. One of these issues is the capability of a technique to deal with very large amounts of data while meeting the realtime
constraint. With this purpose in mind, we present a novel technique for the problem of robust camera-pose estimation that is more suitable for dealing with large amount of data, which additionally, helps improving the results. The method is based on a combination of a very fast coarse-evaluation function and a robust ℓ1-averaging procedure. Such scheme leads to high-quality results while taking considerably less time than RANSAC.
Experimental results on the challenging KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite are provided, showing the validity of the proposed approach.
Keywords: SLAM
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Gioacchino Vino, & Angel Sappa. (2013). Revisiting Harris Corner Detector Algorithm: a Gradual Thresholding Approach. In 10th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 7950, pp. 354–363). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive thresholding approach intended to increase the number of detected corners, while reducing the amount of those ones corresponding to noisy data. The proposed approach works by using the classical Harris corner detector algorithm and overcome the difficulty in finding a general threshold that work well for all the images in a given data set by proposing a novel adaptive thresholding scheme. Initially, two thresholds are used to discern between strong corners and flat regions. Then, a region based criteria is used to discriminate between weak corners and noisy points in the midway interval. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a better capability to reject false corners and, at the same time, to detect weak ones. Comparisons with the state of the art are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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H. Emrah Tasli, Cevahir Çigla, Theo Gevers, & A. Aydin Alatan. (2013). Super pixel extraction via convexity induced boundary adaptation. In 14th IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (pp. 1–6).
Abstract: This study presents an efficient super-pixel extraction algorithm with major contributions to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. Segmentation accuracy is improved through convexity constrained geodesic distance utilization; while computational efficiency is achieved by replacing complete region processing with boundary adaptation idea. Starting from the uniformly distributed rectangular equal-sized super-pixels, region boundaries are adapted to intensity edges iteratively by assigning boundary pixels to the most similar neighboring super-pixels. At each iteration, super-pixel regions are updated and hence progressively converging to compact pixel groups. Experimental results with state-of-the-art comparisons, validate the performance of the proposed technique in terms of both accuracy and speed.
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H. Emrah Tasli, Jan van Gemert, & Theo Gevers. (2013). Spot the differences: from a photograph burst to the single best picture. In 21ST ACM International Conference on Multimedia (pp. 729–732).
Abstract: With the rise of the digital camera, people nowadays typically take several near-identical photos of the same scene to maximize the chances of a good shot. This paper proposes a user-friendly tool for exploring a personal photo gallery for selecting or even creating the best shot of a scene between its multiple alternatives. This functionality is realized through a graphical user interface where the best viewpoint can be selected from a generated panorama of the scene. Once the viewpoint is selected, the user is able to go explore possible alternatives coming from the other images. Using this tool, one can explore a photo gallery efficiently. Moreover, additional compositions from other images are also possible. With such additional compositions, one can go from a burst of photographs to the single best one. Even funny compositions of images, where you can duplicate a person in the same image, are possible with our proposed tool.
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Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Albert Ali Salah, & Theo Gevers. (2013). Like Father, Like Son: Facial Expression Dynamics for Kinship Verification. In 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 1497–1504).
Abstract: Kinship verification from facial appearance is a difficult problem. This paper explores the possibility of employing facial expression dynamics in this problem. By using features that describe facial dynamics and spatio-temporal appearance over smile expressions, we show that it is possible to improve the state of the art in this problem, and verify that it is indeed possible to recognize kinship by resemblance of facial expressions. The proposed method is tested on different kin relationships. On the average, 72.89% verification accuracy is achieved on spontaneous smiles.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Apostolos Antonacopoulos, & Josep Llados. (2013). An interactive appearance-based document retrieval system for historical newspapers. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (pp. 84–87).
Abstract: In this paper we present a retrieval-based application aimed at assisting a user to semi-automatically segment an incoming flow of historical newspaper images by automatically detecting a particular type of pages based on their appearance. A visual descriptor is used to assess page similarity while a relevance feedback process allow refining the results iteratively. The application is tested on a large dataset of digitised historic newspapers.
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Josep Llados, Tomokazu Sato, Masakazu Iwamura, et al. (2013). Key-region detection for document images -applications to administrative document retrieval. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 230–234).
Abstract: In this paper we argue that a key-region detector designed to take into account the special characteristics of document images can result in the detection of less and more meaningful key-regions. We propose a fast key-region detector able to capture aspects of the structural information of the document, and demonstrate its efficiency by comparing against standard detectors in an administrative document retrieval scenario. We show that using the proposed detector results to a smaller number of detected key-regions and higher performance without any drop in speed compared to standard state of the art detectors.
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Isabel Guitart, Jordi Conesa, Luis Villarejo, Agata Lapedriza, David Masip, Antoni Perez, et al. (2013). Opinion Mining on Educational Resources at the Open University of Catalonia. In 3rd International Workshop on Adaptive Learning via Interactive, Collaborative and Emotional approaches. In conjunction with CISIS 2013: The 7th International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems (pp. 385–390).
Abstract: In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) would be extremely helpful, as the university's students often post comments on their learning experiences in them. Exploiting the content of such forums is not a simple undertaking. The volume of data involved is very large, and performing the task manually would require a great deal of effort from lecturers. As a first step to solve this problem, we propose a tool to automatically analyze the posts in forums of communities of UOC students and teachers, with a view to systematically mining the opinions they contain. This article defines the architecture of such tool and explains how lexical-semantic and language technology resources can be used to that end. For pilot testing purposes, the tool has been used to identify students' opinions on the UOC's Business Intelligence master's degree course during the last two years. The paper discusses the results of such test. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates the feasibility of using natural language parsing techniques to help teachers to make decisions. Secondly, it introduces a simple tool that can be refined and adapted to a virtual environment for the purpose in question.
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Ivan Huerta, Ariel Amato, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2013). Exploiting Multiple Cues in Motion Segmentation Based on Background Subtraction. NEUCOM - Neurocomputing, 100, 183–196.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm for mobile-object segmentation from static background scenes, which is both robust and accurate under most of the common problems found in motionsegmentation. In our first contribution, a case analysis of motionsegmentation errors is presented taking into account the inaccuracies associated with different cues, namely colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is an hybrid architecture which copes with the main issues observed in the case analysis by fusing the knowledge from the aforementioned three cues and a temporal difference algorithm. On one hand, we enhance the colour and edge models to solve not only global and local illumination changes (i.e. shadows and highlights) but also the camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is also exploited to solve the camouflage in chroma. On the other hand, the intensity cue is applied when colour and edge cues are not available because their values are beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference scheme is included to segment motion where those three cues cannot be reliably computed, for example in those background regions not visible during the training period. Lastly, our approach is extended for handling ghost detection. The proposed method obtains very accurate and robust motionsegmentation results in multiple indoor and outdoor scenarios, while outperforming the most-referred state-of-art approaches.
Keywords: Motion segmentation; Shadow suppression; Colour segmentation; Edge segmentation; Ghost detection; Background subtraction
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Ivet Rafegas. (2013). Exploring Low-Level Vision Models. Case Study: Saliency Prediction (Vol. 175). Master's thesis, , .
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