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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 26(7), 763–779.
Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Conditional Random Fields for image segmentation in Intravascular Ultrasound. In Medical Image Computing in Catalunya: Graduate Student Workshop (13–14).
Abstract: We present a Conditional Random Fields based approach for segmenting Intravascular Ultrasond (IVUS) images. The presented method uses a contextual discriminative graphical model to deal with the presence of distorsions and artifacts in IVUS images, that turns the segmentation of interesting regions into a difficult task. An accurate lumen segmentation on IVUS longitudinal images is achieved.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). A meta-learning approach to Conditional Random Fields using Error-Correcting Output Codes. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (710–713).
Abstract: We present a meta-learning framework for the design of potential functions for Conditional Random Fields. The design of both node potential and edge potential is formulated as a classification problem where margin classifiers are used. The set of state transitions for the edge potential is treated as a set of different classes, thus defining a multi-class learning problem. The Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) technique is used to deal with the multi-class problem. Furthermore, the point defined by the combination of margin classifiers in the ECOC space is interpreted in a probabilistic manner, and the obtained distance values are then converted into potential values. The proposed model exhibits very promising results when applied to two real detection problems.
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Francisco Javier Orozco. (2010). Human Emotion Evaluation on Facial Image Sequences (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Psychological evidence has emphasized the importance of affective behaviour understanding due to its high impact in nowadays interaction humans and computers. All
type of affective and behavioural patterns such as gestures, emotions and mental
states are highly displayed through the face, head and body. Therefore, this thesis is
focused to analyse affective behaviours on head and face. To this end, head and facial
movements are encoded by using appearance based tracking methods. Specifically,
a wise combination of deformable models captures rigid and non-rigid movements of
different kinematics; 3D head pose, eyebrows, mouth, eyelids and irises are taken into
account as basis for extracting features from databases of video sequences. This approach combines the strengths of adaptive appearance models, optimization methods
and backtracking techniques.
For about thirty years, computer sciences have addressed the investigation on
human emotions to the automatic recognition of six prototypic emotions suggested
by Darwin and systematized by Paul Ekman in the seventies. The Facial Action
Coding System (FACS) which uses discrete movements of the face (called Action
units or AUs) to code the six facial emotions named anger, disgust, fear, happy-Joy,
sadness and surprise. However, human emotions are much complex patterns that
have not received the same attention from computer scientists.
Simon Baron-Cohen proposed a new taxonomy of emotions and mental states
without a system coding of the facial actions. These 426 affective behaviours are
more challenging for the understanding of human emotions. Beyond of classically
classifying the six basic facial expressions, more subtle gestures, facial actions and
spontaneous emotions are considered here. By assessing confidence on the recognition
results, exploring spatial and temporal relationships of the features, some methods are
combined and enhanced for developing new taxonomy of expressions and emotions.
The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computer vision system, including both facial feature extraction, expression recognition and emotion understanding
by building a bottom-up reasoning process. Building a detailed taxonomy of human
affective behaviours is an interesting challenge for head-face-based image analysis
methods. In this paper, we exploit the strengths of Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) to enhance an on-line head-face tracker. A relationship between head pose and
local facial movements is studied according to their cognitive interpretation on affective expressions and emotions. Active Shape Models are synthesized for AAMs based
on CCA-regression. Head pose and facial actions are fused into a maximally correlated space in order to assess expressiveness, confidence and classification in a CBR system. The CBR solutions are also correlated to the cognitive features, which allow
avoiding exhaustive search when recognizing new head-face features. Subsequently,
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayesian Networks are applied for learning the
spatial relationships of facial expressions. Similarly, the temporal evolution of facial
expressions, emotion and mental states are analysed based on Factorized Dynamic
Bayesian Networks (FaDBN).
As results, the bottom-up system recognizes six facial expressions, six basic emotions and six mental states, plus enhancing this categorization with confidence assessment at each level, intensity of expressions and a complete taxonomy
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Herve Locteau, Sebastien Mace, Ernest Valveny, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2010). Extraction des pieces de un plan de habitation. In Colloque Internacional Francophone de l´Ecrit et le Document (1–12).
Abstract: In this article, a method to extract the rooms of an architectural floor plan image is described. We first present a line detection algorithm to extract long lines in the image. Those lines are analyzed to identify the existing walls. From this point, room extraction can be seen as a classical segmentation task for which each region corresponds to a room. The chosen resolution strategy consists in recursively decomposing the image until getting nearly convex regions. The notion of convexity is difficult to quantify, and the selection of separation lines can also be rough. Thus, we take advantage of knowledge associated to architectural floor plans in order to obtain mainly rectangular rooms. Preliminary tests on a set of real documents show promising results.
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Ignasi Rius. (2010). Motion Priors for Efficient Bayesian Tracking in Human Sequence Evaluation (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Recovering human motion by visual analysis is a challenging computer vision research
area with a lot of potential applications. Model-based tracking approaches, and in
particular particle lters, formulate the problem as a Bayesian inference task whose
aim is to sequentially estimate the distribution of the parameters of a human body
model over time. These approaches strongly rely on good dynamical and observation
models to predict and update con gurations of the human body according to measurements from the image data. However, it is very di cult to design observation
models which extract useful and reliable information from image sequences robustly.
This results specially challenging in monocular tracking given that only one viewpoint
from the scene is available. Therefore, to overcome these limitations strong motion
priors are needed to guide the exploration of the state space.
The work presented in this Thesis is aimed to retrieve the 3D motion parameters
of a human body model from incomplete and noisy measurements of a monocular
image sequence. These measurements consist of the 2D positions of a reduced set of
joints in the image plane. Towards this end, we present a novel action-speci c model
of human motion which is trained from several databases of real motion-captured
performances of an action, and is used as a priori knowledge within a particle ltering
scheme.
Body postures are represented by means of a simple and compact stick gure
model which uses direction cosines to represent the direction of body limbs in the 3D
Cartesian space. Then, for a given action, Principal Component Analysis is applied to
the training data to perform dimensionality reduction over the highly correlated input
data. Before the learning stage of the action model, the input motion performances
are synchronized by means of a novel dense matching algorithm based on Dynamic
Programming. The algorithm synchronizes all the motion sequences of the same
action class, nding an optimal solution in real-time.
Then, a probabilistic action model is learnt, based on the synchronized motion
examples, which captures the variability and temporal evolution of full-body motion
within a speci c action. In particular, for each action, the parameters learnt are: a
representative manifold for the action consisting of its mean performance, the standard deviation from the mean performance, the mean observed direction vectors from
each motion subsequence of a given length and the expected error at a given time
instant.
Subsequently, the action-speci c model is used as a priori knowledge on human
motion which improves the e ciency and robustness of the overall particle filtering tracking framework. First, the dynamic model guides the particles according to similar
situations previously learnt. Then, the state space is constrained so only feasible
human postures are accepted as valid solutions at each time step. As a result, the
state space is explored more e ciently as the particle set covers the most probable
body postures.
Finally, experiments are carried out using test sequences from several motion
databases. Results point out that our tracker scheme is able to estimate the rough
3D con guration of a full-body model providing only the 2D positions of a reduced
set of joints. Separate tests on the sequence synchronization method and the subsequence probabilistic matching technique are also provided.
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Ivan Huerta. (2010). Foreground Object Segmentation and Shadow Detection for Video Sequences in Uncontrolled Environments (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: This Thesis is mainly divided in two parts. The first one presents a study of motion
segmentation problems. Based on this study, a novel algorithm for mobile-object
segmentation from a static background scene is also presented. This approach is
demonstrated robust and accurate under most of the common problems in motion
segmentation. The second one tackles the problem of shadows in depth. Firstly, a
bottom-up approach based on a chromatic shadow detector is presented to deal with
umbra shadows. Secondly, a top-down approach based on a tracking system has been
developed in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection.
In our first contribution, a case analysis of motion segmentation problems is presented by taking into account the problems associated with different cues, namely
colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is a hybrid architecture which
handles the main problems observed in such a case analysis, by fusing (i) the knowledge from these three cues and (ii) a temporal difference algorithm. On the one hand,
we enhance the colour and edge models to solve both global/local illumination changes
(shadows and highlights) and camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is
exploited to cope with a very challenging problem such as the camouflage in chroma.
On the other hand, the intensity cue is also applied when colour and edge cues are not
available, such as when beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference
is included to segment motion when these three cues are not available, such as that
background not visible during the training period. Lastly, the approach is enhanced
for allowing ghost detection. As a result, our approach obtains very accurate and robust motion segmentation in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, as quantitatively and
qualitatively demonstrated in the experimental results, by comparing our approach
with most best-known state-of-the-art approaches.
Motion Segmentation has to deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting
moving objects. Most segmentation approaches dealing with shadow detection are
typically restricted to penumbra shadows. Therefore, such techniques cannot cope
well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadows are usually detected as part
of moving objects.
Firstly, a bottom-up approach for detection and removal of chromatic moving
shadows in surveillance scenarios is proposed. Secondly, a top-down approach based
on kalman filters to detect and track shadows has been developed in order to enhance
the chromatic shadow detection. In the Bottom-up part, the shadow detection approach applies a novel technique based on gradient and colour models for separating
chromatic moving shadows from moving objects.
Well-known colour and gradient models are extended and improved into an invariant colour cone model and an invariant gradient model, respectively, to perform
automatic segmentation while detecting potential shadows. Hereafter, the regions corresponding to potential shadows are grouped by considering ”a bluish effect” and an
edge partitioning. Lastly, (i) temporal similarities between local gradient structures
and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are
analysed for all potential shadow regions in order to finally identify umbra shadows.
In the top-down process, after detection of objects and shadows both are tracked
using Kalman filters, in order to enhance the chromatic shadow detection, when it
fails to detect a shadow. Firstly, this implies a data association between the blobs
(foreground and shadow) and Kalman filters. Secondly, an event analysis of the different data association cases is performed, and occlusion handling is managed by a
Probabilistic Appearance Model (PAM). Based on this association, temporal consistency is looked for the association between foregrounds and shadows and their
respective Kalman Filters. From this association several cases are studied, as a result
lost chromatic shadows are correctly detected. Finally, the tracking results are used
as feedback to improve the shadow and object detection.
Unlike other approaches, our method does not make any a-priori assumptions
about camera location, surface geometries, surface textures, shapes and types of
shadows, objects, and background. Experimental results show the performance and
accuracy of our approach in different shadowed materials and illumination conditions.
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Jaime Moreno, Xavier Otazu, & Maria Vanrell. (2010). Local Perceptual Weighting in JPEG2000 for Color Images. In 5th European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging and Vision and 12th International Symposium on Multispectral Colour Science (255–260).
Abstract: The aim of this work is to explain how to apply perceptual concepts to define a perceptual pre-quantizer and to improve JPEG2000 compressor. The approach consists in quantizing wavelet transform coefficients using some of the human visual system behavior properties. Noise is fatal to image compression performance, because it can be both annoying for the observer and consumes excessive bandwidth when the imagery is transmitted. Perceptual pre-quantization reduces unperceivable details and thus improve both visual impression and transmission properties. The comparison between JPEG2000 without and with perceptual pre-quantization shows that the latter is not favorable in PSNR, but the recovered image is more compressed at the same or even better visual quality measured with a weighted PSNR. Perceptual criteria were taken from the CIWaM (Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model).
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Jaime Moreno, Xavier Otazu, & Maria Vanrell. (2010). Contribution of CIWaM in JPEG2000 Quantization for Color Images. In Proceedings of The CREATE 2010 Conference (132–136).
Abstract: The aim of this work is to explain how to apply perceptual concepts to define a perceptual pre-quantizer and to improve JPEG2000 compressor. The approach consists in quantizing wavelet transform coefficients using some of the human visual system behavior properties. Noise is fatal to image compression performance, because it can be both annoying for the observer and consumes excessive bandwidth when the imagery is transmitted. Perceptual pre-quantization reduces unperceivable details and thus improve both visual impression and transmission properties. The comparison between JPEG2000 without and with perceptual pre-quantization shows that the latter is not favorable in PSNR, but the recovered image is more compressed at the same or even better visual quality measured with a weighted PSNR. Perceptual criteria were taken from the CIWaM(ChromaticInductionWaveletModel).
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Jaume Amores. (2010). Vocabulary-based Approaches for Multiple-Instance Data: a Comparative Study. In 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (4246–4250).
Abstract: Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has become a hot topic and many different algorithms have been proposed in the last years. Despite this fact, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light into the characteristics of the different methods and their behavior in different scenarios. In this paper we provide such an analysis. We include methods from different families, and pay special attention to vocabulary-based approaches, a new family of methods that has not received much attention in the MIL literature. The empirical comparison includes seven databases from four heterogeneous domains, implementations of eight popular MIL methods, and a study of the behavior under synthetic conditions. Based on this analysis, we show that, with an appropriate implementation, vocabulary-based approaches outperform other MIL methods in most of the cases, showing in general a more consistent performance.
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Jaume Amores, David Geronimo, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). Multiple instance and active learning for weakly-supervised object-class segmentation. In 3rd IEEE International Conference on Machine Vision.
Abstract: In object-class segmentation, one of the most tedious tasks is to manually segment many object examples in order to learn a model of the object category. Yet, there has been little research on reducing the degree of manual annotation for
object-class segmentation. In this work we explore alternative strategies which do not require full manual segmentation of the object in the training set. In particular, we study the use of bounding boxes as a coarser and much cheaper form of segmentation and we perform a comparative study of several Multiple-Instance Learning techniques that allow to obtain a model with this type of weak annotation. We show that some of these methods can be competitive, when used with coarse
segmentations, with methods that require full manual segmentation of the objects. Furthermore, we show how to use active learning combined with this weakly supervised strategy.
As we see, this strategy permits to reduce the amount of annotation and optimize the number of examples that require full manual segmentation in the training set.
Keywords: Multiple Instance Learning; Active Learning; Object-class segmentation.
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Jaume Garcia, Albert Andaluz, Debora Gil, & Francesc Carreras. (2010). Decoupled External Forces in a Predictor-Corrector Segmentation Scheme for LV Contours in Tagged MR Images. In 32nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (pp. 4805–4808).
Abstract: Computation of functional regional scores requires proper identification of LV contours. On one hand, manual segmentation is robust, but it is time consuming and requires high expertise. On the other hand, the tag pattern in TMR sequences is a problem for automatic segmentation of LV boundaries. We propose a segmentation method based on a predictorcorrector (Active Contours – Shape Models) scheme. Special stress is put in the definition of the AC external forces. First, we introduce a semantic description of the LV that discriminates myocardial tissue by using texture and motion descriptors. Second, in order to ensure convergence regardless of the initial contour, the external energy is decoupled according to the orientation of the edges in the image potential. We have validated the model in terms of error in segmented contours and accuracy of regional clinical scores.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2010). Endowing Canonical Geometries to Cardiac Structures. In O. Camara, M. Pop, K. Rhode, M. Sermesant, N. Smith, & A. Young (Eds.), Statistical Atlases And Computational Models Of The Heart (Vol. 6364, pp. 124–133). LNCS. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.
Abstract: International conference on Cardiac electrophysiological simulation challenge
In this paper, we show that canonical (shape-based) geometries can be endowed to cardiac structures using tubular coordinates defined over their medial axis. We give an analytic formulation of these geometries by means of B-Splines. Since B-Splines present vector space structure PCA can be applied to their control points and statistical models relating boundaries and the interior of the anatomical structures can be derived. We demonstrate the applicability in two cardiac structures, the 3D Left Ventricular volume, and the 2D Left-Right ventricle set in 2D Short Axis view.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Luis Badiella, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Francesc Carreras, Sandra Pujades, et al. (2010). A Normalized Framework for the Design of Feature Spaces Assessing the Left Ventricular Function. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 29(3), 733–745.
Abstract: A through description of the left ventricle functionality requires combining complementary regional scores. A main limitation is the lack of multiparametric normality models oriented to the assessment of regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMA). This paper covers two main topics involved in RWMA assessment. We propose a general framework allowing the fusion and comparison across subjects of different regional scores. Our framework is used to explore which combination of regional scores (including 2-D motion and strains) is better suited for RWMA detection. Our statistical analysis indicates that for a proper (within interobserver variability) identification of RWMA, models should consider motion and extreme strains.
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Jaume Gibert, & Ernest Valveny. (2010). Graph Embedding based on Nodes Attributes Representatives and a Graph of Words Representation. In I. Ulusoy and F. Escolano T. Windeatt R. C. W. In E.R. Hancock (Ed.), 13th International worshop on structural and syntactic pattern recognition and 8th international worshop on statistical pattern recognition (Vol. 6218, 223–232). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Although graph embedding has recently been used to extend statistical pattern recognition techniques to the graph domain, some existing embeddings are usually computationally expensive as they rely on classical graph-based operations. In this paper we present a new way to embed graphs into vector spaces by first encapsulating the information stored in the original graph under another graph representation by clustering the attributes of the graphs to be processed. This new representation makes the association of graphs to vectors an easy step by just arranging both node attributes and the adjacency matrix in the form of vectors. To test our method, we use two different databases of graphs whose nodes attributes are of different nature. A comparison with a reference method permits to show that this new embedding is better in terms of classification rates, while being much more faster.
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