Abstract: Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue, obtaining a reliable ground truth. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available study cases due to the complex procedure of histological analysis. In this work we propose a novel semi-supervised approach to enhance the in-vitro training set by including examples from in-vivo coronary plaques data set. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is applied on in-vivo data and plaque characterization performances are evaluated by Leave-One-Patient-Out cross-validation technique. Supervised data inclusion improves global classification accuracy from 89.39% to 91.82%.

Abstract: We present ECOC-DRF, a framework where potential functions for Discriminative Random Fields are formulated as an ensemble of classifiers. We introduce the label trick, a technique to express transitions in the pairwise potential as meta-classes. This allows to independently learn any possible transition between labels without assuming any pre-defined model. The Error Correcting Output Codes matrix is used as ensemble framework for the combination of margin classifiers. We apply ECOC-DRF to a large set of classification problems, covering synthetic, natural and medical images for binary and multi-class cases, outperforming state-of-the art in almost all the experiments.

Abstract: In this paper we tackle the automatic detection of struts elements (metallic braces of a stent device) in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) sequences. The proposed method is based on context-aware classification of IVUS images, where we use Multi-Class Multi-Scale Stacked Sequential Learning (M2SSL). Additionally, we introduce a novel technique to reduce the amount of required contextual features. The comparison with binary and multi-class learning is also performed, using a dataset of IVUS images with struts manually annotated by an expert. The best performing configuration reaches a F-measure F = 63.97% .

Abstract: Purpose: An intraluminal coronary stent is a metal mesh tube deployed in a stenotic artery during Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI), in order to prevent acute vessel occlusion. The identication of struts location and the denition of the stent shape are relevant for PCI planning 15 and for patient follow-up. We present a fully-automatic framework for Computer-Aided Detection
(CAD) of intra-coronary stents in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) image sequences. The CAD system is able to detect stent struts and estimate the stent shape.
Methods: The proposed CAD uses machine learning to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the local structure of the vessel by means of semantic classication. The output of the classication 20 stage is then used to detect struts and to estimate the stent shape. The proposed approach is validated using a multi-centric data-set of 1,015 images from 107 IVUS sequences containing both metallic and bio-absorbable stents.
Results: The method was able to detect structs in both metallic stents with an overall F-measure of 77.7% and a mean distance of 0.15 mm from manually annotated struts, and in bio-absorbable 25 stents with an overall F-measure of 77.4% and a mean distance of 0.09 mm from manually annotated struts.
Conclusions: The results are close to the inter-observer variability and suggest that the system has the potential of being used as method for aiding percutaneous interventions.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the continual learning of Vision Transformers (ViT) for the challenging exemplar-free scenario, with special focus on how to efficiently distill the knowledge of its crucial self-attention mechanism (SAM). Our work takes an initial step towards a surgical investigation of SAM for designing coherent continual learning methods in ViTs. We first carry out an evaluation of established continual learning regularization techniques. We then examine the effect of regularization when applied to two key enablers of SAM: (a) the contextualized embedding layers, for their ability to capture well-scaled representations with respect to the values, and (b) the prescaled attention maps, for carrying value-independent global contextual information. We depict the perks of each distilling strategy on two image recognition benchmarks (CIFAR100 and ImageNet-32) – while (a) leads to a better overall accuracy, (b) helps enhance the rigidity by maintaining competitive performances. Furthermore, we identify the limitation imposed by the symmetric nature of regularization losses. To alleviate this, we propose an asymmetric variant and apply it to the pooled output distillation (POD) loss adapted for ViTs. Our experiments confirm that introducing asymmetry to POD boosts its plasticity while retaining stability across (a) and (b). Moreover, we acknowledge low forgetting measures for all the compared methods, indicating that ViTs might be naturally inclined continual learners. 1

Abstract: In this paper we dene a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for structure detection and segmentation of images of documents.
Two sets of text classication features are used to perform an initial classication of each zone of the page. Then, the document segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a stochastic grammar. We used a dataset of historical marriage license books to validate this approach. We also tested several inference algorithms for Probabilistic Graphical Models
and the results showed that the proposed grammatical model outperformed
the other methods. Furthermore, grammars also provide the document structure
along with its segmentation.

Abstract: Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.
Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.
In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.