Abstract: In the last years, the interest in Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has reawakened, especially since the appearance of deep learning. However, there are very few works addressing handwritten scores. In this work we describe a full OMR pipeline for handwritten music scores by using Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks that could serve as a baseline for the research community.

Abstract: The problem of removing illuminant variations to preserve the colours of objects (colour constancy) has already been solved by the human brain using mechanisms that rely largely on centre-surround computations of local contrast. In this paper we adopt some of these biological solutions described by long known physiological findings into a simple, fully automatic, functional model (termed Adaptive Surround Modulation or ASM). In ASM, the size of a visual neuron's receptive field (RF) as well as the relationship with its surround varies according to the local contrast within the stimulus, which in turn determines the nature of the centre-surround normalisation of cortical neurons higher up in the processing chain. We modelled colour constancy by means of two overlapping asymmetric Gaussian kernels whose sizes are adapted based on the contrast of the surround pixels, resembling the change of RF size. We simulated the contrast-dependent surround modulation by weighting the contribution of each Gaussian according to the centre-surround contrast. In the end, we obtained an estimation of the illuminant from the set of the most activated RFs' outputs. Our results on three single-illuminant and one multi-illuminant benchmark datasets show that ASM is highly competitive against the state-of-the-art and it even outperforms learning-based algorithms in one case. Moreover, the robustness of our model is more tangible if we consider that our results were obtained using the same parameters for all datasets, that is, mimicking how the human visual system operates. These results might provide an insight on how dynamical adaptation mechanisms contribute to make object's colours appear constant to us.

Abstract: Simulation can enable several developments in the field of intelligent vehicles. This chapter is divided into three main subsections. The first one deals with driving simulators. The continuous improvement of hardware performance is a well-known fact that is allowing the development of more complex driving simulators. The immersion in the simulation scene is increased by high fidelity feedback to the driver. In the second subsection, traffic simulation is explained as well as how it can be used for intelligent transport systems. Finally, it is rather clear that sensor-based perception and action must be based on data-driven algorithms. Simulation could provide data to train and test algorithms that are afterwards implemented in vehicles. These tools are explained in the third subsection.

Abstract: Many algorithms formulate graph matching as an optimization of an objective function of pairwise quantification of nodes and edges of two graphs to be matched. Pairwise measurements usually consider local attributes but disregard contextual information involved in graph structures. We address this issue by proposing contextual similarities between pairs of nodes. This is done by considering the tensor product graph (TPG) of two graphs to be matched, where each node is an ordered pair of nodes of the operand graphs. Contextual similarities between a pair of nodes are computed by accumulating weighted walks (normalized pairwise similarities) terminating at the corresponding paired node in TPG. Once the contextual similarities are obtained, we formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in TPG. We use contextual similarities to construct an objective function and optimize it with a linear programming approach. Since random walk formulation through TPG takes into account higher order information, it is not a surprise that we obtain more reliable similarities and better discrimination among the nodes and edges. Experimental results shown on synthetic as well as real benchmarks illustrate that higher order contextual similarities increase discriminating power and allow one to find approximate solutions to the subgraph matching problem.

Abstract: Embedding data into vector spaces is a very popular strategy of pattern recognition methods. When distances between embeddings are quantized, performance metrics become ambiguous. In this paper, we present an analysis of the ambiguity quantized distances introduce and provide bounds on the effect. We demonstrate that it can have a measurable effect in empirical data in state-of-the-art systems. We also approach the phenomenon from a computer security perspective and demonstrate how someone being evaluated by a third party can exploit this ambiguity and greatly outperform a random predictor without even access to the input data. We also suggest a simple solution making the performance metrics, which rely on ranking, totally deterministic and impervious to such exploits.

Abstract: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC 2017, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2017.
The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. They contain both classical and emerging topics of graphics rcognition, namely analysis and detection of diagrams, search and classification, optical music recognition, interpretation of engineering drawings and maps.

Abstract: Event boundaries play a crucial role as a pre-processing step for detection, localization, and recognition tasks of human activities in videos. Typically, although their intrinsic subjectiveness, temporal bounds are provided manually as input for training action recognition algorithms. However, their role for activity recognition in the domain of egocentric photostreams has been so far neglected. In this paper, we provide insights of how automatically computed boundaries can impact activity recognition results in the emerging domain of egocentric photostreams. Furthermore, we collected a new annotated dataset acquired by 15 people by a wearable photo-camera and we used it to show the generalization capabilities of several deep learning based architectures to unseen users.

Abstract: We present a vision-inertial system which combines two RGB-Depth devices together with a wearable inertial movement unit in order to detect activities of the daily living. From multi-view videos, we extract dense trajectories enriched with a histogram of normals description computed from the depth cue and bag them into multi-view codebooks. During the later classification step a multi-class support vector machine with a RBF- 2 kernel combines the descriptions at kernel level. In order to perform action detection from the videos, a sliding window approach is utilized. On the other hand, we extract accelerations, rotation angles, and jerk features from the inertial data collected by the wearable placed on the user’s dominant wrist. During gesture spotting, a dynamic time warping is applied and the aligning costs to a set of pre-selected gesture sub-classes are thresholded to determine possible detections. The outputs of the two modules are combined in a late-fusion fashion. The system is validated in a real-case scenario with elderly from an elder home. Learning-based fusion results improve the ones from the single modalities, demonstrating the success of such multimodal approach.