Abstract: Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.

Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.

Abstract: In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder-like architecture to perform face reenactment in image sequences. Our goal is to transfer the training subject identity to a given test subject. We regularize face reenactment by facial action unit intensity and 3D gaze vector regression. This way, we enforce the network to transfer subtle facial expressions and eye dynamics, providing a more lifelike result. The proposed encoder-decoder receives as input the previous sequence frame stacked to the current frame image of facial landmarks. Thus, the generated frames benefit from appearance and geometry, while keeping temporal coherence for the generated sequence. At test stage, a new target subject with the facial performance of the source subject and the appearance of the training subject is reenacted. Principal component analysis is applied to project the test subject geometry to the closest training subject geometry before reenactment. Evaluation of our proposal shows faster convergence, and more accurate and realistic results in comparison to other architectures without action units and gaze regularization.

Abstract: This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports.
The papers are organized into the following topical sections: document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, multimedia document analysis, mobile text recognition, document analysis for social good, indexing and retrieval of documents, physical and logical layout analysis, recognition of tables and formulas, and natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding.

Abstract: This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports.
The papers are organized into the following topical sections: historical document analysis, document analysis systems, handwriting recognition, scene text detection and recognition, document image processing, natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding, and graphics, diagram and math recognition.