Abstract: In this workshop a 6 years experience in Project Based Learning (PBL) in Computer Graphics, Computer Engineering course at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) is presented. We use a Moodle environment suited to manage the documentation generated in PBL. The course is organized by means of two alternative routes: a classic itinerary of lectures and test-based evaluation and another with PBL. In the PBL itinerary we explain the organization in teamgroups, homework tutoring and monitoring and evaluation guidelines for students. We provide some of the work done by students, and the results of assessment surveys carried out to students during these years. We report the evolution of our PBL itinerary in terms of, both, organization and student surveys.
The workshop aims at discussing about on the advantages and disadvantages of using these active methodologies in technical degrees such as computer engineering, in order to debate about the most suitable way of organizing PBL and assessing students learning rate.

Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for real-time estimation of the onboard stereo head's position and orientation relative to the road surface, which is required for any advanced driver-assistance application. This framework can be used with all road types: highways, urban, etc. Unlike existing works that rely on feature extraction in either the image domain or 3-D space, we propose a framework that directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs' brightness. The proposed approach consists of two stages that are invoked for every stereo frame. The first stage segments the road region in one monocular view. The second stage estimates the camera pose using a featureless registration between the segmented monocular road region and the other view in the stereo pair. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution combines a road segmentation algorithm with a registration technique to estimate the online stereo camera pose. The second contribution solves the registration using a featureless method, which is carried out using two different optimization techniques: 1) the differential evolution algorithm and 2) the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. We provide experiments and evaluations of performance. The results presented show the validity of our proposed framework.

Abstract: We describe a novel technique for feature combination in the bag-of-words model of image classification. Our approach builds discriminative compound words from primitive cues learned independently from training images. Our main observation is that modeling joint-cue distributions independently is more statistically robust for typical classification problems than attempting to empirically estimate the dependent, joint-cue distribution directly. We use Information theoretic vocabulary compression to find discriminative combinations of cues and the resulting vocabulary of portmanteau words is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. State-of-the-art results on both the Oxford Flower-102 and Caltech-UCSD Bird-200 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique compared to other, significantly more complex approaches to multi-cue image representation

Abstract: Video alignment consists of integrating multiple video sequences recorded independently into a single video sequence. This means to register both in time (synchronize
frames) and space (image registration) so that the two videos sequences can be fused
or compared pixel–wise. In spite of being relatively unknown, many applications today may benefit from the availability of robust and efficient video alignment methods.
For instance, video surveillance requires to integrate video sequences that are recorded
of the same scene at different times in order to detect changes. The problem of aligning videos has been addressed before, but in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, most works rely
on restrictive assumptions which reduce its difficulty such as linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points on the images; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of the solutions developed until now. In this thesis, we focus on the challenging problem of aligning sequences recorded at different times from independent moving cameras following similar but not coincident trajectories. More precisely, this thesis covers four studies that advance the state-of-the-art in video alignment. First, we focus on analyzing and developing a probabilistic framework for video alignment, that is, a principled way to integrate multiple observations and prior information. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit the combination of several purely visual features (image–intensities, visual words and dense motion field descriptor), and
global positioning system (GPS) information. Second, we focus on reformulating the
problem into a single alignment framework since previous works on video alignment
adopt a divide–and–conquer strategy, i.e., first solve the synchronization, and then
register corresponding frames. This also generalizes the ’classic’ case of fixed geometric transform and linear time mapping. Third, we focus on exploiting directly the
time domain of the video sequences in order to avoid exhaustive cross–frame search.
This provides relevant information used for learning the temporal mapping between
pairs of video sequences. Finally, we focus on adapting these methods to the on–line
setting for road detection and vehicle geolocation. The qualitative and quantitative
results presented in this thesis on a variety of real–world pairs of video sequences show that the proposed method is: robust to varying imaging conditions, different image
content (e.g., incoming and outgoing vehicles), variations on camera velocity, and
different scenarios (indoor and outdoor) going beyond the state–of–the–art. Moreover, the on–line video alignment has been successfully applied for road detection and
vehicle geolocation achieving promising results.

Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for clinical and medical procedures. Although the muscular architecture of the heart has been debated by countless researchers, the controversy is still alive. Diffusion Tensor MRI, DT-MRI, is a unique imaging technique for computational validation of the muscular structure of the heart. By the complex arrangement of myocites, existing techniques can not provide comprehensive descriptions of the global muscular architecture. In this paper we introduce a multiresolution reconstruction technique based on DT-MRI streamlining for simplified global myocardial model generation. Our reconstructions can restore the most complex myocardial structures and indicate a global helical organization

Abstract: In this paper we present a methodology for the automatic detection of media-adventitia border (MAb) in Intravascular Ultrasound. A robust computation of the MAb is achieved through a holistic approach where the position of the MAb with respect to other tissues of the vessel is used. A learned quality measure assures that the resulting MAb is optimal with respect to all other tissues. The mean distance error computed through a set of 140 images is 0.2164 (±0.1326) mm.

Abstract: Video synchronization and alignment is a rather recent topic in computer vision. It usually deals with the problem of aligning sequences recorded simultaneously by static, jointly- or independently-moving cameras. In this paper, we investigate the more difficult problem of matching videos captured at different times from independently-moving cameras, whose trajectories are approximately coincident or parallel. To this end, we propose a novel method that pixel-wise aligns videos and allows thus to automatically highlight their differences. This primarily aims at visual surveillance but the method can be adopted as is by other related video applications, like object transfer (augmented reality) or high dynamic range video. We build upon a slice matching scheme to first synchronize the sequences, while we develop a spatio-temporal alignment scheme to spatially register corresponding frames and refine the temporal mapping. We investigate the performance of the proposed method on videos recorded from vehicles driven along different types of roads and compare with related previous works.

Abstract: An endoscopy system (1) comprises an endoscope (2) with a camera (3) at its tip. The endoscope extends through an endoscope guide (4) for guiding movement of the endoscope and for measurement of its movement as it enters the body. The guide (4) comprises a generally conical body (5) having a through passage (105) through which the endoscope (2) extends. A motion sensor comprises an optical transmitter (7) and a detector (8) mounted alongside the passage (105) to measure the insertion-withdrawal linear motion and also rotation of the endoscope by the endoscopist's hand. The system (1) also comprises a flexure controller (10) having wheels operated by the endoscopist. The camera (3), the motion sensor (7/8), and the flexure controller (10) are all connected to a processor (11) which feeds a display.