Abstract: The structure of document images plays a signicant role in document analysis thus considerable eorts have been made towards extracting and understanding document structure, usually in the form of layout analysis approaches. In this paper, we rst employ Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) to eciently extract stable document structural elements in terms of a dendrogram of key-regions. Then a fast structural matching method is proposed to query the structure of document (dendrogram) based on a spatial database which facilitates the formulation of advanced spatial queries. The experiments demonstrate a signicant improvement in a document retrieval scenario when compared to the use of typical Bag of Words (BoW) and pyramidal BoW descriptors.

Abstract: This paper describes a general method to address partial occlusions for human detection in still images. The Random Subspace Method (RSM) is chosen for building a classifier ensemble robust against partial occlusions. The component classifiers are chosen on the basis of their individual and combined performance. The main contribution of this work lies in our approach’s capability to improve the detection rate when partial occlusions are present without compromising the detection performance on non occluded data. In contrast to many recent approaches, we propose a method which does not require manual labelling of body parts, defining any semantic spatial components, or using additional data coming from motion or stereo. Moreover, the method can be easily extended to other object classes. The experiments are performed on three large datasets: the INRIA person dataset, the Daimler Multicue dataset, and a new challenging dataset, called PobleSec, in which a considerable number of targets are partially occluded. The different approaches are evaluated at the classification and detection levels for both partially occluded and non-occluded data. The experimental results show that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the presence of partial occlusions, while offering performance and reliability similar to those of the holistic approach on non-occluded data. The datasets used in our experiments have been made publicly available for benchmarking purposes

Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.

Abstract: Domain adaptation addresses the problem of accuracy drop that a classifier may suffer when the training data (source domain) and the testing data (target domain) are drawn from different distributions. In this work, we focus on domain adaptation for structured SVM (SSVM). We propose a cost-sensitive domain adaptation method for SSVM, namely COSS-SSVM. In particular, during the re-training of an adapted classifier based on target and source data, the idea that we explore consists in introducing a non-zero cost even for correctly classified source domain samples. Eventually, we aim to learn a more targetoriented classifier by not rewarding (zero loss) properly classified source-domain training samples. We assess the effectiveness of COSS-SSVM on multi-category object recognition.

Abstract: We explore the potential of the use of blood vessels as anatomical landmarks for developing image registration methods in colonoscopy images. An unequivocal representation of blood vessels could be used to guide follow-up methods to track lesions over different interventions. We propose a graph-based representation to characterize network structures, such as blood vessels, based on the use of intersections and endpoints. We present a study consisting of the assessment of the minimal performance a keypoint detector should achieve so that the structure can still be recognized. Experimental results prove that, even by achieving a loss of 35% of the keypoints, the descriptive power of the associated graphs to the vessel pattern is still high enough to recognize blood vessels.

Abstract: Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and for centuries, handwriting had been the most reliable way to preserve knowledge. However, despite the recent development of printing houses and electronic devices, handwriting is still broadly used for taking notes, doing annotations, or sketching ideas.
Transferring the ability of understanding handwritten text or recognizing handwritten shapes to computers has been the goal of many researches due to its huge importance for many different fields. However, designing good representations to deal with handwritten shapes, e.g. symbols or words, is a very challenging problem due to the large variability of these kinds of shapes. One of the consequences of working with handwritten shapes is that we need representations to be robust, i.e., able to adapt to large intra-class variability. We need representations to be discriminative, i.e., able to learn what are the differences between classes. And, we need representations to be efficient, i.e., able to be rapidly computed and compared. Unfortunately, current techniques of handwritten shape representation for matching and recognition do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of learning to represent handwritten shapes aimed at retrieval and recognition tasks. Concretely, on the first part of the thesis, we focus on the general problem of representing any kind of handwritten shape. We first present a novel shape descriptor based on a deformable grid that deals with large deformations by adapting to the shape and where the cells of the grid can be used to extract different features. Then, we propose to use this descriptor to learn statistical models, based on the Active Appearance Model, that jointly learns the variability in structure and texture of a given class. Then, on the second part, we focus on a concrete application, the problem of representing handwritten words, for the tasks of word spotting, where the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images, and recognition. First, we address the segmentation-free problem and propose an unsupervised, sliding-window-based approach that achieves state-of- the-art results in two public datasets. Second, we address the more challenging multi-writer problem, where the variability in words exponentially increases. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace, and where those that represent the same word are close together. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. This leads to a low-dimensional, unified representation of word images and strings, resulting in a method that allows one to perform either image and text searches, as well as image transcription, in a unified framework. We evaluate our methods on different public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images. Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding-window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the Exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Then, we use a more discriminative representation based on Fisher Vector to rerank the best regions retrieved, and the most promising ones are used to expand the Exemplar SVM training set and improve the query representation. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.