Abstract: Intestinal contractions are one of the most important events to diagnose motility pathologies of the small intestine. When visualized by wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE), the sequence of frames that represents a contraction is characterized by a clear wrinkle structure in the central frames that corresponds to the folding of the intestinal wall. In this paper we present a new method to robustly detect wrinkle frames in full WCE videos by using a new mid-level image descriptor that is based on a centrality measure proposed for graphs. We present an extended validation, carried out in a very large database, that shows that the proposed method achieves state of the art performance for this task.

Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new framework for image segmentation based on parametrized active contours. The contour and the points of the image space are parametrized using a set of reduced control points that have to form a closed polygon in two dimensional problems and a closed surface in three dimensional problems. By moving the control points, the active contour evolves. We use mean value coordinates as the parametrization tool for the interface, which allows to parametrize any point of the space, inside or outside the closed polygon
or surface. Region-based energies such as the one proposed by Chan and Vese can be easily implemented in both two and three dimensional segmentation problems. We show the usefulness of our approach with several experiments.

Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.

Abstract: In this paper, we address two complex issues: 1) Text frame classification and 2) Multi-oriented text detection in video text frame. We first divide a video frame into 16 blocks and propose a combination of wavelet and median-moments with k-means clustering at the block level to identify probable text blocks. For each probable text block, the method applies the same combination of feature with k-means clustering over a sliding window running through the blocks to identify potential text candidates. We introduce a new idea of symmetry on text candidates in each block based on the observation that pixel distribution in text exhibits a symmetric pattern. The method integrates all blocks containing text candidates in the frame and then all text candidates are mapped on to a Sobel edge map of the original frame to obtain text representatives. To tackle the multi-orientation problem, we present a new method called Angle Projection Boundary Growing (APBG) which is an iterative algorithm and works based on a nearest neighbor concept. APBG is then applied on the text representatives to fix the bounding box for multi-oriented text lines in the video frame. Directional information is used to eliminate false positives. Experimental results on a variety of datasets such as non-horizontal, horizontal, publicly available data (Hua’s data) and ICDAR-03 competition data (camera images) show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods proposed for video and the state of the art methods for scene text as well.

Abstract: Effective information retrieval on handwritten document images has always been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel handwritten word spotting approach based on graph representation. The presented model comprises both topological and morphological signatures of handwriting. Skeleton-based graphs with the Shape Context labelled vertexes are established for connected components. Each word image is represented as a sequence of graphs. In order to be robust to the handwriting variations, an exhaustive merging process based on DTW alignment result is introduced in the similarity measure between word images. With respect to the computation complexity, an approximate graph edit distance approach using bipartite matching is employed for graph matching. The experiments on the George Washington dataset and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art structural methods.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in the long-wave infrared spectral band. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are evaluated using a state of the art framework. Statistical results using an outdoor image data set are presented together with a discussion about the differences with respect to the results obtained when images from the visible spectrum are considered.