Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for external and internal segmentation of the caudate nucleus in Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) based on statistical and structural machine learning approaches. This method is applied in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis. The external segmentation method adapts the Graph Cut energy-minimization model to make it suitable for segmenting small, low-contrast structures, such as the caudate nucleus. In particular, new energy function data and boundary potentials are defined and a supervised energy term based on contextual brain structures is added. Furthermore, the internal segmentation method learns a classifier based on shape features of the Region of Interest (ROI) in MRI slices. The results show accurate external and internal caudate segmentation in a real data set and similar performance of ADHD diagnostic test to manual annotation.

Abstract: Symbol spotting can be defined as locating given query symbol in a large collection of graphical documents. In this paper we present a hierarchical graph representation for symbols. This representation allows graph matching methods to deal with low-level vectorization errors and, thus, to perform a robust symbol spotting. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: Edges are caused by several imaging cues such as shadow, material and illumination transitions. Classification methods have been proposed which are solely based on photometric information, ignoring geometry to classify the physical nature of edges in images. In this paper, the aim is to present a novel strategy to handle both photometric and geometric information for edge classification. Photometric information is obtained through the use of quasi-invariants while geometric information is derived from the orientation and contrast of edges. Different combination frameworks are compared with a new principled approach that captures both information into the same descriptor. From large scale experiments on different datasets, it is shown that, in addition to photometric information, the geometry of edges is an important visual cue to distinguish between different edge types. It is concluded that by combining both cues the performance improves by more than 7% for shadows and highlights.

Abstract: 0,624 JCR
Word spotting is the process of retrieving all instances of a queried keyword from a digital library of document images. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different word descriptors to assess the advantages and disadvantages of statistical and structural models in a framework of query-by-example word spotting in historical documents. We compare four word representation models, namely sequence alignment using DTW as a baseline reference, a bag of visual words approach as statistical model, a pseudo-structural model based on a Loci features representation, and a structural approach where words are represented by graphs. The four approaches have been tested with two collections of historical data: the George Washington database and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral. We experimentally demonstrate that statistical representations generally give a better performance, however it cannot be neglected that large descriptors are difficult to be implemented in a retrieval scenario where word spotting requires the indexation of data with million word images.

Abstract: Road scene segmentation is important in computer vision for different applications such as autonomous driving and pedestrian detection. Recovering the 3D structure of road scenes provides relevant contextual information to improve their understanding.
In this paper, we use a convolutional neural network based algorithm to learn features from noisy labels to recover the 3D scene layout of a road image. The novelty of the algorithm relies on generating training labels by applying an algorithm trained on a general image dataset to classify on–board images. Further, we propose a novel texture descriptor based on a learned color plane fusion to obtain maximal uniformity in road areas. Finally, acquired (off–line) and current (on–line) information are combined to detect road areas in single images.
From quantitative and qualitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, it is concluded that convolutional neural networks are suitable for learning 3D scene layout from noisy labels and provides a relative improvement of 7% compared to the baseline. Furthermore, combining color planes provides a statistical description of road areas that exhibits maximal uniformity and provides a relative improvement of 8% compared to the baseline. Finally, the improvement is even bigger when acquired and current information from a single image are combined

Abstract: Co-segmentation is defined as jointly partitioning multiple images depicting the same or similar object, into foreground and background. Our method consists of a multiple-scale multiple-image generative model, which jointly estimates the foreground and background appearance distributions from several images, in a non-supervised manner. In contrast to other co-segmentation methods, our approach does not require the images to have similar foregrounds and different backgrounds to function properly. Region matching is applied to exploit inter-image information by establishing correspondences between the common objects that appear in the scene. Moreover, computing many-to-many associations of regions allow further applications, like recognition of object parts across images. We report results on iCoseg, a challenging dataset that presents extreme variability in camera viewpoint, illumination and object deformations and poses. We also show that our method is robust against large intra-class variability in the MSRC database.