Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Xavier Carrillo, Josepa Mauri, et al. (2011). Combining Growcut and Temporal Correlation for IVUS Lumen Segmentation. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Raposo, & Mario Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 556–563). LNCS. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The assessment of arterial luminal area, performed by IVUS analysis, is a clinical index used to evaluate the degree of coronary artery disease. In this paper we propose a novel approach to automatically segment the vessel lumen, which combines model-based temporal information extracted from successive frames of the sequence, with spatial classification using the Growcut algorithm. The performance of the method is evaluated by an in vivo experiment on 300 IVUS frames. The automatic and manual segmentation performances in general vessel and stent frames are comparable. The average segmentation error in vessel, stent and bifurcation frames are 0.17±0.08 mm, 0.18±0.07 mm and 0.31±0.12 mm respectively.
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Xavier Carrillo, F. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Plaque Type, Plaque Burden and Wall Shear Stress Relation in Coronary Arteries Assessed by X-ray Angiography and Intravascular Ultrasound: a Qualitative Study. In 14th International Symposium on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Communication Technologies.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a complete framework that automatically provides fluid-dynamic and plaque analysis from IVUS and Angiographic sequences. Such framework is used to analyze, in three coronary arteries, the relation between wall shear stress with type and amount of plaque. Preliminary qualitative results show an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque burden, which is confirmed by the fact that the plaque growth is higher on the wall having concave curvature. Regarding the plaque type it was observed that regions having low shear stress are predominantly fibro-lipidic while the heavy calcifications are in general located in areas of the vessel having high WSS.
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, A. Wahle, Petia Radeva, S. Carlier, et al. (2014). Standardized evaluation methodology and reference database for evaluating IVUS image segmentation. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(2), 70–90.
Abstract: This paper describes an evaluation framework that allows a standardized and quantitative comparison of IVUS lumen and media segmentation algorithms. This framework has been introduced at the MICCAI 2011 Computing and Visualization for (Intra)Vascular Imaging (CVII) workshop, comparing the results of eight teams that participated.
We describe the available data-base comprising of multi-center, multi-vendor and multi-frequency IVUS datasets, their acquisition, the creation of the reference standard and the evaluation measures. The approaches address segmentation of the lumen, the media, or both borders; semi- or fully-automatic operation; and 2-D vs. 3-D methodology. Three performance measures for quantitative analysis have
been proposed. The results of the evaluation indicate that segmentation of the vessel lumen and media is possible with an accuracy that is comparable to manual annotation when semi-automatic methods are used, as well as encouraging results can be obtained also in case of fully-automatic segmentation. The analysis performed in this paper also highlights the challenges in IVUS segmentation that remains to be
solved.
Keywords: IVUS (intravascular ultrasound); Evaluation framework; Algorithm comparison; Image segmentation
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2012). Three-Dimensional Design of Error Correcting Output Codes. In 8th International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining (pp. 29–).
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2012). Error Correcting Output Codes for multiclass classification: Application to two image vision problems. In 16th symposium on Artificial Intelligence & Signal Processing (pp. 508–513). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) represents a powerful framework to deal with multiclass classification problems based on combining binary classifiers. The key factor affecting the performance of ECOC methods is the independence of binary classifiers, without which the ECOC method would be ineffective. In spite of its ability on classification of problems with relatively large number of classes, it has been applied in few real world problems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the ECOC approach on two image vision problems: logo recognition and shape classification using Decision Tree and AdaBoost as the base learners. The results show that the ECOC method can be used to improve the classification performance in comparison with the classical multiclass approaches.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2012). Efficient pairwise classification using Local Cross Off strategy. In 25th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 7310, pp. 25–36). LNCS.
Abstract: The pairwise classification approach tends to perform better than other well-known approaches when dealing with multiclass classification problems. In the pairwise approach, however, the nuisance votes of many irrelevant classifiers may result in a wrong prediction class. To overcome this problem, a novel method, Local Crossing Off (LCO), is presented and evaluated in this paper. The proposed LCO system takes advantage of nearest neighbor classification algorithm because of its simplicity and speed, as well as the strength of other two powerful binary classifiers to discriminate between two classes. This paper provides a set of experimental results on 20 datasets using two base learners: Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines. The results show that the proposed technique not only achieves better classification accuracy, but also is computationally more efficient for tackling classification problems which have a relatively large number of target classes.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). A Genetic-based Subspace Analysis Method for Improving Error-Correcting Output Coding. PR - Pattern Recognition, 46(10), 2830–2839.
Abstract: Two key factors affecting the performance of Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in multiclass classification problems are the independence of binary classifiers and the problem-dependent coding design. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm-based approach to the design of an application-dependent codematrix in the ECOC framework. The central idea of this work is to design a three-dimensional codematrix, where the third dimension is the feature space of the problem domain. In order to do that, we consider the feature space in the design process of the codematrix with the aim of improving the independence and accuracy of binary classifiers. The proposed method takes advantage of some basic concepts of ensemble classification, such as diversity of classifiers, and also benefits from the evolutionary approach for optimizing the three-dimensional codematrix, taking into account the problem domain. We provide a set of experimental results using a set of benchmark datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, as well as two real multiclass Computer Vision problems. Both sets of experiments are conducted using two different base learners: Neural Networks and Decision Trees. The results show that the proposed method increases the classification accuracy in comparison with the state-of-the-art ECOC coding techniques.
Keywords: Error Correcting Output Codes; Evolutionary computation; Multiclass classification; Feature subspace; Ensemble classification
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). Logo recognition Based on the Dempster-Shafer Fusion of Multiple Classifiers. In 26th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 7884, pp. 1–12). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Best paper award
The performance of different feature extraction and shape description methods in trademark image recognition systems have been studied by several researchers. However, the potential improvement in classification through feature fusion by ensemble-based methods has remained unattended. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an ensemble of three classifiers, each trained on different feature sets. Three promising shape description techniques, including Zernike moments, generic Fourier descriptors, and shape signature are used to extract informative features from logo images, and each set of features is fed into an individual classifier. In order to reduce recognition error, a powerful combination strategy based on the Dempster-Shafer theory is utilized to fuse the three classifiers trained on different sources of information. This combination strategy can effectively make use of diversity of base learners generated with different set of features. The recognition results of the individual classifiers are compared with those obtained from fusing the classifiers’ output, showing significant performance improvements of the proposed methodology.
Keywords: Logo recognition; ensemble classification; Dempster-Shafer fusion; Zernike moments; generic Fourier descriptor; shape signature
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2015). Combining Local and Global Learners in the Pairwise Multiclass Classification. PAA - Pattern Analysis and Applications, 18(4), 845–860.
Abstract: Pairwise classification is a well-known class binarization technique that converts a multiclass problem into a number of two-class problems, one problem for each pair of classes. However, in the pairwise technique, nuisance votes of many irrelevant classifiers may result in a wrong class prediction. To overcome this problem, a simple, but efficient method is proposed and evaluated in this paper. The proposed method is based on excluding some classes and focusing on the most probable classes in the neighborhood space, named Local Crossing Off (LCO). This procedure is performed by employing a modified version of standard K-nearest neighbor and large margin nearest neighbor algorithms. The LCO method takes advantage of nearest neighbor classification algorithm because of its local learning behavior as well as the global behavior of powerful binary classifiers to discriminate between two classes. Combining these two properties in the proposed LCO technique will avoid the weaknesses of each method and will increase the efficiency of the whole classification system. On several benchmark datasets of varying size and difficulty, we found that the LCO approach leads to significant improvements using different base learners. The experimental results show that the proposed technique not only achieves better classification accuracy in comparison to other standard approaches, but also is computationally more efficient for tackling classification problems which have a relatively large number of target classes.
Keywords: Multiclass classification; Pairwise approach; One-versus-one
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Generic Subclass Ensemble: A Novel Approach to Ensemble Classification. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1254–1259).
Abstract: Multiple classifier systems, also known as classifier ensembles, have received great attention in recent years because of their improved classification accuracy in different applications. In this paper, we propose a new general approach to ensemble classification, named generic subclass ensemble, in which each base classifier is trained with data belonging to a subset of classes, and thus discriminates among a subset of target categories. The ensemble classifiers are then fused using a combination rule. The proposed approach differs from existing methods that manipulate the target attribute, since in our approach individual classification problems are not restricted to two-class problems. We perform a series of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the generic subclass approach on a set of benchmark datasets. Experimental results with multilayer perceptrons show that the proposed approach presents a viable alternative to the most commonly used ensemble classification approaches.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, Sergio Escalera, Albert Clapes, Kamal Nasrollahi, Michael Holte, et al. (2015). Keep it Accurate and Diverse: Enhancing Action Recognition Performance by Ensemble Learning. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Worshops (CVPRW) (pp. 22–29).
Abstract: The performance of different action recognition techniques has recently been studied by several computer vision researchers. However, the potential improvement in classification through classifier fusion by ensemble-based methods has remained unattended. In this work, we evaluate the performance of an ensemble of action learning techniques, each performing the recognition task from a different perspective.
The underlying idea is that instead of aiming a very sophisticated and powerful representation/learning technique, we can learn action categories using a set of relatively simple and diverse classifiers, each trained with different feature set. In addition, combining the outputs of several learners can reduce the risk of an unfortunate selection of a learner on an unseen action recognition scenario.
This leads to having a more robust and general-applicable framework. In order to improve the recognition performance, a powerful combination strategy is utilized based on the Dempster-Shafer theory, which can effectively make use
of diversity of base learners trained on different sources of information. The recognition results of the individual classifiers are compared with those obtained from fusing the classifiers’ output, showing enhanced performance of the proposed methodology.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Support Vector Machines with Time Series Distance Kernels for Action Classification. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 1–7).
Abstract: Despite the outperformance of Support Vector Machine (SVM) on many practical classification problems, the algorithm is not directly applicable to multi-dimensional trajectories having different lengths. In this paper, a new class of SVM that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating two efficient time-series distances measures into the kernel function.
Dynamic Time Warping and Longest Common Subsequence distance measures along with their derivatives are
employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite kernels in the SVM formulation. The proposed method is employed for a challenging classification problem: action recognition by depth cameras using only skeleton data; and evaluated on three benchmark action datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our methodology compared to the state-ofthe-art on the considered datasets.
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Action Recognition by Pairwise Proximity Function Support Vector Machines with Dynamic Time Warping Kernels. In 29th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 9673, pp. 3–14). Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: In the context of human action recognition using skeleton data, the 3D trajectories of joint points may be considered as multi-dimensional time series. The traditional recognition technique in the literature is based on time series dis(similarity) measures (such as Dynamic Time Warping). For these general dis(similarity) measures, k-nearest neighbor algorithms are a natural choice. However, k-NN classifiers are known to be sensitive to noise and outliers. In this paper, a new class of Support Vector Machine that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating an efficient time-series distances measure into the kernel function. More specifically, the derivative of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure is employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite (PSD) kernels in the SVM formulation. The recognition results of the proposed technique on two action recognition datasets demonstrates the ourperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, we obtained 89 % accuracy on the well-known MSRAction3D dataset using only 3D trajectories of body joints obtained by Kinect
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, Sergio Escalera, Huamin Ren, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Elham Etemad. (2017). Locality Regularized Group Sparse Coding for Action Recognition. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 158, 106–114.
Abstract: Bag of visual words (BoVW) models are widely utilized in image/ video representation and recognition. The cornerstone of these models is the encoding stage, in which local features are decomposed over a codebook in order to obtain a representation of features. In this paper, we propose a new encoding algorithm by jointly encoding the set of local descriptors of each sample and considering the locality structure of descriptors. The proposed method takes advantages of locality coding such as its stability and robustness to noise in descriptors, as well as the strengths of the group coding strategy by taking into account the potential relation among descriptors of a sample. To efficiently implement our proposed method, we consider the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework, which results in quadratic complexity in the problem size. The method is employed for a challenging classification problem: action recognition by depth cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art on the considered datasets.
Keywords: Bag of words; Feature encoding; Locality constrained coding; Group sparse coding; Alternating direction method of multipliers; Action recognition
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Adela Barbulescu, Wenjuan Gong, Jordi Gonzalez, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Xavier Roca. (2012). 3D Human Pose Estimation Using 2D Body Part Detectors. In 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2484–2487).
Abstract: Automatic 3D reconstruction of human poses from monocular images is a challenging and popular topic in the computer vision community, which provides a wide range of applications in multiple areas. Solutions for 3D pose estimation involve various learning approaches, such as support vector machines and Gaussian processes, but many encounter difficulties in cluttered scenarios and require additional input data, such as silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. We present a framework that is capable of estimating the 3D pose of a person from single images or monocular image sequences without requiring background information and which is robust to camera variations. The framework models the non-linearity present in human pose estimation as it benefits from flexible learning approaches, including a highly customizable 2D detector. Results on the HumanEva benchmark show how they perform and influence the quality of the 3D pose estimates.
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