Abstract: With the massive explosion of machine learning in our day-to-day life, incremental and adaptive learning has become a major topic, crucial to keep up-to-date and improve classification models and their corresponding feature extraction processes. This paper presents a categorized overview of incremental feature extraction based on linear subspace methods which aim at incorporating new information to the already acquired knowledge without accessing previous data. Specifically, this paper focuses on those linear dimensionality reduction methods with orthogonal matrix constraints based on global loss function, due to the extensive use of their batch approaches versus other linear alternatives. Thus, we cover the approaches derived from Principal Components Analysis, Linear Discriminative Analysis and Discriminative Common Vector methods. For each basic method, its incremental approaches are differentiated according to the subspace model and matrix decomposition involved in the updating process. Besides this categorization, several updating strategies are distinguished according to the amount of data used to update and to the fact of considering a static or dynamic number of classes. Moreover, the specific role of the size/dimension ratio in each method is considered. Finally, computational complexity, experimental setup and the accuracy rates according to published results are compiled and analyzed, and an empirical evaluation is done to compare the best approach of each kind.

Abstract: A main weakness of virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) is unsuccessful segmentation of distal branches approaching peripheral pulmonary nodules (PPN). CT scan acquisition protocol is pivotal for segmentation covering the utmost periphery. We hypothesize that application of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) during CT acquisition could improve visualization and segmentation of peripheral bronchi. The purpose of the present pilot study is to compare quality of segmentations under 4 CT acquisition modes: inspiration (INSP), expiration (EXP) and both with CPAP (INSP-CPAP and EXP-CPAP).

Abstract: This paper explores the utilization of product graph for spotting symbols on graphical documents. Product graph is intended to find the candidate subgraphs or components in the input graph containing the paths similar to the query graph. The acute angle between two edges and their length ratio are considered as the node labels. In a second step, each of the candidate subgraphs in the input graph is assigned with a distance measure computed by a random walk kernel. Actually it is the minimum of the distances of the component to all the components of the model graph. This distance measure is then used to eliminate dissimilar components. The remaining neighboring components are grouped and the grouped zone is considered as a retrieval zone of a symbol similar to the queried one. The entire method works online, i.e., it doesn't need any preprocessing step. The present paper reports the initial results of the method, which are very encouraging.

Abstract: Medical image fusion plays an important role in the clinical diagnosis of several critical neurological diseases by merging complementary information available in multimodal images. In this paper, a novel CT-MR neurological image fusion framework is proposed using an optimized biologically inspired feedforward neural model in two-scale hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition domain using gray wolf optimization to preserve the structural as well as texture information present in source CT and MR images. Initially, the source images are subjected to two-scale ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition with optimized parameters, giving a scale-1 detail layer, a scale-2 detail layer and a scale-2 base layer. Two detail layers at scale-1 and 2 are fused using an optimized biologically inspired neural model and weighted average scheme based on local energy and modified spatial frequency to maximize the preservation of edges and local textures, respectively, while the scale-2 base layer gets fused using choose max rule to preserve the background information. To optimize the hyper-parameters of hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition and biologically inspired neural model, a fitness function is evaluated based on spatial frequency and edge index of the resultant fused image obtained by adding all the fused components. The fusion performance is analyzed by conducting extensive experiments on different CT-MR neurological images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides better-fused images and outperforms the other state-of-the-art fusion methods in both visual and quantitative assessments.

Abstract: Abstract
RATIONALE:
Virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) guidance to peripheral pulmonary lesions is often limited by insufficient segmentation of the peripheral airways.
OBJECTIVES:
To test the effect of applying positive airway pressure (PAP) during CT acquisition to improve segmentation, particularly at end-expiration.
METHODS:
CT acquisitions in inspiration and expiration with 4 PAP protocols were recorded prospectively and compared to baseline inspiratory acquisitions in 20 patients. The 4 protocols explored differences between devices (flow vs. turbine), exposures (within seconds vs. 15-min) and pressure levels (10 vs. 14 cmH2O). Segmentation quality was evaluated with the number of airways and number of endpoints reached. A generalized mixed-effects model explored the estimated effect of each protocol.
MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS:
Patient characteristics and lung function did not significantly differ between protocols. Compared to baseline inspiratory acquisitions, expiratory acquisitions after 15 min of 14 cmH2O PAP segmented 1.63-fold more airways (95% CI 1.07-2.48; p = 0.018) and reached 1.34-fold more endpoints (95% CI 1.08-1.66; p = 0.004). Inspiratory acquisitions performed immediately under 10 cmH2O PAP reached 1.20-fold (95% CI 1.09-1.33; p < 0.001) more endpoints; after 15 min the increase was 1.14-fold (95% CI 1.05-1.24; p < 0.001).
CONCLUSIONS:
CT acquisitions with PAP segment more airways and reach more endpoints than baseline inspiratory acquisitions. The improvement is particularly evident at end-expiration after 15 min of 14 cmH2O PAP. Further studies must confirm that the improvement increases diagnostic yield when using VBN to evaluate peripheral pulmonary lesions.

Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.

Abstract: Evaluation of driving performance is of utmost importance in order to reduce road accident rate. Since driving ability includes visual-spatial and operational attention, among others, head pose estimation of the driver is a crucial indicator of driving performance. This paper proposes a new automatic method for coarse and fine head's yaw angle estimation of the driver. We rely on a set of geometric features computed from just three representative facial keypoints, namely the center of the eyes and the nose tip. With these geometric features, our method combines two manifold embedding methods and a linear regression one. In addition, the method has a confidence mechanism to decide if the classification of a sample is not reliable. The approach has been tested using the CMU-PIE dataset and our own driver dataset. Despite the very few facial keypoints required, the results are comparable to the state-of-the-art techniques. The low computational cost of the method and its robustness makes feasible to integrate it in massive consume devices as a real time application.