Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%

Abstract: In the recent years commercial eye-tracking hardware has become more common, with the introduction of new models from several brands that have better performance and easier setup procedures. A cause and at the same time a result of this phenomenon is the popularity of eye-tracking research directed at marketing, accessibility and usability, among others.
One problem with these hardware components is scalability, because both the price and the necessary expertise to operate them makes it practically impossible in the large scale. In this work, we analyze the feasibility of a software eye-tracking system based on a single, ordinary webcam. Our aim is to discover the limits of such a system and to see whether it provides acceptable performances.
The significance of this setup is that it is the most common setup found in consumer environments, off-the-shelf electronic devices such as laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers. As no special equipment such as infrared lights, mirrors or zoom lenses are used; setting up and calibrating the system is easier compared to other approaches using these components.
Our work is based on the open source application Opengazer, which provides a good starting point for our contributions. We propose several improvements in order to push the system's performance further and make it feasible as a robust, real-time device. Then we carry out an elaborate experiment involving 18 human subjects and 4 different system setups. Finally, we give an analysis of the results and discuss the effects of setup changes, subject differences and modifications in the software.

Abstract: State-of-the-art handwriting recognition systems are learning-based systems that require large sets of training data. The creation of training data, and consequently the creation of a well-performing recognition system, requires therefore a substantial amount of human work. This can be reduced with semi-supervised learning, which uses unlabeled text lines for training as well. Current approaches estimate the correct transcription of the unlabeled data via handwriting recognition which is not only extremely demanding as far as computational costs are concerned but also requires a good model of the target language. In this paper, we propose a different approach that makes use of keyword spotting, which is significantly faster and does not need any language model. In a set of experiments we demonstrate its superiority over existing approaches.

Abstract: Poster

Abstract: The release of challenging datasets with a vast number of images, requires the development of efficient image representations and algorithms which are able to manipulate these large-scale datasets efficiently. Nowadays the Bag-of-Words (BoW) is the most successful approach in the context of object and scene classification tasks. However, its main drawback is the absence of the important spatial information. Spatial pyramids (SP) have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into BoW-based image representation. Observing the remarkable performance of spatial pyramids, their growing number of applications to a broad range of vision problems, and finally its geometry inclusion, a question can be asked what are the limits of spatial pyramids. Within the SP framework, the optimal way for obtaining an image spatial representation, which is able to cope with it’s most foremost shortcomings, concretely, it’s high dimensionality and the rigidity of the resulting image representation, still remains an active research domain. In summary, the main concern of this thesis is to search for the limits of spatial pyramids and try to figure out solutions for them.

Abstract: Most successful approaches on scenerecognition tend to efficiently combine global image features with spatial local appearance and shape cues. On the other hand, less attention has been devoted for studying spatial texture features within scenes. Our method is based on the insight that scenes can be seen as a composition of micro-texture patterns. This paper analyzes the role of texture along with its spatial layout for scenerecognition. However, one main drawback of the resulting spatial representation is its huge dimensionality. Hence, we propose a technique that addresses this problem by presenting a compactSpatialPyramid (SP) representation. The basis of our compact representation, namely, CompactAdaptiveSpatialPyramid (CASP) consists of a two-stages compression strategy. This strategy is based on the Agglomerative Information Bottleneck (AIB) theory for (i) compressing the least informative SP features, and, (ii) automatically learning the most appropriate shape for each category. Our method exceeds the state-of-the-art results on several challenging scenerecognition data sets.

Abstract: IF=1.77 (2010)
Social interactions are a very important component in peopleís lives. Social network analysis has become a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from multimodal dyadic interactions. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Timesí Blogging Heads opinion blog.
The Social Network is represented as an oriented graph, whose directed links are determined by the Influence Model. The linksí weights are a measure of the ìinfluenceî a person has over the other. The states of the Influence Model encode automatically extracted audio/visual features from our videos using state-of-the art algorithms. Our results are reported in terms of accuracy of audio/visual data fusion for speaker segmentation and centrality measures used to characterize the extracted social network.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to extract text regions from graphical documents. In our method, we first empirically construct two sequences of learned dictionaries for the text and graphical parts respectively. Then, we compute the sparse representations of all different sizes and non-overlapped document patches in these learned dictionaries. Based on these representations, each patch can be classified into the text or graphic category by comparing its reconstruction errors. Same-sized patches in one category are then merged together to define the corresponding text or graphic layers which are combined to createfinal text/graphic layer. Finally, in a post-processing step, text regions are further filtered out by using some learned thresholds.