Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) represents a powerful imaging technique to explore coronary vessels and to study their morphology and histologic properties. In this paper, we characterize different tissues based on radial frequency, texture-based, and combined features. To deal with the classification of multiple tissues, we require the use of robust multi-class learning techniques. In this sense, error-correcting output codes (ECOC) show to robustly combine binary classifiers to solve multi-class problems. In this context, we propose a strategy to model multi-class classification tasks using sub-classes information in the ECOC framework. The new strategy splits the classes into different sub-sets according to the applied base classifier. Complex IVUS data sets containing overlapping data are learnt by splitting the original set of classes into sub-classes, and embedding the binary problems in a problem-dependent ECOC design. The method automatically characterizes different tissues, showing performance improvements over the state-of-the-art ECOC techniques for different base classifiers. Furthermore, the combination of RF and texture-based features also shows improvements over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: Post Conference IEEE-IS 2008
The Chagas’ disease is endemic in all Latin America, affecting millions of people in the continent. In order to diagnose and treat the chagas’ disease, it is important to detect and measure the coronary damage of the patient. In this paper,
we analyze and categorize patients into different groups based on the coronary damage produced by the disease. Based on the features of the heart cycle extracted using high resolution ECG, a multi-class scheme of Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC)is formulated and successfully applied. The results show that the proposed scheme obtains significant performance improvements compared to previous works and state-of-the-art ECOC designs.

Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.

Abstract: Multi-class binary symbol classification requires the use of rich descriptors and robust classifiers. Shape representation is a difficult task because of several symbol distortions, such as occlusions, elastic deformations, gaps or noise. In this paper, we present the Circular Blurred Shape Model descriptor. This descriptor encodes the arrangement information of object parts in a correlogram structure. A prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed to the symbol. Moreover, we learn the new feature space using a set of Adaboost classifiers, which are combined in the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework to deal with the multi-class categorization problem. The presented work has been validated over different multi-class data sets, and compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors, showing significant performance improvements.