Abstract: Colour constancy refers to the human visual system's ability to preserve the perceived colour of objects despite changes in the illumination. Its exact mechanisms are unknown, although a number of systems ranging from retinal to cortical and memory are thought to play important roles. The strength of the perceptual shift necessary to preserve these colours is usually estimated by the vectorial distances from an ideal match (or canonical illuminant). In this work we explore how much of the colour constancy phenomenon could be explained by well-known physiological properties of V1 and V2 neurons whose receptive fields (RF) vary according to the contrast and orientation of surround stimuli. Indeed, it has been shown that both RF size and the normalization occurring between centre and surround in cortical neurons depend on the local properties of surrounding stimuli. Our stating point is the construction of a computational model which includes this dynamical centre-surround adaptation by means of two overlapping asymmetric Gaussian kernels whose variances are adjusted to the contrast of surrounding pixels to represent the changes in RF size of cortical neurons and the weights of their respective contributions are altered according to differences in centre-surround contrast and orientation. The final output of the model is obtained after convolving an image with this dynamical operator and an estimation of the illuminant is obtained by considering the contrast of the far surround. We tested our algorithm on naturalistic stimuli from several benchmark datasets. Our results show that although our model does not require any training, its performance against the state-of-the-art is highly competitive, even outperforming learning-based algorithms in some cases. Indeed, these results are very encouraging if we consider that they were obtained with the same parameters for all datasets (i.e. just like the human visual system operates).

Abstract: Bronchoscopists use X‐ray fluoroscopy to guide bronchoscopes to the lesion to be biopsied without any kind of incisions. Reducing exposure to X‐ray is important for both patients and doctors but alternatives like electromagnetic navigation require specific equipment and increase the cost of the clinical procedure. We propose a guiding system based on the extraction of airway centers from intra‐operative videos. Such anatomical landmarks could be
matched to the airway centerline extracted from a pre‐planned CT to indicate the best path to the lesion. We present an extraction of lumen centers
from intra‐operative videos based on tracking of maximal stable regions of energy maps.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new data-driven approach for binary descriptor selection. In order to draw a clear analysis of common designs, we present a general information-theoretic selection paradigm. It encompasses several standard binary descriptor construction schemes, including a recent state-of-the-art one named BOLD. We pursue the same endeavor to increase the stability of the produced descriptors with respect to rotations. To achieve this goal, we have designed a novel offline selection criterion which is better adapted to the online matching procedure. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on two standard datasets, where our descriptor is compared to BOLD and to several classical descriptors. In particular, it emerges that our approach can reproduce equivalent if not better performance as BOLD while relying on twice shorter descriptors. Such an improvement can be influential for real-time applications.

Abstract: The extraction of relevant information from historical document collections is one of the key steps in order to make these documents available for access and searches. The usual approach combines transcription and grammars in order to extract semantically meaningful entities. In this paper, we describe a new method to obtain word categories directly from non-preprocessed handwritten word images. The method can be used to directly extract information, being an alternative to the transcription. Thus it can be used as a first step in any kind of syntactical analysis. The approach is based on Convolutional Neural Networks with a Spatial Pyramid Pooling layer to deal with the different shapes of the input images. We performed the experiments on a historical marriage record dataset, obtaining promising results.

Abstract: Dense, robust and real-time computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely used algorithm that propagates consistency constraints along several paths across the image. This work presents a real-time system producing reliable disparity estimation results on the new embedded energy efficient GPU devices. Our design runs on a Tegra X1 at 42 frames per second (fps) for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.

Abstract: Semantic image retrieval from large amounts of egocentric visual data requires to leverage powerful techniques for filling in the semantic gap. This paper introduces LEMoRe, a Lifelog Engine for Moments Retrieval, developed in the context of the Lifelog Semantic Access Task (LSAT) of the the NTCIR-12 challenge and discusses its performance variation on different trials. LEMoRe integrates classical image descriptors with high-level semantic concepts extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), powered by a graphic user interface that uses natural language processing. Although this is just a first attempt towards interactive image retrieval from large egocentric datasets and there is a large room for improvement of the system components and the user interface, the structure of the system itself and the way the single components cooperate are very promising.