Abstract: Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demography studies and genealogical research. Automatic processing of historical documents, however, has mostly been focused on single works of literature and less on social records, which tend to have a distinct layout, structure, and vocabulary. Such information is usually collected by expert demographers that devote a lot of time to manually transcribe them. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a marriage license books collection, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition for historical documents containing social records. Marriage license books are documents that were used for centuries by ecclesiastical institutions to register marriage licenses. Books from this collection are handwritten and span nearly half a millennium until the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies.

Abstract: Color constancy is usually measured by achromatic setting, asymmetric matching, or color naming paradigms, whose results are interpreted in terms of indexes and models that arguably do not capture the full complexity of the phenomenon. Here we propose a new paradigm, chromatic setting, which allows a more comprehensive characterization of color constancy through the measurement of multiple points in color space under immersive adaptation. We demonstrated its feasibility by assessing the consistency of subjects' responses over time. The paradigm was applied to two-dimensional (2-D) Mondrian stimuli under three different illuminants, and the results were used to fit a set of linear color constancy models. The use of multiple colors improved the precision of more complex linear models compared to the popular diagonal model computed from gray. Our results show that a diagonal plus translation matrix that models mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain the phenomenon. Additionally, we calculated a number of color constancy indices for several points in color space, and our results suggest that interrelations among colors are not as uniform as previously believed. To account for this variability, we developed a new structural color constancy index that takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift in addition to the interrelations among colors and memory effects.

Abstract: Graph-based representations of patterns are very flexible and powerful, but they are not easily processed due to the lack of learning algorithms in the domain of graphs. Embedding a graph into a vector space solves this problem since graphs are turned into feature vectors and thus all the statistical learning machinery becomes available for graph input patterns. In this work we present a new way of embedding discrete attributed graphs into vector spaces using node and edge label frequencies. The methodology is experimentally tested on graph classification problems, using patterns of different nature, and it is shown to be competitive to state-of-the-art classification algorithms for graphs, while being computationally much more efficient.

Abstract: In this paper we describe a framework to learn a model of shape variability in a set of patterns. The framework is based on the Active Appearance Model (AAM) and permits to combine shape deformations with appearance variability. We have used two modifications of the Blurred Shape Model (BSM) descriptor as basic shape and appearance features to learn the model. These modifications permit to overcome the rigidity of the original BSM, adapting it to the deformations of the shape to be represented. We have applied this framework to representation and classification of handwritten digits and symbols. We show that results of the proposed methodology outperform the original BSM approach.

Abstract: Graph-based representations are of broad use and applicability in pattern recognition. They exhibit, however, a major drawback with regards to the processing tools that are available in their domain. Graphembedding into vectorspaces is a growing field among the structural pattern recognition community which aims at providing a feature vector representation for every graph, and thus enables classical statistical learning machinery to be used on graph-based input patterns. In this work, we propose a novel embedding methodology for graphs with continuous nodeattributes and unattributed edges. The approach presented in this paper is based on statistics of the node labels and the edges between them, based on their similarity to a set of representatives. We specifically deal with an important issue of this methodology, namely, the selection of a suitable set of representatives. In an experimental evaluation, we empirically show the advantages of this novel approach in the context of different classification problems using several databases of graphs.

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of human action recognition in reconstructed 3-D data acquired by multi-camera systems. We contribute to this field by introducing a novel 3-D action recognition approach based on detection of 4-D (3-D space $+$ time) spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and local description of 3-D motion features. STIPs are detected in multi-view images and extended to 4-D using 3-D reconstructions of the actors and pixel-to-vertex correspondences of the multi-camera setup. Local 3-D motion descriptors, histogram of optical 3-D flow (HOF3D), are extracted from estimated 3-D optical flow in the neighborhood of each 4-D STIP and made view-invariant. The local HOF3D descriptors are divided using 3-D spatial pyramids to capture and improve the discrimination between arm- and leg-based actions. Based on these pyramids of HOF3D descriptors we build a bag-of-words (BoW) vocabulary of human actions, which is compressed and classified using agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) and support vector machines (SVMs), respectively. Experiments on the publicly available i3DPost and IXMAS datasets show promising state-of-the-art results and validate the performance and view-invariance of the approach.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a fully automatic method which identifies every bifurcation in an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequence, the corresponding frames, the angular orientation with respect to the IVUS acquisition, and the extension. This goal is reached using a two-level classification scheme: first, a classifier is applied to a set of textural features extracted from each image of a sequence. A comparison among three state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers (AdaBoost, random forest, and support vector machine) is performed to identify the most suitable method for the branching detection task. Second, the results are improved by exploiting contextual information using a multiscale stacked sequential learning scheme. The results are then successively refined using a-priori information about branching dimensions and geometry. The proposed approach provides a robust tool for the quick review of pullback sequences, facilitating the evaluation of the lesion at bifurcation sites. The proposed method reaches an F-Measure score of 86.35%, while the F-Measure scores for inter- and intraobserver variability are 71.63% and 76.18%, respectively. The obtained results are positive. Especially, considering the branching detection task is very challenging, due to high variability in bifurcation dimensions and appearance.

Abstract: When light is reflected off a surface, there is a linear relation between the three human photoreceptor responses to the incoming light and the three photoreceptor responses to the reflected light. Different colored surfaces have different linear relations. Recently, Philipona and O'Regan (2006) showed that when this relation is singular in a mathematical sense, then the surface is perceived as having a highly nameable color. Furthermore, white light reflected by that surface is perceived as corresponding precisely to one of the four psychophysically measured unique hues. However, Philipona and O'Regan's approach seems unrelated to classical psychophysical models of color constancy. In this paper we make this link. We begin by transforming cone sensors to spectrally sharpened counterparts. In sharp color space, illumination change can be modeled by simple von Kries type scalings of response values within each of the spectrally sharpened response channels. In this space, Philipona and O'Regan's linear relation is captured by a simple Land-type color designator defined by dividing reflected light by incident light. This link between Philipona and O'Regan's theory and Land's notion of color designator gives the model biological plausibility. We then show that Philipona and O'Regan's singular surfaces are surfaces which are very close to activating only one or only two of such newly defined spectrally sharpened sensors, instead of the usual three. Closeness to zero is quantified in a new simplified measure of singularity which is also shown to relate to the chromaticness of colors. As in Philipona and O'Regan's original work, our new theory accounts for a large variety of psychophysical color data.