Abstract: Tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive technique used to examine cardiac deformation in vivo. An Angle Image is a representation of a Tagged MRI which recovers the relative position of the tissue respect to the distorted tags. Thus cardiac deformation can be estimated. This paper describes a new approach to generate Angle Images using a bank of Gabor filters in short axis cardiac Tagged MRI. Our method improves the Angle Images obtained by global techniques, like HARP, with a local frequency analysis. We propose to use the phase response of a combination of a Gabor filters bank, and use it to find a more precise deformation of the left ventricle. We demonstrate the accuracy of our method over HARP by several experimental results.

Abstract: Myocardium appears as a uniform tissue that seen in convectional Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) shows just the contractile part of its movement. MR Tagging is a unique imaging technique that prints a grid over the tissue which moves according to the underlying movement of the myocardium revealing the true deformation of the cardiac muscle. Optical flow techniques based on spectral information estimate tissue displacement by analyzing information encoded in the phase maps which can be obtained using, local (Gabor) and global (HARP) methods. In this paper we compare both in synthetic and real Tagged MR sequences. We conclude that local method is slightly more accurate than the global one. On the other hand, global method is more efficient as it is much faster and less parameters have to be taken into account

Abstract: In this work, we address the study of intestinal contractions in a novel approach based on a machine learning framework to process data from Wireless Capsule Video Endoscopy. Wireless endoscopy represents a unique way to visualize the intestine motility by creating long videos to visualize intestine dynamics. In this paper we argue that to analyze huge amount of wireless endoscopy data and define robust methods for contraction detection we should base our approach on sophisticated machine learning techniques. In particular, we propose a cascade of classifiers in order to remove different physiological phenomenon and obtain the motility pattern of small intestines. Our results show obtaining high specificity and sensitivity rates that highlight the high efficiency of the selected approach and support the feasibility of the proposed methodology in the automatic detection and analysis of intestine contractions.

Abstract: Robust visual pose estimation is at the core of many computer vision applications, being fundamental for Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry problems. During the last decades, many approaches have been proposed to solve these problems, being RANSAC one of the most accepted and used. However, with the arrival of new challenges, such as large driving scenarios for autonomous vehicles, along with the improvements in the data gathering frameworks, new issues must be considered. One of these issues is the capability of a technique to deal with very large amounts of data while meeting the realtime
constraint. With this purpose in mind, we present a novel technique for the problem of robust camera-pose estimation that is more suitable for dealing with large amount of data, which additionally, helps improving the results. The method is based on a combination of a very fast coarse-evaluation function and a robust ℓ1-averaging procedure. Such scheme leads to high-quality results while taking considerably less time than RANSAC.
Experimental results on the challenging KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite are provided, showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: On–board pedestrian detection is in the frontier of the state–of–the–art since it implies processing outdoor scenarios from a mobile platform and searching for aspect–changing objects in cluttered urban environments. Most promising approaches include the development of classifiers based on feature selection and machine learning. However, they use a large number of features which compromises real–time. Thus, methods for running the classifiers in only a few image windows must be provided. In this paper we contribute in both aspects, proposing a camera
pose estimation method for adaptive sparse image sampling, as well as a classifier for pedestrian detection based on Haar wavelets and edge orientation histograms as features and AdaBoost as learning machine. Both proposals are compared with relevant approaches in the literature, showing comparable results but reducing processing time by four for the sampling tasks and by ten for the classification one.