Dimosthenis Karatzas, Sergi Robles, & Lluis Gomez. (2014). An on-line platform for ground truthing and performance evaluation of text extraction systems. In 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (pp. 242–246).
Abstract: This paper presents a set of on-line software tools for creating ground truth and calculating performance evaluation metrics for text extraction tasks such as localization, segmentation and recognition. The platform supports the definition of comprehensive ground truth information at different text representation levels while it offers centralised management and quality control of the ground truthing effort. It implements a range of state of the art performance evaluation algorithms and offers functionality for the definition of evaluation scenarios, on-line calculation of various performance metrics and visualisation of the results. The
presented platform, which comprises the backbone of the ICDAR 2011 (challenge 1) and 2013 (challenges 1 and 2) Robust Reading competitions, is now made available for public use.
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2014). MSER-based Real-Time Text Detection and Tracking. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 3110–3115).
Abstract: We present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of text in natural scenes that goes beyond the fulldetection approaches in terms of time performance optimization.
A state-of-the-art scene text detection module based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) is used to detect text asynchronously, while on a separate thread detected text objects are tracked by MSER propagation. The cooperation of these two modules yields real time video processing at high frame rates even on low-resource devices.
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Alejandro Tabas, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, & Laura Igual. (2014). Spatial Discriminant ICA for RS-fMRI characterisation. In 4th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging (pp. 1–4).
Abstract: Resting-State fMRI (RS-fMRI) is a brain imaging technique useful for exploring functional connectivity. A major point of interest in RS-fMRI analysis is to isolate connectivity patterns characterising disorders such as for instance ADHD. Such characterisation is usually performed in two steps: first, all connectivity patterns in the data are extracted by means of Independent Component Analysis (ICA); second, standard statistical tests are performed over the extracted patterns to find differences between control and clinical groups. In this work we introduce a novel, single-step, approach for this problem termed Spatial Discriminant ICA. The algorithm can efficiently isolate networks of functional connectivity characterising a clinical group by combining ICA and a new variant of the Fisher’s Linear Discriminant also introduced in this work. As the characterisation is carried out in a single step, it potentially provides for a richer characterisation of inter-class differences. The algorithm is tested using synthetic and real fMRI data, showing promising results in both experiments.
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Oualid M. Benkarim, Petia Radeva, & Laura Igual. (2014). Label Consistent Multiclass Discriminative Dictionary Learning for MRI Segmentation. In 8th Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (Vol. 8563, pp. 138–147). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: The automatic segmentation of multiple subcortical structures in brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) still remains a challenging task. In this paper, we address this problem using sparse representation and discriminative dictionary learning, which have shown promising results in compression, image denoising and recently in MRI segmentation. Particularly, we use multiclass dictionaries learned from a set of brain atlases to simultaneously segment multiple subcortical structures.
We also impose dictionary atoms to be specialized in one given class using label consistent K-SVD, which can alleviate the bias produced by unbalanced libraries, present when dealing with small structures. The proposed method is compared with other state of the art approaches for the segmentation of the Basal Ganglia of 35 subjects of a public dataset.
The promising results of the segmentation method show the eciency of the multiclass discriminative dictionary learning algorithms in MRI segmentation problems.
Keywords: MRI segmentation; sparse representation; discriminative dic- tionary learning; multiclass classi cation
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Patricia Marquez, H. Kause, A. Fuster, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, L. Florack, Debora Gil, et al. (2014). Factors Affecting Optical Flow Performance in Tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (Vol. 8896, pp. 231–238). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across di erent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three di erent OF methods, including HARP.
Keywords: Optical flow; Performance Evaluation; Synthetic Database; ANOVA; Tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Fast Structural Matching for Document Image Retrieval through Spatial Databases. In Document Recognition and Retrieval XXI (Vol. 9021).
Abstract: The structure of document images plays a signi cant role in document analysis thus considerable e orts have been made towards extracting and understanding document structure, usually in the form of layout analysis approaches. In this paper, we rst employ Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) to eciently extract stable document structural elements in terms of a dendrogram of key-regions. Then a fast structural matching method is proposed to query the structure of document (dendrogram) based on a spatial database which facilitates the formulation of advanced spatial queries. The experiments demonstrate a signi cant improvement in a document retrieval scenario when compared to the use of typical Bag of Words (BoW) and pyramidal BoW descriptors.
Keywords: Document image retrieval; distance transform; MSER; spatial database
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Hongxing Gao, Marçal Rusiñol, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Josep Llados. (2014). Embedding Document Structure to Bag-of-Words through Pair-wise Stable Key-regions. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2903–2908).
Abstract: Since the document structure carries valuable discriminative information, plenty of efforts have been made for extracting and understanding document structure among which layout analysis approaches are the most commonly used. In this paper, Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) is employed to efficiently extract the document structure as a dendrogram of key-regions which roughly correspond to structural elements such as characters, words and paragraphs. Inspired by the Bag
of Words (BoW) framework, we propose an efficient method for structural document matching by representing the document image as a histogram of key-region pairs encoding structural relationships.
Applied to the scenario of document image retrieval, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement when comparing the proposed method with typical BoW and pyramidal BoW methods.
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Joan Marc Llargues Asensio, Juan Peralta, Raul Arrabales, Manuel Gonzalez Bedia, Paulo Cortez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Artificial Intelligence Approaches for the Generation and Assessment of Believable Human-Like Behaviour in Virtual Characters. EXSY - Expert Systems With Applications, 41(16), 7281–7290.
Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.
Keywords: Turing test; Human-like behaviour; Believability; Non-player characters; Cognitive architectures; Genetic algorithm; Artificial neural networks
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Jose Manuel Alvarez, Antonio Lopez, Theo Gevers, & Felipe Lumbreras. (2014). Combining Priors, Appearance and Context for Road Detection. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(3), 1168–1178.
Abstract: Detecting the free road surface ahead of a moving vehicle is an important research topic in different areas of computer vision, such as autonomous driving or car collision warning.
Current vision-based road detection methods are usually based solely on low-level features. Furthermore, they generally assume structured roads, road homogeneity, and uniform lighting conditions, constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, road priors and contextual information are introduced for road detection. First, we propose an algorithm to estimate road priors online using geographical information, providing relevant initial information about the road location. Then, contextual cues, including horizon lines, vanishing points, lane markings, 3-D scene layout, and road geometry, are used in addition to low-level cues derived from the appearance of roads. Finally, a generative model is used to combine these cues and priors, leading to a road detection method that is, to a large degree, robust to varying imaging conditions, road types, and scenarios.
Keywords: Illuminant invariance; lane markings; road detection; road prior; road scene understanding; vanishing point; 3-D scene layout
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Jorge Bernal, Debora Gil, Carles Sanchez, & F. Javier Sanchez. (2014). Discarding Non Informative Regions for Efficient Colonoscopy Image Analysis. In 1st MICCAI Workshop on Computer-Assisted and Robotic Endoscopy (Vol. 8899, pp. 1–10). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel polyp region segmentation method for colonoscopy videos. Our method uses valley information associated to polyp boundaries in order to provide an initial segmentation. This first segmentation is refined to eliminate boundary discontinuities caused by image artifacts or other elements of the scene. Experimental results over a publicly annotated database show that our method outperforms both general and specific segmentation methods by providing more accurate regions rich in polyp content. We also prove how image preprocessing is needed to improve final polyp region segmentation.
Keywords: Image Segmentation; Polyps, Colonoscopy; Valley Information; Energy Maps
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Joan M. Nuñez, Jorge Bernal, Miquel Ferrer, & Fernando Vilariño. (2014). Impact of Keypoint Detection on Graph-based Characterization of Blood Vessels in Colonoscopy Videos. In CARE workshop.
Abstract: We explore the potential of the use of blood vessels as anatomical landmarks for developing image registration methods in colonoscopy images. An unequivocal representation of blood vessels could be used to guide follow-up methods to track lesions over different interventions. We propose a graph-based representation to characterize network structures, such as blood vessels, based on the use of intersections and endpoints. We present a study consisting of the assessment of the minimal performance a keypoint detector should achieve so that the structure can still be recognized. Experimental results prove that, even by achieving a loss of 35% of the keypoints, the descriptive power of the associated graphs to the vessel pattern is still high enough to recognize blood vessels.
Keywords: Colonoscopy; Graph Matching; Biometrics; Vessel; Intersection
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2014). Robust Head Gestures Recognition for Assistive Technology. In Pattern Recognition (Vol. 8495, pp. 152–161). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: This paper presents a system capable of recognizing six head gestures: nodding, shaking, turning right, turning left, looking up, and looking down. The main difference of our system compared to other methods is that the Hidden Markov Models presented in this paper, are fully connected and consider all possible states in any given order, providing the following advantages to the system: (1) allows unconstrained movement of the head and (2) it can be easily integrated into a wearable device (e.g. glasses, neck-hung devices), in which case it can robustly recognize gestures in the presence of ego-motion. Experimental results show that this approach outperforms common methods that use restricted HMMs for each gesture.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Michael Felsberg, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Semantic Pyramids for Gender and Action Recognition. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(8), 3633–3645.
Abstract: Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigated two major aspects of person description: 1) gender and 2) action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part, such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is suboptimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body, and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pretrained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box, which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body, and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large data sets namely: 1) human attribute; 2) head-shoulder; and 3) proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four data sets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: 1) Sports; 2) Willow; 3) PASCAL VOC 2010; and 4) Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.
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Marc Serra, Olivier Penacchio, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2014). The Photometry of Intrinsic Images. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1494–1501).
Abstract: Intrinsic characterization of scenes is often the best way to overcome the illumination variability artifacts that complicate most computer vision problems, from 3D reconstruction to object or material recognition. This paper examines the deficiency of existing intrinsic image models to accurately account for the effects of illuminant color and sensor characteristics in the estimation of intrinsic images and presents a generic framework which incorporates insights from color constancy research to the intrinsic image decomposition problem. The proposed mathematical formulation includes information about the color of the illuminant and the effects of the camera sensors, both of which modify the observed color of the reflectance of the objects in the scene during the acquisition process. By modeling these effects, we get a “truly intrinsic” reflectance image, which we call absolute reflectance, which is invariant to changes of illuminant or camera sensors. This model allows us to represent a wide range of intrinsic image decompositions depending on the specific assumptions on the geometric properties of the scene configuration and the spectral properties of the light source and the acquisition system, thus unifying previous models in a single general framework. We demonstrate that even partial information about sensors improves significantly the estimated reflectance images, thus making our method applicable for a wide range of sensors. We validate our general intrinsic image framework experimentally with both synthetic data and natural images.
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M. Danelljan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Michael Felsberg, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2014). Adaptive color attributes for real-time visual tracking. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1090–1097).
Abstract: Visual tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most state-of-the-art visual trackers either rely on luminance information or use simple color representations for image description. Contrary to visual tracking, for object
recognition and detection, sophisticated color features when combined with luminance have shown to provide excellent performance. Due to the complexity of the tracking problem, the desired color feature should be computationally
efficient, and possess a certain amount of photometric invariance while maintaining high discriminative power.
This paper investigates the contribution of color in a tracking-by-detection framework. Our results suggest that color attributes provides superior performance for visual tracking. We further propose an adaptive low-dimensional
variant of color attributes. Both quantitative and attributebased evaluations are performed on 41 challenging benchmark color sequences. The proposed approach improves the baseline intensity-based tracker by 24% in median distance precision. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms
state-of-the-art tracking methods while running at more than 100 frames per second.
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