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Author Misael Rosales
Title A Physics-Based Image Modelling of IVUS as a Geometric and Kinematic System Type Book Whole
Year 2005 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address CVC (UAB)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Petia Radeva
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition 978-84-922529-8-7 Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ros2005 Serial 603
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Author Fernando Vilariño
Title A Machine Learning Approach for Intestinal Motility Assessment with Capsule Endoscopy Type Book Whole
Year 2006 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Intestinal motility assessment with video capsule endoscopy arises as a novel and challenging clinical fieldwork. This technique is based on the analysis of the patterns of intestinal contractions obtained by labelling all the motility events present in a video provided by a capsule with a wireless micro-camera, which is ingested by the patient. However, the visual analysis of these video sequences presents several im- portant drawbacks, mainly related to both the large amount of time needed for the visualization process, and the low prevalence of intestinal contractions in video.
In this work we propose a machine learning system to automatically detect the intestinal contractions in video capsule endoscopy, driving a very useful but not fea- sible clinical routine into a feasible clinical procedure. Our proposal is divided into two different parts: The first part tackles the problem of the automatic detection of phasic contractions in capsule endoscopy videos. Phasic contractions are dynamic events spanning about 4-5 seconds, which show visual patterns with a high variability. Our proposal is based on a sequential design which involves the analysis of textural, color and blob features with powerful classifiers such as SVM. This approach appears to cope with two basic aims: the reduction of the imbalance rate of the data set, and the modular construction of the system, which adds the capability of including domain knowledge as new stages in the cascade. The second part of the current work tackles the problem of the automatic detection of tonic contractions. Tonic contrac- tions manifest in capsule endoscopy as a sustained pattern of the folds and wrinkles of the intestine, which may be prolonged for an undetermined span of time. Our proposal is based on the analysis of the wrinkle patterns, presenting a comparative study of diverse features and classification methods, and providing a set of appro- priate descriptors for their characterization. We provide a detailed analysis of the performance achieved by our system both in a qualitative and a quantitative way.
Address CVC (UAB)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Petia Radeva
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue 84-933652-7-0 Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area 800 Expedition Conference
Notes MV;SIAI Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Vil2006; IAM @ iam @ Vil2006 Serial 738
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Author David Rotger
Title Analysis and Multi-Modal Fusion of coronary Images Type Book Whole
Year 2009 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The framework of this thesis is to study in detail different techniques and tools for medical image registration in order to ease the daily life of clinical experts in cardiology. The first aim of this thesis is providing computer tools for
fusing IVUS and angiogram data is of high clinical interest to help the physicians locate in IVUS data and decide which lesion is observed, how long it is, how far from a bifurcation or another lesions stays, etc. This thesis proves and
validates that we can segment the catheter path in angiographies using geodesic snakes (based on fast marching algorithm), a three-dimensional reconstruction of the catheter inspired in stereo vision and a new technique to fuse IVUS
and angiograms that establishes exact correspondences between them. We have developed a new workstation called iFusion that has four strong advantages: registration of IVUS and angiographic images with sub-pixel precision, it works on- and off-line, it is independent on the X-ray system and there is no need of daily calibration. The second aim of the thesis is devoted to developing a computer-aided analysis of IVUS for image-guided intervention. We have designed, implemented
and validated a robust algorithm for stent extraction and reconstruction from IVUS videos. We consider a very special and recent kind of stents, bioabsorbable stents that represent a great clinical challenge due to their property to be
absorbed by time and thus avoiding the “danger” of neostenosis as one of the main problems of metallic stents. We present a new and very promising algorithm based on an optimized cascade of multiple classifiers to automatically detect individual stent struts of a very novel bioabsorbable drug eluting coronary stent. This problem represents a very challenging target given the variability in contrast, shape and grey levels of the regions to be detected, what is
denoted by the high variability between the specialists (inter-observer variability of 0.14~$\pm$0.12). The obtained results of the automatic strut detection are within the inter-observer variability.
Address Barcelona (Espanya)
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Petia Radeva
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Rot2009 Serial 1261
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Author Ricardo Toledo
Title Cardiac workstation and dynamic model to assist in coronary tree analysis. Type Book Whole
Year 2001 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Petia Radeva;JuanJose Villanueva
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Tol2001 Serial 166
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Author Eduard Vazquez
Title Unsupervised image segmentation based on material reflectance description and saliency Type Book Whole
Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Image segmentations aims to partition an image into a set of non-overlapped regions, called segments. Despite the simplicity of the definition, image segmentation raises as a very complex problem in all its stages. The definition of segment is still unclear. When asking to a human to perform a segmentation, this person segments at different levels of abstraction. Some segments might be a single, well-defined texture whereas some others correspond with an object in the scene which might including multiple textures and colors. For this reason, segmentation is divided in bottom-up segmentation and top-down segmentation. Bottom up-segmentation is problem independent, that is, focused on general properties of the images such as textures or illumination. Top-down segmentation is a problem-dependent approach which looks for specific entities in the scene, such as known objects. This work is focused on bottom-up segmentation. Beginning from the analysis of the lacks of current methods, we propose an approach called RAD. Our approach overcomes the main shortcomings of those methods which use the physics of the light to perform the segmentation. RAD is a topological approach which describes a single-material reflectance. Afterwards, we cope with one of the main problems in image segmentation: non supervised adaptability to image content. To yield a non-supervised method, we use a model of saliency yet presented in this thesis. It computes the saliency of the chromatic transitions of an image by means of a statistical analysis of the images derivatives. This method of saliency is used to build our final approach of segmentation: spRAD. This method is a non-supervised segmentation approach. Our saliency approach has been validated with a psychophysical experiment as well as computationally, overcoming a state-of-the-art saliency method. spRAD also outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation techniques as results obtained with a widely-used segmentation dataset show
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Ramon Baldrich
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Vaz2011b Serial 1835
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Author Monica Piñol
Title Reinforcement Learning of Visual Descriptors for Object Recognition Type Book Whole
Year 2014 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Ricardo Toledo;Angel Sappa
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-940902-5-7 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS; 600.076 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Piñ2014 Serial 2464
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Author Marc Serra
Title Modeling, estimation and evaluation of intrinsic images considering color information Type Book Whole
Year 2015 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Image values are the result of a combination of visual information coming from multiple sources. Recovering information from the multiple factors thatproduced an image seems a hard and ill-posed problem. However, it is important to observe that humans develop the ability to interpret images and recognize and isolate specific physical properties of the scene.

Images describing a single physical characteristic of an scene are called intrinsic images. These images would benefit most computer vision tasks which are often affected by the multiple complex effects that are usually found in natural images (e.g. cast shadows, specularities, interreflections...).

In this thesis we analyze the problem of intrinsic image estimation from different perspectives, including the theoretical formulation of the problem, the visual cues that can be used to estimate the intrinsic components and the evaluation mechanisms of the problem.
Address September 2015
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Robert Benavente;Olivier Penacchio
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-943427-4-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC; 600.074 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ser2015 Serial 2688
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Author Meysam Madadi
Title Human Segmentation, Pose Estimation and Applications Type Book Whole
Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Automatic analyzing humans in photographs or videos has great potential applications in computer vision, including medical diagnosis, sports, entertainment, movie editing and surveillance, just to name a few. Body, face and hand are the most studied components of humans. Body has many variabilities in shape and clothing along with high degrees of freedom in pose. Face has many muscles causing many visible deformity, beside variable shape and hair style. Hand is a small object, moving fast and has high degrees of freedom. Adding human characteristics to all aforementioned variabilities makes human analysis quite a challenging task.
In this thesis, we developed human segmentation in different modalities. In a first scenario, we segmented human body and hand in depth images using example-based shape warping. We developed a shape descriptor based on shape context and class probabilities of shape regions to extract nearest neighbors. We then considered rigid affine alignment vs. nonrigid iterative shape warping. In a second scenario, we segmented face in RGB images using convolutional neural networks (CNN). We modeled conditional random field with recurrent neural networks. In our model pair-wise kernels are not fixed and learned during training. We trained the network end-to-end using adversarial networks which improved hair segmentation by a high margin.
We also worked on 3D hand pose estimation in depth images. In a generative approach, we fitted a finger model separately for each finger based on our example-based rigid hand segmentation. We minimized an energy function based on overlapping area, depth discrepancy and finger collisions. We also applied linear models in joint trajectory space to refine occluded joints based on visible joints error and invisible joints trajectory smoothness. In a CNN-based approach, we developed a tree-structure network to train specific features for each finger and fused them for global pose consistency. We also formulated physical and appearance constraints as loss functions.
Finally, we developed a number of applications consisting of human soft biometrics measurement and garment retexturing. We also generated some datasets in this thesis consisting of human segmentation, synthetic hand pose, garment retexturing and Italian gestures.
Address October 2017
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Sergio Escalera;Jordi Gonzalez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-3-2 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes HUPBA Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Mad2017 Serial 3017
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Author Jaime Moreno
Title Perceptual Criteria on Image Compresions Type Book Whole
Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Nowadays, digital images are used in many areas in everyday life, but they tend to be big. This increases amount of information leads us to the problem of image data storage. For example, it is common to have a representation a color pixel as a 24-bit number, where the channels red, green, and blue employ 8 bits each. In consequence, this kind of color pixel can specify one of 224 ¼ 16:78 million colors. Therefore, an image at a resolution of 512 £ 512 that allocates 24 bits per pixel, occupies 786,432 bytes. That is why image compression is important. An important feature of image compression is that it can be lossy or lossless. A compressed image is acceptable provided these losses of image information are not perceived by the eye. It is possible to assume that a portion of this information is redundant. Lossless Image Compression is defined as to mathematically decode the same image which was encoded. In Lossy Image Compression needs to identify two features inside the image: the redundancy and the irrelevancy of information. Thus, lossy compression modifies the image data in such a way when they are encoded and decoded, the recovered image is similar enough to the original one. How similar is the recovered image in comparison to the original image is defined prior to the compression process, and it depends on the implementation to be performed. In lossy compression, current image compression schemes remove information considered irrelevant by using mathematical criteria. One of the problems of these schemes is that although the numerical quality of the compressed image is low, it shows a high visual image quality, e.g. it does not show a lot of visible artifacts. It is because these mathematical criteria, used to remove information, do not take into account if the viewed information is perceived by the Human Visual System. Therefore, the aim of an image compression scheme designed to obtain images that do not show artifacts although their numerical quality can be low, is to eliminate the information that is not visible by the Human Visual System. Hence, this Ph.D. thesis proposes to exploit the visual redundancy existing in an image by reducing those features that can be unperceivable for the Human Visual System. First, we define an image quality assessment, which is highly correlated with the psychophysical experiments performed by human observers. The proposed CwPSNR metrics weights the well-known PSNR by using a particular perceptual low level model of the Human Visual System, e.g. the Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model (CIWaM). Second, we propose an image compression algorithm (called Hi-SET), which exploits the high correlation and self-similarity of pixels in a given area or neighborhood by means of a fractal function. Hi-SET possesses the main features that modern image compressors have, that is, it is an embedded coder, which allows a progressive transmission. Third, we propose a perceptual quantizer (½SQ), which is a modification of the uniform scalar quantizer. The ½SQ is applied to a pixel set in a certain Wavelet sub-band, that is, a global quantization. Unlike this, the proposed modification allows to perform a local pixel-by-pixel forward and inverse quantization, introducing into this process a perceptual distortion which depends on the surround spatial information of the pixel. Combining ½SQ method with the Hi-SET image compressor, we define a perceptual image compressor, called ©SET. Finally, a coding method for Region of Interest areas is presented, ½GBbBShift, which perceptually weights pixels into these areas and maintains only the more important perceivable features in the rest of the image. Results presented in this report show that CwPSNR is the best-ranked image quality method when it is applied to the most common image compression distortions such as JPEG and JPEG2000. CwPSNR shows the best correlation with the judgement of human observers, which is based on the results of psychophysical experiments obtained for relevant image quality databases such as TID2008, LIVE, CSIQ and IVC. Furthermore, Hi-SET coder obtains better results both for compression ratios and perceptual image quality than the JPEG2000 coder and other coders that use a Hilbert Fractal for image compression. Hence, when the proposed perceptual quantization is introduced to Hi-SET coder, our compressor improves its numerical and perceptual e±ciency. When ½GBbBShift method applied to Hi-SET is compared against MaxShift method applied to the JPEG2000 standard and Hi-SET, the images coded by our ROI method get the best results when the overall image quality is estimated. Both the proposed perceptual quantization and the ½GBbBShift method are generalized algorithms that can be applied to other Wavelet based image compression algorithms such as JPEG2000, SPIHT or SPECK.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Xavier Otazu
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-938351-3-2 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Mor2011 Serial 1786
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Author Xim Cerda-Company
Title Understanding color vision: from psychophysics to computational modeling Type Book Whole
Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract In this PhD we have approached the human color vision from two different points of view: psychophysics and computational modeling. First, we have evaluated 15 different tone-mapping operators (TMOs). We have conducted two experiments that
consider two different criteria: the first one evaluates the local relationships among intensity levels and the second one evaluates the global appearance of the tonemapped imagesw.r.t. the physical one (presented side by side). We conclude that the rankings depend on the criterion and they are not correlated. Considering both criteria, the best TMOs are KimKautz (Kim and Kautz, 2008) and Krawczyk (Krawczyk, Myszkowski, and Seidel, 2005). Another conclusion is that a more standardized evaluation criteria is needed to do a fair comparison among TMOs.
Secondly, we have conducted several psychophysical experiments to study the
color induction. We have studied two different properties of the visual stimuli: temporal frequency and luminance spatial distribution. To study the temporal frequency we defined equiluminant stimuli composed by both uniform and striped surrounds and we flashed them varying the flash duration. For uniform surrounds, the results show that color induction depends on both the flash duration and inducer’s chromaticity. As expected, in all chromatic conditions color contrast was induced. In contrast, for striped surrounds, we expected to induce color assimilation, but we observed color contrast or no induction. Since similar but not equiluminant striped stimuli induce color assimilation, we concluded that luminance differences could be a key factor to induce color assimilation. Thus, in a subsequent study, we have studied the luminance differences’ effect on color assimilation. We varied the luminance difference between the target region and its inducers and we observed that color assimilation depends on both this difference and the inducer’s chromaticity. For red-green condition (where the first inducer is red and the second one is green), color assimilation occurs in almost all luminance conditions.
Instead, for green-red condition, color assimilation never occurs. Purple-lime
and lime-purple chromatic conditions show that luminance difference is a key factor to induce color assimilation. When the target is darker than its surround, color assimilation is stronger in purple-lime, while when the target is brighter, color assimilation is stronger in lime-purple (’mirroring’ effect). Moreover, we evaluated whether color assimilation is due to luminance or brightness differences. Similarly to equiluminance condition, when the stimuli are equibrightness no color assimilation is induced. Our results support the hypothesis that mutual-inhibition plays a major role in color perception, or at least in color induction.
Finally, we have defined a new firing rate model of color processing in the V1
parvocellular pathway. We have modeled two different layers of this cortical area: layers 4Cb and 2/3. Our model is a recurrent dynamic computational model that considers both excitatory and inhibitory cells and their lateral connections. Moreover, it considers the existent laminar differences and the cells’ variety. Thus, we have modeled both single- and double-opponent simple cells and complex cells, which are a pool of double-opponent simple cells. A set of sinusoidal drifting gratings have been used to test the architecture. In these gratings we have varied several spatial properties such as temporal and spatial frequencies, grating’s area and orientation. To reproduce the electrophysiological observations, the architecture has to consider the existence of non-oriented double-opponent cells in layer 4Cb and the lack of lateral connections between single-opponent cells. Moreover, we have tested our lateral connections simulating the center-surround modulation and we have reproduced physiological measurements where for high contrast stimulus, the
result of the lateral connections is inhibitory, while it is facilitatory for low contrast stimulus.
Address March 2019
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Xavier Otazu
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-4-2 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes NEUROBIT Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Cer2019 Serial 3259
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Author David Berga
Title Understanding Eye Movements: Psychophysics and a Model of Primary Visual Cortex Type Book Whole
Year 2019 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Humansmove their eyes in order to learn visual representations of the world. These eye movements depend on distinct factors, either by the scene that we perceive or by our own decisions. To select what is relevant to attend is part of our survival mechanisms and the way we build reality, as we constantly react both consciously and unconsciously to all the stimuli that is projected into our eyes. In this thesis we try to explain (1) how we move our eyes, (2) how to build machines that understand visual information and deploy eyemovements, and (3) how to make these machines understand tasks in order to decide for eye movements.
(1) We provided the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of 230 synthetically-generated image patterns. A total of 15 types of stimuli has been generated (e.g. orientation, brightness, color, size, etc.), with 7 feature contrasts for each feature category. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of the dataset, using Free-Viewing and Visual Search task instructions. Results showed that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. Temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. From such dataset (SID4VAM), we have computed a benchmark of saliency models by testing performance using psychophysical patterns. Model performance has been evaluated considering model inspiration and consistency with human psychophysics. Our study reveals that state-of-the-art Deep Learning saliency models do not performwell with synthetic pattern images, instead, modelswith Spectral/Fourier inspiration outperform others in saliency metrics and are more consistent with human psychophysical experimentation.
(2) Computations in the primary visual cortex (area V1 or striate cortex) have long been hypothesized to be responsible, among several visual processing mechanisms, of bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). In order to validate this hypothesis, images from eye tracking datasets have been processed with a biologically plausible model of V1 (named Neurodynamic SaliencyWaveletModel or NSWAM). Following Li’s neurodynamic model, we define V1’s lateral connections with a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation and scale. Early subcortical processes (i.e. retinal and thalamic) are functionally simulated. The resulting saliency maps are generated from the model output, representing the neuronal activity of V1 projections towards brain areas involved in eye movement control. We want to pinpoint that our unified computational architecture is able to reproduce several visual processes (i.e. brightness, chromatic induction and visual discomfort) without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parametrization. The model has been extended (NSWAM-CM) with an implementation of the cortical magnification function to define the retinotopical projections towards V1, processing neuronal activity for each distinct view during scene observation. Novel computational definitions of top-down inhibition (in terms of inhibition of return and selection mechanisms), are also proposed to predict attention in Free-Viewing and Visual Search conditions. Results show that our model outperforms other biologically-inpired models of saliency prediction as well as to predict visual saccade sequences, specifically for nature and synthetic images. We also show how temporal and spatial characteristics of inhibition of return can improve prediction of saccades, as well as how distinct search strategies (in terms of feature-selective or category-specific inhibition) predict attention at distinct image contexts.
(3) Although previous scanpath models have been able to efficiently predict saccades during Free-Viewing, it is well known that stimulus and task instructions can strongly affect eye movement patterns. In particular, task priming has been shown to be crucial to the deployment of eye movements, involving interactions between brain areas related to goal-directed behavior, working and long-termmemory in combination with stimulus-driven eyemovement neuronal correlates. In our latest study we proposed an extension of the Selective Tuning Attentive Reference Fixation ControllerModel based on task demands (STAR-FCT), describing novel computational definitions of Long-TermMemory, Visual Task Executive and Task Working Memory. With these modules we are able to use textual instructions in order to guide the model to attend to specific categories of objects and/or places in the scene. We have designed our memorymodel by processing a visual hierarchy of low- and high-level features. The relationship between the executive task instructions and the memory representations has been specified using a tree of semantic similarities between the learned features and the object category labels. Results reveal that by using this model, the resulting object localizationmaps and predicted saccades have a higher probability to fall inside the salient regions depending on the distinct task instructions compared to saliency.
Address July 2019
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Xavier Otazu
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-948531-8-0 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes NEUROBIT Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ber2019 Serial 3390
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Author Naila Murray
Title Predicting Saliency and Aesthetics in Images: A Bottom-up Perspective Type Book Whole
Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.

In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.

Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.

As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor (up) Xavier Otazu;Maria Vanrell
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CIC Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Mur2012 Serial 2212
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Author Jordi Gonzalez
Title Human Sequence Evaluation: the Key-frame Approach Type Book Whole
Year 2004 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor (up) Xavier Roca;Javier Varona
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes Approved no
Call Number ISE @ ise @ Gon2004 Serial 362
Permanent link to this record