Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%

Abstract: The operational model of agonism has been widely used for the analysis of agonist action since its formulation in 1983. The model includes the Em parameter, which is defined as the maximum response of the system. The methods for Em estimation provide Em values not significantly higher than the maximum responses achieved by full agonists. However, it has been found that that some classes of compounds as, for instance, superagonists and positive allosteric modulators can increase the full agonist maximum response, implying upper limits for Em and thereby posing doubts on the validity of Em estimates. Because of the correlation between Em and operational efficacy, τ, wrong Em estimates will yield wrong τ estimates.
In this presentation, the operational model of agonism and various methods for the simulation of allosteric modulation will be analyzed. Alternatives for curve fitting will be presented and discussed.

Abstract: Facial trait judgments are an important information cue for people. Recent works in the Psychology field have stated the basis of face evaluation, defining a set of traits that we evaluate from faces (e.g. dominance, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, attractiveness, threatening or intelligence among others). We rapidly infer information from others faces, usually after a short period of time (< 1000ms) we perceive a certain degree of dominance or trustworthiness of another person from the face. Although these perceptions are not necessarily accurate, they influence many important social outcomes (such as the results of the elections or the court decisions). This topic has also attracted the attention of Computer Vision scientists, and recently a computational model to automatically predict trait evaluations from faces has been proposed. These systems try to mimic the human perception by means of applying machine learning classifiers to a set of labeled data. In this paper we perform an experimental study on the specific facial features that trigger the social inferences. Using previous results from the literature, we propose to use simple similarity maps to evaluate which regions of the face influence the most the trait inferences. The correlation analysis is performed using only appearance, and the results from the experiments suggest that each trait is correlated with specific facial characteristics.

Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.

Abstract: Pattern recognition is the task that aims at distinguishing objects among different classes. When such a task wants to be solved in an automatic way a crucial step is how to formally represent such patterns to the computer. Based on the different representational formalisms, we may distinguish between statistical and structural pattern recognition. The former describes objects as a set of measurements arranged in the form of what is called a feature vector. The latter assumes that relations between parts of the underlying objects need to be explicitly represented and thus it uses relational structures such as graphs for encoding their inherent information. Vector spaces are a very flexible mathematical structure that has allowed to come up with several efficient ways for the analysis of patterns under the form of feature vectors. Nevertheless, such a representation cannot explicitly cope with binary relations between parts of the objects and it is restricted to measure the exact same number of features for each pattern under study regardless of their complexity. Graph-based representations present the contrary situation. They can easily adapt to the inherent complexity of the patterns but introduce a problem of high computational complexity, hindering the design of efficient tools to process and analyse patterns.
Solving this paradox is the main goal of this thesis. The ideal situation for solving pattern recognition problems would be to represent the patterns using relational structures such as graphs, and to be able to use the wealthy repository of data processing tools from the statistical pattern recognition domain. An elegant solution to this problem is to transform the graph domain into a vector domain where any processing algorithm can be applied. In other words, by mapping each graph to a point in a vector space we automatically get access to the rich set of algorithms from the statistical domain to be applied in the graph domain. Such methodology is called graph embedding.
In this thesis we propose to associate feature vectors to graphs in a simple and very efficient way by just putting attention on the labelling information that graphs store. In particular, we count frequencies of node labels and of edges between labels. Although their locality, these features are able to robustly represent structurally global properties of graphs, when considered together in the form of a vector. We initially deal with the case of discrete attributed graphs, where features are easy to compute. The continuous case is tackled as a natural generalization of the discrete one, where rather than counting node and edge labelling instances, we count statistics of some representatives of them. We encounter how the proposed vectorial representations of graphs suffer from high dimensionality and correlation among components and we face these problems by feature selection algorithms. We also explore how the diversity of different embedding representations can be exploited in order to boost the performance of base classifiers in a multiple classifier systems framework. An extensive experimental evaluation finally shows how the methodology we propose can be efficiently computed and compete with other graph matching and embedding methodologies.

Abstract: Pose Recovery (PR) and Human Behavior Analysis (HBA) have been a main focus of interest from the beginnings of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. PR and HBA were originally addressed by the analysis of still images and image sequences. More recent strategies consisted of Motion Capture technology (MOCAP), based on the synchronization of multiple cameras in controlled environments; and the analysis of depth maps from Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology, based on range image recording from distance sensor measurements. Recently, with the appearance of the multi-modal RGBD information provided by the low cost Kinect \textsfTM sensor (from RGB and Depth, respectively), classical methods for PR and HBA have been redefined, and new strategies have been proposed. In this paper, the recent contributions and future trends of multi-modal RGBD data analysis for PR and HBA are reviewed and discussed.