Tadashi Araki, Sumit K. Banchhor, Narendra D. Londhe, Nobutaka Ikeda, Petia Radeva, Devarshi Shukla, et al. (2016). Reliable and Accurate Calcium Volume Measurement in Coronary Artery Using Intravascular Ultrasound Videos. JMS - Journal of Medical Systems, 40(3), 51:1–51:20.
Abstract: Quantitative assessment of calcified atherosclerotic volume within the coronary artery wall is vital for cardiac interventional procedures. The goal of this study is to automatically measure the calcium volume, given the borders of coronary vessel wall for all the frames of the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) video. Three soft computing fuzzy classification techniques were adapted namely Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), K-means, and Hidden Markov Random Field (HMRF) for automated segmentation of calcium regions and volume computation. These methods were benchmarked against previously developed threshold-based method. IVUS image data sets (around 30,600 IVUS frames) from 15 patients were collected using 40 MHz IVUS catheter (Atlantis® SR Pro, Boston Scientific®, pullback speed of 0.5 mm/s). Calcium mean volume for FCM, K-means, HMRF and threshold-based method were 37.84 ± 17.38 mm3, 27.79 ± 10.94 mm3, 46.44 ± 19.13 mm3 and 35.92 ± 16.44 mm3 respectively. Cross-correlation, Jaccard Index and Dice Similarity were highest between FCM and threshold-based method: 0.99, 0.92 ± 0.02 and 0.95 + 0.02 respectively. Student’s t-test, z-test and Wilcoxon-test are also performed to demonstrate consistency, reliability and accuracy of the results. Given the vessel wall region, the system reliably and automatically measures the calcium volume in IVUS videos. Further, we validated our system against a trained expert using scoring: K-means showed the best performance with an accuracy of 92.80 %. Out procedure and protocol is along the line with method previously published clinically.
Keywords: Interventional cardiology; Atherosclerosis; Coronary arteries; IVUS; calcium volume; Soft computing; Performance Reliability; Accuracy
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, David Fernandez, Alicia Fornes, Ernest Valveny, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2013). Runlength Histogram Image Signature for Perceptual Retrieval of Architectural Floor Plans. In 10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2015). Global Color Sparseness and a Local Statistics Prior for Fast Bilateral Filtering. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5842–5853.
Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.
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Dimosthenis Karatzas, Lluis Gomez, Anguelos Nicolaou, Suman Ghosh, Andrew Bagdanov, Masakazu Iwamura, et al. (2015). ICDAR 2015 Competition on Robust Reading. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 1156–1160).
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Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2015). Object Proposals for Text Extraction in the Wild. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 206–210).
Abstract: Object Proposals is a recent computer vision technique receiving increasing interest from the research community. Its main objective is to generate a relatively small set of bounding box proposals that are most likely to contain objects of interest. The use of Object Proposals techniques in the scene text understanding field is innovative. Motivated by the success of powerful while expensive techniques to recognize words in a holistic way, Object Proposals techniques emerge as an alternative to the traditional text detectors. In this paper we study to what extent the existing generic Object Proposals methods may be useful for scene text understanding. Also, we propose a new Object Proposals algorithm that is specifically designed for text and compare it with other generic methods in the state of the art. Experiments show that our proposal is superior in its ability of producing good quality word proposals in an efficient way. The source code of our method is made publicly available
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Anguelos Nicolaou, Andrew Bagdanov, Marcus Liwicki, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2015). Sparse Radial Sampling LBP for Writer Identification. In 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition ICDAR2015 (pp. 716–720).
Abstract: In this paper we present the use of Sparse Radial Sampling Local Binary Patterns, a variant of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) for text-as-texture classification. By adapting and extending the standard LBP operator to the particularities of text we get a generic text-as-texture classification scheme and apply it to writer identification. In experiments on CVL and ICDAR 2013 datasets, the proposed feature-set demonstrates State-Of-the-Art (SOA) performance. Among the SOA, the proposed method is the only one that is based on dense extraction of a single local feature descriptor. This makes it fast and applicable at the earliest stages in a DIA pipeline without the need for segmentation, binarization, or extraction of multiple features.
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Suman Ghosh, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Ernest Valveny. (2015). Efficient indexing for Query By String text retrieval. In 6th IAPR International Workshop on Camera Based Document Analysis and Recognition CBDAR2015 (pp. 1236–1240).
Abstract: This paper deals with Query By String word spotting in scene images. A hierarchical text segmentation algorithm based on text specific selective search is used to find text regions. These regions are indexed per character n-grams present in the text region. An attribute representation based on Pyramidal Histogram of Characters (PHOC) is used to compare text regions with the query text. For generation of the index a similar attribute space based Pyramidal Histogram of character n-grams is used. These attribute models are learned using linear SVMs over the Fisher Vector [1] representation of the images along with the PHOC labels of the corresponding strings.
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J.Kuhn, A.Nussbaumer, J.Pirker, Dimosthenis Karatzas, A. Pagani, O.Conlan, et al. (2015). Advancing Physics Learning Through Traversing a Multi-Modal Experimentation Space. In Workshop Proceedings on the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (Vol. 19, pp. 373–380).
Abstract: Translating conceptual knowledge into real world experiences presents a significant educational challenge. This position paper presents an approach that supports learners in moving seamlessly between conceptual learning and their application in the real world by bringing physical and virtual experiments into everyday settings. Learners are empowered in conducting these situated experiments in a variety of physical settings by leveraging state of the art mobile, augmented reality, and virtual reality technology. A blend of mobile-based multi-sensory physical experiments, augmented reality and enabling virtual environments can allow learners to bridge their conceptual learning with tangible experiences in a completely novel manner. This approach focuses on the learner by applying self-regulated personalised learning techniques, underpinned by innovative pedagogical approaches and adaptation techniques, to ensure that the needs and preferences of each learner are catered for individually.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Ernest Valveny, & Gemma Sanchez. (2013). Unsupervised and Notation-Independent Wall Segmentation in Floor Plans Using a Combination of Statistical and Structural Strategies. In 10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.
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Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2015). Towards social interaction detection in egocentric photo-streams. In Proceedings of SPIE, 8th International Conference on Machine Vision , ICMV 2015 (Vol. 9875).
Abstract: Detecting social interaction in videos relying solely on visual cues is a valuable task that is receiving increasing attention in recent years. In this work, we address this problem in the challenging domain of egocentric photo-streams captured by a low temporal resolution wearable camera (2fpm). The major difficulties to be handled in this context are the sparsity of observations as well as unpredictability of camera motion and attention orientation due to the fact that the camera is worn as part of clothing. Our method consists of four steps: multi-faces localization and tracking, 3D localization, pose estimation and analysis of f-formations. By estimating pair-to-pair interaction probabilities over the sequence, our method states the presence or absence of interaction with the camera wearer and specifies which people are more involved in the interaction. We tested our method over a dataset of 18.000 images and we show its reliability on our considered purpose. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
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Ivan Huerta, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2015). Chromatic shadow detection and tracking for moving foreground segmentation. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 41, 42–53.
Abstract: Advanced segmentation techniques in the surveillance domain deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting moving objects. Most approaches for shadow detection are still typically restricted to penumbra shadows and cannot cope well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadow regions are usually detected as part of moving objects, thus aecting the performance of the nal detection. In this paper we address the detection of both penumbra and umbra shadow regions. First, a novel bottom-up approach is presented based on gradient and colour models, which successfully discriminates between chromatic moving cast shadow regions and those regions detected as moving objects. In essence, those regions corresponding to potential shadows are detected based on edge partitioning and colour statistics. Subsequently (i) temporal similarities between textures and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are analysed for each potential shadow region for detecting the umbra shadow regions. Our second contribution renes even further the segmentation results: a tracking-based top-down approach increases the performance of our bottom-up chromatic shadow detection algorithm by properly correcting non-detected shadows.
To do so, a combination of motion lters in a data association framework exploits the temporal consistency between objects and shadows to increase
the shadow detection rate. Experimental results exceed current state-of-the-
art in shadow accuracy for multiple well-known surveillance image databases which contain dierent shadowed materials and illumination conditions.
Keywords: Detecting moving objects; Chromatic shadow detection; Temporal local gradient; Spatial and Temporal brightness and angle distortions; Shadow tracking
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Sergio Escalera, Junior Fabian, Pablo Pardo, Xavier Baro, Jordi Gonzalez, Hugo Jair Escalante, et al. (2015). ChaLearn Looking at People 2015: Apparent Age and Cultural Event Recognition Datasets and Results. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 243–251).
Abstract: Following previous series on Looking at People (LAP) competitions [14, 13, 11, 12, 2], in 2015 ChaLearn ran two new competitions within the field of Looking at People: (1) age estimation, and (2) cultural event recognition, both in
still images. We developed a crowd-sourcing application to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). In terms of cultural event recognition, one hundred categories had to be recognized. These
tasks involved scene understanding and human body analysis. This paper summarizes both challenges and data, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competition.
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Josep M. Gonfaus, Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrea Vedaldi, & Xavier Roca. (2015). Factorized appearances for object detection. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 138, 92–101.
Abstract: Deformable object models capture variations in an object’s appearance that can be represented as image deformations. Other effects such as out-of-plane rotations, three-dimensional articulations, and self-occlusions are often captured by considering mixture of deformable models, one per object aspect. A more scalable approach is representing instead the variations at the level of the object parts, applying the concept of a mixture locally. Combining a few part variations can in fact cheaply generate a large number of global appearances.
A limited version of this idea was proposed by Yang and Ramanan [1], for human pose dectection. In this paper we apply it to the task of generic object category detection and extend it in several ways. First, we propose a model for the relationship between part appearances more general than the tree of Yang and Ramanan [1], which is more suitable for generic categories. Second, we treat part locations as well as their appearance as latent variables so that training does not need part annotations but only the object bounding boxes. Third, we modify the weakly-supervised learning of Felzenszwalb et al. and Girshick et al. [2], [3] to handle a significantly more complex latent structure.
Our model is evaluated on standard object detection benchmarks and is found to improve over existing approaches, yielding state-of-the-art results for several object categories.
Keywords: Object recognition; Deformable part models; Learning and sharing parts; Discovering discriminative parts
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Julie Digne, Mariella Dimiccoli, Neus Sabater, & Philippe Salembier. (2015). Neighborhood Filters and the Recovery of 3D Information. In Handbook of Mathematical Methods in Imaging (pp. 1645–1673). Springer New York.
Abstract: Following their success in image processing (see Chapter Local Smoothing Neighborhood Filters), neighborhood filters have been extended to 3D surface processing. This adaptation is not straightforward. It has led to several variants for surfaces depending on whether the surface is defined as a mesh, or as a raw data point set. The image gray level in the bilateral similarity measure is replaced by a geometric information such as the normal or the curvature. The first section of this chapter reviews the variants of 3D mesh bilateral filters and compares them to the simplest possible isotropic filter, the mean curvature motion.In a second part, this chapter reviews applications of the bilateral filter to a data composed of a sparse depth map (or of depth cues) and of the image on which they have been computed. Such sparse depth cues can be obtained by stereovision or by psychophysical techniques. The underlying assumption to these applications is that pixels with similar intensity around a region are likely to have similar depths. Therefore, when diffusing depth information with a bilateral filter based on locality and color similarity, the discontinuities in depth are assured to be consistent with the color discontinuities, which is generally a desirable property. In the reviewed applications, this ends up with the reconstruction of a dense perceptual depth map from the joint data of an image and of depth cues.
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Jean-Pascal Jacob, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Lionel Moisan. (2016). Active skeleton for bacteria modeling. CMBBE - Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging and Visualization, 5(4), 274–286.
Abstract: The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modeling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness, orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images, and a natural bacteria-centered coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimizing an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modeling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at this http URL
Keywords: Bacteria modelling; medial axis; active contours; active skeleton; shape contraints
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