Abstract: Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.

Abstract: For millennia, the study of the couple brain-mind has fascinated the humanity in order to understand the complex nature of cognitive states. A cognitive state is the state of the mind at a specific time and involves cognition activities to acquire and process information for making a decision, solving a problem, or achieving a goal.
While normal cognitive states assist in the successful accomplishment of tasks; on the contrary, abnormal states of the mind can lead to task failures due to a reduced cognition capability. In this thesis, we focus on the assessment of cognitive states by means of the analysis of ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEG) signals using deep learning methods. EEG records the electrical activity of the brain using a set of electrodes placed on the scalp that output a set of spatiotemporal signals that are expected to be correlated to a specific mental process.
From the point of view of artificial intelligence, any method for the assessment of cognitive states using EEG signals as input should face several challenges. On the one hand, one should determine which is the most suitable approach for the optimal combination of the multiple signals recorded by EEG electrodes. On the other hand, one should have a protocol for the collection of good quality unambiguous annotated data, and an experimental design for the assessment of the generalization and transfer of models. In order to tackle them, first, we propose several convolutional neural architectures to perform data fusion of the signals recorded by EEG electrodes, at raw signal and feature levels. Four channel fusion methods, easy to incorporate into any neural network architecture, are proposed and assessed. Second, we present a method to create an unambiguous dataset for the prediction of cognitive mental workload using serious games and an Airbus-320 flight simulator. Third, we present a validation protocol that takes into account the levels of generalization of models based on the source and amount of test data.
Finally, the approaches for the assessment of cognitive states are applied to two use cases of high social impact: the assessment of mental workload for personalized support systems in the cockpit and the detection of epileptic seizures. The results obtained from the first use case show the feasibility of task transfer of models trained to detect workload in serious games to real flight scenarios. The results from the second use case show the generalization capability of our EEG channel fusion methods at k-fold cross-validation, patient-specific, and population levels.

Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.

Abstract: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise such as spurious nodes and edges, and their discontinuity. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance. But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result, the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the categorization of administrative document images (such as invoices) based on the recognition of the supplier’s graphical logo. Two different methods are proposed, the first one uses a bag-of-visual-words model whereas the second one tries to locate logo images described by the blurred shape model descriptor within documents by a sliding-window technique. Preliminar results are reported with a dataset of real administrative documents.

Abstract: It is very common to find different versions of the same music work in archives of Opera Theaters. These differences correspond to modifications and annotations from the musicians. From the musicologist point of view, these variations are very interesting and deserve study. This paper explores the alignment of music scores as a tool for automatically detecting the passages that contain such differences. Given the difficulties in the recognition of handwritten music scores, our goal is to align the music scores and at the same time, avoid the recognition of music elements as much as possible. After removing the staff lines, braces and ties, the bar lines are detected. Then, the bar units are described as a whole using the Blurred Shape Model. The bar units alignment is performed by using Dynamic Time Warping. The analysis of the alignment path is used to detect the variations in the music scores. The method has been evaluated on a subset of the CVC-MUSCIMA dataset, showing encouraging results.

Abstract: The original idea of this project was to study the role of colour in the challenging task of object recognition. We started by extending previous research on colour naming showing that it is feasible to capture colour terms through parsimonious ellipsoids. Although, the results of our model exceeded state-of-the-art in two benchmark datasets, we realised that the two phenomena of metameric lights and colour constancy must be addressed prior to any further colour processing. Our investigation of metameric pairs reached the conclusion that they are infrequent in real world scenarios. Contrary to that, the illumination of a scene often changes dramatically. We addressed this issue by proposing a colour constancy model inspired by the dynamical centre-surround adaptation of neurons in the visual cortex. This was implemented through two overlapping asymmetric Gaussians whose variances and heights are adjusted according to the local contrast of pixels. We complemented this model with a generic contrast-variant pooling mechanism that inversely connect the percentage of pooled signal to the local contrast of a region. The results of our experiments on four benchmark datasets were indeed promising: the proposed model, although simple, outperformed even learning-based approaches in many cases. Encouraged by the success of our contrast-variant surround modulation, we extended this approach to detect boundaries of objects. We proposed an edge detection model based on the first derivative of the Gaussian kernel. We incorporated four types of surround: full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation. Furthermore, we accounted for the pooling mechanism at higher cortical areas and the shape feedback sent to lower areas. Our results in three benchmark datasets showed significant improvement over non-learning algorithms.
To summarise, we demonstrated that biologically-inspired models offer promising solutions to computer vision problems, such as, colour naming, colour constancy and edge detection. We believe that the greatest contribution of this Ph.D dissertation is modelling the concept of dynamic surround modulation that shows the significance of contrast-variant surround integration. The models proposed here are grounded on only a portion of what we know about the human visual system. Therefore, it is only natural to complement them accordingly in future works.