Abstract: Structural pattern recognition approaches offer the most expressive, convenient, powerful but computational expensive representations of underlying relational information. To benefit from mature, less expensive and efficient state-of-the-art machine learning models of statistical pattern recognition they must be mapped to a low-dimensional vector space. Our method of explicit graph embedding bridges the gap between structural and statistical pattern recognition. We extract the topological, structural and attribute information from a graph and encode numeric details by fuzzy histograms and symbolic details by crisp histograms. The histograms are concatenated to achieve a simple and straightforward embedding of graph into a low-dimensional numeric feature vector. Experimentation on standard public graph datasets shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods of graph embedding for richly attributed graphs.

Abstract: In this paper we tackle the automatic detection of struts elements (metallic braces of a stent device) in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) sequences. The proposed method is based on context-aware classification of IVUS images, where we use Multi-Class Multi-Scale Stacked Sequential Learning (M2SSL). Additionally, we introduce a novel technique to reduce the amount of required contextual features. The comparison with binary and multi-class learning is also performed, using a dataset of IVUS images with struts manually annotated by an expert. The best performing configuration reaches a F-measure F = 63.97% .

Abstract: In this paper we present a method for the segmentation of continuous page streams into multipage documents and the simultaneous classification of the resulting documents. We first present an approach to combine the multiple pages of a document into a single feature vector that represents the whole document. Despite its simplicity and low computational cost, the proposed representation yields results comparable to more complex methods in multipage document classification tasks. We then exploit this representation in the context of page stream segmentation. The most plausible segmentation of a page stream into a sequence of multipage documents is obtained by optimizing a statistical model that represents the probability of each segmented multipage document belonging to a particular class. Experimental results are reported on a large sample of real administrative multipage documents.

Abstract: Training vision-based pedestrian detectors using synthetic datasets (virtual world) is a useful technique to collect automatically the training examples with their pixel-wise ground truth. However, as it is often the case, these detectors must operate in real-world images, experiencing a significant drop of their performance. In fact, this effect also occurs among different real-world datasets, i.e. detectors' accuracy drops when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, it is required to adapt the detector trained with synthetic data to operate in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation approach based on boosting LDA exemplar classifiers from both virtual and real worlds. We evaluate our proposal on multiple real-world pedestrian detection datasets. The results show that our method can efficiently adapt the exemplar classifiers from virtual to real world, avoiding drops in average precision over the 15%.

Abstract: In this paper we present a handwritten line segmentation method devised to work on documents composed of several paragraphs with multiple line orientations. The method is based on a variation of the EM algorithm for the estimation of a set of regression lines between the connected components that compose the image. We evaluated our method on the ICDAR2009 handwriting segmentation contest dataset with promising results that overcome most of the presented methods. In addition, we prove the usability of the presented method by performing line segmentation on the George Washington database obtaining encouraging results.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique in graphical documents. Graphs are used to represent the documents and a (sub)graph matching technique is used to detect the symbols in them. We propose a graph serialization to reduce the usual computational complexity of graph matching. Serialization of graphs is performed by computing acyclic graph paths between each pair of connected nodes. Graph paths are one-dimensional structures of graphs which are less expensive in terms of computation. At the same time they enable robust localization even in the presence of noise and distortion. Indexing in large graph databases involves a computational burden as well. We propose a graph factorization approach to tackle this problem. Factorization is intended to create a unified indexed structure over the database of graphical documents. Once graph paths are extracted, the entire database of graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. We have performed detailed experiments with various datasets of line drawings and compared our method with the state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our technique.

Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and function of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Several conceptual models of myocardial fiber organization have been proposed but the lack of an automatic and objective methodology prevented an agreement. We sought to deepen in this knowledge through advanced computer graphic representations of the myocardial fiber architecture by diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI).
We performed automatic tractography reconstruction of unsegmented DT-MRI canine heart datasets coming from the public database of the Johns Hopkins University. Full scale tractographies have been build with 200 seeds and are composed by streamlines computed on the vectorial field of primary eigenvectors given at the diffusion tensor volumes. Also, we introduced a novel multi-scale visualization technique in order to obtain a simplified tractography. This methodology allowed to keep the main geometric features of the fiber tracts, making easier to decipher the main properties of the architectural organization of the heart.
On the analysis of the output from our tractographic representations we found exact correlation with low-level details of myocardial architecture, but also with the more abstract conceptualization of a continuous helical ventricular myocardial fiber array.
Objective analysis of myocardial architecture by an automated method, including the entire myocardium and using several 3D levels of complexity, reveals a continuous helical myocardial fiber arrangement of both right and left ventricles, supporting the anatomical model of the helical ventricular myocardial band described by Torrent-Guasp.

Abstract: This paper addresses the static and dynamic recognition of basic facial expressions. It has two main contributions. First, we introduce a view- and texture-independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. We represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Second, we compare this dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that the former performs better than the latter. We provide evaluations of performance using three subspace learning techniques: linear discriminant analysis, non-parametric discriminant analysis and support vector machines.