Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent document understanding enable direct content-based search as opposed to metadata only search (e.g. album title or author name). Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for the automatic text localization in scanned comics book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comics book understanding. We focus on speech text as it is semantically important and represents the majority of the text present in comics. The approach is compared with existing methods of text localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Abstract: Manifold learning techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data---the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed schemes were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only reached for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that sparse coding theory not only serves for automatic graph reconstruction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on four public face databases. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.

Abstract: In this paper we deal with the problem of recognizing handwritten shapes. We present a new deformable feature extraction method that adapts to the shape to be described, dealing in this way with the variability introduced in the handwriting domain. It consists in a selection of the regions that best define the shape to be described, followed by the computation of histograms of oriented gradients-based features over these points. Our results significantly outperform other descriptors in the literature for the task of hand-drawn shape recognition and handwritten word retrieval

Abstract: In this paper we present an incremental framework aimed at extracting field information from administrative document images in the context of a Digital Mail-room scenario. Given a single training sample in which the user has marked which fields have to be extracted from a particular document class, a document model representing structural relationships among words is built. This model is incrementally refined as the system processes more and more documents from the same class. A reformulation of the tf-idf statistic scheme allows to adjust the importance weights of the structural relationships among words. We report in the experimental section our results obtained with a large dataset of real invoices.

Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent comic book understanding would enable a variety of new applications, including content-based retrieval and content retargeting. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for closed and non-closed speech balloon localization in scanned comic book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. The approach is compared with existing methods for closed balloon localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Abstract: In order to provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability for restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions.
This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoids degenerated medial axis segments. Second, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to syn- thetic shapes of known medial geometry. We also show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume.

Abstract: World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world population is affected by back-related disorders during his life. Current practices to analyze musculo-skeletal disorders (MSDs) are expensive, subjective, and invasive. In this work, we propose a tool for static body posture analysis and dynamic range of movement estimation of the skeleton joints based on 3D anthropometric information from multi-modal data. Given a set of keypoints, RGB and depth data are aligned, depth surface is reconstructed, keypoints are matched, and accurate measurements about posture and spinal curvature are computed. Given a set of joints, range of movement measurements is also obtained. Moreover, gesture recognition based on joint movements is performed to look for the correctness in the development of physical exercises. The system shows high precision and reliable measurements, being useful for posture reeducation purposes to prevent MSDs, as well as tracking the posture evolution of patients in rehabilitation treatments.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel method for continuous visual event recognition (CVER) on a large scale video dataset using max-margin Hough transformation framework. Due to high scalability, diverse real environmental state and wide scene variability direct application of action recognition/detection methods such as spatio-temporal interest point (STIP)-local feature based technique, on the whole dataset is practically infeasible. To address this problem, we apply a motion region extraction technique which is based on motion segmentation and region clustering to identify possible candidate “event of interest” as a preprocessing step. On these candidate regions a STIP detector is applied and local motion features are computed. For activity representation we use generalized Hough transform framework where each feature point casts a weighted vote for possible activity class centre. A max-margin frame work is applied to learn the feature codebook weight. For activity detection, peaks in the Hough voting space are taken into account and initial event hypothesis is generated using the spatio-temporal information of the participating STIPs. For event recognition a verification Support Vector Machine is used. An extensive evaluation on benchmark large scale video surveillance dataset (VIRAT) and as well on a small scale benchmark dataset (MSR) shows that the proposed method is applicable on a wide range of continuous visual event recognition applications having extremely challenging conditions.