Abstract: Kidney stone formation is a common disease and the incidence rate is constantly increasing worldwide. It has been shown that the classification of kidney stones can lead to an important reduction of the recurrence rate. The classification of kidney stones by human experts on the basis of certain visual color and texture features is one of the most employed techniques. However, the knowledge of how to analyze kidney stones is not widespread, and the experts learn only after being trained on a large number of samples of the different classes. In this paper we describe a new device specifically designed for capturing images of expelled kidney stones, and a method to learn and apply the experts knowledge with regard to their classification. We show that with off the shelf components, a carefully selected set of features and a state of the art classifier it is possible to automate this difficult task to a good degree. We report results on a collection of 454 kidney stones, achieving an overall accuracy of 63% for a set of eight classes covering almost all of the kidney stones taxonomy. Moreover, for more than 80% of samples the real class is the first or the second most probable class according to the system, being then the patient recommendations for the two top classes similar. This is the first attempt towards the automatic visual classification of kidney stones, and based on the current results we foresee better accuracies with the increase of the dataset size.

Abstract: Three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) allows to visualize and obtain volumetric measurements of coronary lesions through an exploration of the cross sections and longitudinal views of arteries. However, the visualization and subsequent morpho-geometric measurements in IVUS longitudinal cuts are subject to distortion caused by periodic image/vessel motion around the IVUS catheter. Usually, to overcome the image motion artifact ECG-gating and image-gated approaches are proposed, leading to slowing the pullback acquisition or disregarding part of IVUS data. In this paper, we argue that the image motion is due to 3-D vessel geometry as well as cardiac dynamics, and propose a dynamic model based on the tracking of an elliptical vessel approximation to recover the rigid transformation and align IVUS images without loosing any IVUS data. We report an extensive validation with synthetic simulated data and in vivo IVUS sequences of 30 patients achieving an average reduction of the image artifact of 97% in synthetic data and 79% in real-data. Our study shows that IVUS alignment improves longitudinal analysis of the IVUS data and is a necessary step towards accurate reconstruction and volumetric measurements of 3-D IVUS.

Abstract: In this paper we evaluate four graph distance measures. The analysis is performed for document retrieval tasks. For this aim, different kind of documents are used including line drawings (symbols), ancient documents (ornamental letters), shapes and trademark-logos. The experimental results show that the performance of each graph distance measure depends on the kind of data and the graph representation technique.

Abstract: This paper develops a formalism by which an estimate for the upper and lower bounds for the elasticity parameters for a snake can be obtained. Objects different in size and shape give rise to different bounds. The bounds can be obtained based on an analysis of the shape of the object of interest. Experiments on synthetic images show a good correlation between the estimated behaviour of the snake and the one actually observed. Experiments on real X-ray images show that the parameters for optimal segmentation lie within the estimated bounds.

Abstract: The PAD competitions we organized attracted more than 835 teams from home and abroad, most of them from the industry, which shows that the topic of face anti-spoofing is closely related to daily life, and there is an urgent need for advanced algorithms to solve its application needs. Specifically, the Chalearn LAP multi-modal face anti-spoofing attack detection challenge attracted more than 300 teams for the development phase with a total of 13 teams qualifying for the final round; the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge attracted 340 teams in the development stage, and finally, 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively; the 3D High-Fidelity Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection Challenge attracted 195 teams for the development phase with a total of 18 teams qualifying for the final round. All the results were verified and re-run by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. In this chapter, we briefly the methods developed by the teams participating in each competition, and introduce the algorithm details of the top-three ranked teams in detail.

Abstract: During the last years, there has been an increasing interest in applying the multiple classifier framework to the domain of structural pattern recognition. Constructing base classifiers when the input patterns are graph based representations is not an easy problem. In this work, we make use of the graph embedding methodology in order to construct different feature vector representations for graphs. The graph of words embedding assigns a feature vector to every graph by counting unary and binary relations between node representatives and combining these pieces of information into a single vector. Selecting different node representatives leads to different vectorial representations and therefore to different base classifiers that can be combined. We experimentally show how this methodology significantly improves the classification of graphs with respect to single base classifiers.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an original sparse vector model for symbol retrieval task. More specically, we apply the K-SVD algorithm for learning a visual dictionary based on symbol descriptors locally computed around interest points. Results on benchmark datasets show that the obtained sparse representation is competitive related to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our sparse representation is invariant to rotation and scale transforms and also robust to degraded images and distorted symbols. Thereby, the learned visual dictionary is able to represent instances of unseen classes of symbols.