R. Valenti, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Combining Head Pose and Eye Location Information for Gaze Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 802–815.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/12?: 3.32
Head pose and eye location for gaze estimation have been separately studied in numerous works in the literature. Previous research shows that satisfactory accuracy in head pose and eye location estimation can be achieved in constrained settings. However, in the presence of nonfrontal faces, eye locators are not adequate to accurately locate the center of the eyes. On the other hand, head pose estimation techniques are able to deal with these conditions; hence, they may be suited to enhance the accuracy of eye localization. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to combine head pose and eye location information to obtain enhanced gaze estimation. To this end, the transformation matrix obtained from the head pose is used to normalize the eye regions, and in turn, the transformation matrix generated by the found eye location is used to correct the pose estimation procedure. The scheme is designed to enhance the accuracy of eye location estimations, particularly in low-resolution videos, to extend the operative range of the eye locators, and to improve the accuracy of the head pose tracker. These enhanced estimations are then combined to obtain a novel visual gaze estimation system, which uses both eye location and head information to refine the gaze estimates. From the experimental results, it can be derived that the proposed unified scheme improves the accuracy of eye estimations by 16% to 23%. Furthermore, it considerably extends its operating range by more than 15° by overcoming the problems introduced by extreme head poses. Moreover, the accuracy of the head pose tracker is improved by 12% to 24%. Finally, the experimentation on the proposed combined gaze estimation system shows that it is accurate (with a mean error between 2° and 5°) and that it can be used in cases where classic approaches would fail without imposing restraints on the position of the head.
|
Arjan Gijsenij, R. Lu, Theo Gevers, & De Xu. (2012). Color Constancy for Multiple Light Source. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 697–707.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/2012?: 3.32
Color constancy algorithms are generally based on the simplifying assumption that the spectral distribution of a light source is uniform across scenes. However, in reality, this assumption is often violated due to the presence of multiple light sources. In this paper, we will address more realistic scenarios where the uniform light-source assumption is too restrictive. First, a methodology is proposed to extend existing algorithms by applying color constancy locally to image patches, rather than globally to the entire image. After local (patch-based) illuminant estimation, these estimates are combined into more robust estimations, and a local correction is applied based on a modified diagonal model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on spectral and real images show that the proposed methodology reduces the influence of two light sources simultaneously present in one scene. If the chromatic difference between these two illuminants is more than 1° , the proposed framework outperforms algorithms based on the uniform light-source assumption (with error-reduction up to approximately 30%). Otherwise, when the chromatic difference is less than 1° and the scene can be considered to contain one (approximately) uniform light source, the performance of the proposed method framework is similar to global color constancy methods.
|
Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Albert Ali Salah, & Theo Gevers. (2012). A Statistical Method for 2D Facial Landmarking. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 844–858.
Abstract: IF = 3.32
Many facial-analysis approaches rely on robust and accurate automatic facial landmarking to correctly function. In this paper, we describe a statistical method for automatic facial-landmark localization. Our landmarking relies on a parsimonious mixture model of Gabor wavelet features, computed in coarse-to-fine fashion and complemented with a shape prior. We assess the accuracy and the robustness of the proposed approach in extensive cross-database conditions conducted on four face data sets (Face Recognition Grand Challenge, Cohn-Kanade, Bosphorus, and BioID). Our method has 99.33% accuracy on the Bosphorus database and 97.62% accuracy on the BioID database on the average, which improves the state of the art. We show that the method is not significantly affected by low-resolution images, small rotations, facial expressions, and natural occlusions such as beard and mustache. We further test the goodness of the landmarks in a facial expression recognition application and report landmarking-induced improvement over baseline on two separate databases for video-based expression recognition (Cohn-Kanade and BU-4DFE).
|
Francesc Tanarro Marquez, Pau Gratacos Marti, F. Javier Sanchez, Joan Ramon Jimenez Minguell, Coen Antens, & Enric Sala i Esteva. (2012). A device for monitoring condition of a railway supply. European Patent Office.
Abstract: of a railway supply line when the supply line is in contact with a head of a pantograph of a vehicle in order to power said vehicle . The device includes a camera ( for monitoring parameters indicative of operating capability of said supply line.
The device is intended to monitor condition
tive of operating capability of said supply line. The device includes a reflective element. comprising a pattern , intended to be arranged onto the pantograph head . The camera is intended to be arranged on the vehicle (10) so as to register the pattern position regarding a vertical direction.
|
Oriol Ramos Terrades, Alejandro Hector Toselli, Nicolas Serrano, Veronica Romero, Enrique Vidal, & Alfons Juan. (2010). Interactive layout analysis and transcription systems for historic handwritten documents. In 10th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (219–222).
Abstract: The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents, waiting to be classified and finally transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF). Nevertheless, most of the available fully-automatic applications addressing this task are far from being perfect and heavy and inefficient human intervention is often required to check and correct the results of such systems. In contrast, multimodal interactive-predictive approaches may allow the users to participate in the process helping the system to improve the overall performance. With this in mind, two sets of recent advances are introduced in this work: a novel interactive method for text block detection and two multimodal interactive handwritten text transcription systems which use active learning and interactive-predictive technologies in the recognition process.
Keywords: Handwriting recognition; Interactive predictive processing; Partial supervision; Interactive layout analysis
|
Alberto Hidalgo, Ferran Poveda, Enric Marti, Debora Gil, Albert Andaluz, Francesc Carreras, et al. (2012). Evidence of continuous helical structure of the cardiac ventricular anatomy assessed by diffusion tensor imaging magnetic resonance multiresolution tractography. ECR - European Radiology, 3(1), 361–362.
Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and func- tion of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Diffusion tensor MRI provides a discrete measurement of the 3D arrangement of myocardial fibres by the observation of local anisotropic
diffusion of water molecules in biological tissues. In this work, we present a multi- scale visualisation technique based on DT-MRI streamlining capable of uncovering additional properties of the architectural organisation of the heart. Methods and Materials: We selected the John Hopkins University (JHU) Canine Heart Dataset, where the long axis cardiac plane is aligned with the scanner’s Z- axis. Their equipment included a 4-element passed array coil emitting a 1.5 T. For DTI acquisition, a 3D-FSE sequence is apply. We used 200 seeds for full-scale tractography, while we applied a MIP mapping technique for simplified tractographic reconstruction. In this case, we reduced each DTI 3D volume dimensions by order- two magnitude before streamlining.
Our simplified tractographic reconstruction method keeps the main geometric features of fibres, allowing for an easier identification of their global morphological disposition, including the ventricular basal ring. Moreover, we noticed a clearly visible helical disposition of the myocardial fibres, in line with the helical myocardial band ventricular structure described by Torrent-Guasp. Finally, our simplified visualisation with single tracts identifies the main segments of the helical ventricular architecture.
DT-MRI makes possible the identification of a continuous helical architecture of the myocardial fibres, which validates Torrent-Guasp’s helical myocardial band ventricular anatomical model.
|
Antonio Hernandez, Miguel Angel Bautista, Xavier Perez Sala, Victor Ponce, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, et al. (2014). Probability-based Dynamic Time Warping and Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words for Human Gesture Recognition in RGB-D. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 50(1), 112–121.
Abstract: PATREC5825
We present a methodology to address the problem of human gesture segmentation and recognition in video and depth image sequences. A Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words (BoVDW) model is introduced as an extension of the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model. State-of-the-art RGB and depth features, including a newly proposed depth descriptor, are analysed and combined in a late fusion form. The method is integrated in a Human Gesture Recognition pipeline, together with a novel probability-based Dynamic Time Warping (PDTW) algorithm which is used to perform prior segmentation of idle gestures. The proposed DTW variant uses samples of the same gesture category to build a Gaussian Mixture Model driven probabilistic model of that gesture class. Results of the whole Human Gesture Recognition pipeline in a public data set show better performance in comparison to both standard BoVW model and DTW approach.
Keywords: RGB-D; Bag-of-Words; Dynamic Time Warping; Human Gesture Recognition
|
G.D. Evangelidis, Ferran Diego, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Slice Matching for Accurate Spatio-Temporal Alignment. In In ICCV Workshop on Visual Surveillance.
Abstract: Video synchronization and alignment is a rather recent topic in computer vision. It usually deals with the problem of aligning sequences recorded simultaneously by static, jointly- or independently-moving cameras. In this paper, we investigate the more difficult problem of matching videos captured at different times from independently-moving cameras, whose trajectories are approximately coincident or parallel. To this end, we propose a novel method that pixel-wise aligns videos and allows thus to automatically highlight their differences. This primarily aims at visual surveillance but the method can be adopted as is by other related video applications, like object transfer (augmented reality) or high dynamic range video. We build upon a slice matching scheme to first synchronize the sequences, while we develop a spatio-temporal alignment scheme to spatially register corresponding frames and refine the temporal mapping. We investigate the performance of the proposed method on videos recorded from vehicles driven along different types of roads and compare with related previous works.
Keywords: video alignment
|
G. Roig, Xavier Boix, F. de la Torre, Joan Serrat, & C. Vilella. (2011). Hierarchical CRF with product label spaces for parts-based Models. In IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Abstract: Non-rigid object detection is a challenging an open research problem in computer vision. It is a critical part in many applications such as image search, surveillance, human-computer interaction or image auto-annotation. Most successful approaches to non-rigid object detection make use of part-based models. In particular, Conditional Random Fields (CRF) have been successfully embedded into a discriminative parts-based model framework due to its effectiveness for learning and inference (usually based on a tree structure). However, CRF-based approaches do not incorporate global constraints and only model pairwise interactions. This is especially important when modeling object classes that may have complex parts interactions (e.g. facial features or body articulations), because neglecting them yields an oversimplified model with suboptimal performance. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical CRF (HCRF). The main contribution is to build a hierarchy of part combinations by extending the label set to a hierarchy of product label spaces. In order to keep the inference computation tractable, we propose an effective method to reduce the new label set. We test our method on two applications: facial feature detection on the Multi-PIE database and human pose estimation on the Buffy dataset.
|
Albert Andaluz. (2012). Harmonic Phase Flow: User's guide. Barcelona: CVC.
Abstract: HPF is a plugin for the computation of clinical scores under Osirix.
This manual provides a basic guide for experienced clinical staff. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical background in which this plugin is based.
Next, in chapter 2 we provide basic instructions for installing and uninstalling this plugin. chapter 3we shows a step-by-step scenario to compute clinical scores from tagged-MRI images with HPF. Finally, in chapter 4 we provide a quick guide for plugin developers
|
Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Modulating Shape Features by Color Attention for Object Recognition. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1), 49–64.
Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.
|
Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Portmanteau Vocabularies for Multi-Cue Image Representation. In 25th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: We describe a novel technique for feature combination in the bag-of-words model of image classification. Our approach builds discriminative compound words from primitive cues learned independently from training images. Our main observation is that modeling joint-cue distributions independently is more statistically robust for typical classification problems than attempting to empirically estimate the dependent, joint-cue distribution directly. We use Information theoretic vocabulary compression to find discriminative combinations of cues and the resulting vocabulary of portmanteau words is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. State-of-the-art results on both the Oxford Flower-102 and Caltech-UCSD Bird-200 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique compared to other, significantly more complex approaches to multi-cue image representation
|
Jordi Roca, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Categorical Focal Colours are Structurally Invariant Under Illuminant Changes. In European Conference on Visual Perception (196). Perception 40.
Abstract: The visual system perceives the colour of surfaces approximately constant under changes of illumination. In this work, we investigate how stable is the perception of categorical \“focal\” colours and their interrelations with varying illuminants and simple chromatic backgrounds. It has been proposed that best examples of colour categories across languages cluster in small regions of the colour space and are restricted to a set of 11 basic terms (Kay and Regier, 2003 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100 9085\–9089). Following this, we developed a psychophysical paradigm that exploits the ability of subjects to reliably reproduce the most representative examples of each category, adjusting multiple test patches embedded in a coloured Mondrian. The experiment was run on a CRT monitor (inside a dark room) under various simulated illuminants. We modelled the recorded data for each subject and adapted state as a 3D interconnected structure (graph) in Lab space. The graph nodes were the subject\’s focal colours at each adaptation state. The model allowed us to get a better distance measure between focal structures under different illuminants. We found that perceptual focal structures tend to be preserved better than the structures of the physical \“ideal\” colours under illuminant changes.
|
S. Chanda, Umapada Pal, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2009). Word-Wise Thai and Roman Script Identification. TALIP - ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, 1–21.
Abstract: In some Thai documents, a single text line of a printed document page may contain words of both Thai and Roman scripts. For the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a document page it is better to identify, at first, Thai and Roman script portions and then to use individual OCR systems of the respective scripts on these identified portions. In this article, an SVM-based method is proposed for identification of word-wise printed Roman and Thai scripts from a single line of a document page. Here, at first, the document is segmented into lines and then lines are segmented into character groups (words). In the proposed scheme, we identify the script of a character group combining different character features obtained from structural shape, profile behavior, component overlapping information, topological properties, and water reservoir concept, etc. Based on the experiment on 10,000 data (words) we obtained 99.62% script identification accuracy from the proposed scheme.
|
H. Chouaib, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Salvatore Tabbone, F. Cloppet, & N. Vincent. (2008). Feature Selection Combining Genetic Algorithm and Adaboost Classifiers. In 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1–4).
|