Abstract: Videobronchoscopy is a medical imaging technique that allows interactive navigation inside the respiratory pathways. This imaging modality provides realistic images and allows non-invasive minimal intervention procedures. Tracheal procedures are routinary interventions that require assessment of the percentage of obstructed pathway for injury (stenosis) detection. Visual assessment in videobronchoscopic sequences requires high expertise of trachea anatomy and is prone to human error.
This paper introduces an automatic method for the estimation of steneosed trachea percentage reduction in videobronchoscopic images. We look for tracheal rings , whose deformation determines the degree of obstruction. For ring extraction , we present a ring detector based on an illumination and appearance model. This model allows us to parametrise the ring detection. Finally, we can infer optimal estimation parameters for any video resolution.

Abstract: Poster
Studies on volumetric brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) showed neuroanatomical abnormalities in pediatric Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In particular, the diminished right caudate volume is one of the most replicated findings among ADHD samples in morphometric MRI studies. In this paper, we propose a fully-automatic method for internal caudate nucleus segmentation based on machine learning. Moreover, the ratio between right caudate body volume and the bilateral caudate body volume is applied in a ADHD diagnostic test. We separately validate the automatic internal segmentation of caudate in head and body structures and the diagnostic test using real data from ADHD and control subjects. As a result, we show accurate internal caudate segmentation and similar performance among the proposed automatic diagnostic test and the manual annotation.

Abstract: This article describes a new collection of still image dataset which are dedicated to interactions between people. Human action recognition from still images have been a hot topic recently, but most of them are actions performed by a single person, like running, walking, riding bikes, phoning and so on and there is no interactions between people in one image. The dataset collected in this paper are concentrating on human interaction between two people aiming to explore this new topic in the research area of action recognition from still images.

Abstract: In this paper we improve the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), a core descriptor of state-of-the-art object detection, by the use of higher-level information coming from image segmentation. The idea is to re-weight the descriptor while computing it without increasing its size. The benefits of the proposal are two-fold: (i) to improve the performance of the detector by enriching the descriptor information and (ii) take advantage of the information of image segmentation, which in fact is likely to be used in other stages of the detection system such as candidate generation or refinement.
We test our technique in the INRIA person dataset, which was originally developed to test HOG, embedding it in a human detection system. The well-known segmentation method, mean-shift (from smaller to larger super-pixels), and different methods to re-weight the original descriptor (constant, region-luminance, color or texture-dependent) has been evaluated. We achieve performance improvements of 4:47% in detection rate through the use of differences of color between contour pixel neighborhoods as re-weighting function.

Abstract: Clinical studies on atherosclerosis regression/progression performed by Intravascular Ultrasound analysis require the alignment of pullbacks of the same patient before and after clinical interventions. In this paper, a methodology for the automatic alignment of IVUS sequences based on the Dynamic Time Warping technique is proposed. The method is adapted to the specific IVUS alignment task by applying the non-rigid alignment technique to multidimensional morphological signals, and by introducing a sliding window approach together with a regularization term. To show the effectiveness of our method, an extensive validation is performed both on synthetic data and in-vivo IVUS sequences. The proposed method is robust to stent deployment and post dilation surgery and reaches an alignment error of approximately 0.7 mm for in-vivo data, which is comparable to the inter-observer variability.

Abstract: Smiling is an indispensable element of nonverbal social interaction. Besides, automatic distinction between spontaneous and posed expressions is important for visual analysis of social signals. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to distinguish between spontaneous and posed enjoyment smiles by using the dynamics of eyelid, cheek, and lip corner movements. The discriminative power of these movements, and the effect of different fusion levels are investigated on multiple databases. Our results improve the state-of-the-art. We also introduce the largest spontaneous/posed enjoyment smile database collected to date, and report new empirical and conceptual findings on smile dynamics. The collected database consists of 1240 samples of 400 subjects. Moreover, it has the unique property of having an age range from 8 to 76 years. Large scale experiments on the new database indicate that eyelid dynamics are highly relevant for smile classification, and there are age-related differences in smile dynamics.

Abstract: Road scene segmentation is important in computer vision for different applications such as autonomous driving and pedestrian detection. Recovering the 3D structure of road scenes provides relevant contextual information to improve their understanding.
In this paper, we use a convolutional neural network based algorithm to learn features from noisy labels to recover the 3D scene layout of a road image. The novelty of the algorithm relies on generating training labels by applying an algorithm trained on a general image dataset to classify on–board images. Further, we propose a novel texture descriptor based on a learned color plane fusion to obtain maximal uniformity in road areas. Finally, acquired (off–line) and current (on–line) information are combined to detect road areas in single images.
From quantitative and qualitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, it is concluded that convolutional neural networks are suitable for learning 3D scene layout from noisy labels and provides a relative improvement of 7% compared to the baseline. Furthermore, combining color planes provides a statistical description of road areas that exhibits maximal uniformity and provides a relative improvement of 8% compared to the baseline. Finally, the improvement is even bigger when acquired and current information from a single image are combined

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing 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 avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.