Abstract: Atherosclerosis is a vascular pathology affecting the arterial walls, generally located in specific vessel sites, such as bifurcations. In this paper, for the first time, a fully automatic approach for the detection of bifurcations in IVUS pullback sequences is presented. The method identifies the frames and the angular sectors in which a bifurcation is visible. This goal is achieved by applying a classifier to a set of textural features extracted from each image of an IVUS pullback. A comparison between two state-of-the-art classifiers is performed, AdaBoost and Random Forest. A cross-validation scheme is applied in order to evaluate the performances of the approaches. The obtained results are encouraging, showing a sensitivity of 75% and an accuracy of 94% by using the AdaBoost algorithm.

Abstract: There are lots of historical handwritten documents with information that can be used for several studies and projects. The Document Image Analysis and Recognition community is interested in preserving these documents and extracting all the valuable information from them. Handwritten word-spotting is the pattern classification task which consists in detecting handwriting word images. In this work, we have used a query-by-example formalism: we have matched an input image with one or multiple images from handwritten documents to determine the distance that might indicate a correspondence. We have developed an approach based in characteristic Loci Features stored in a hash structure. Document images of the marriage licences of the Cathedral of Barcelona are used as the benchmarking database.

Abstract: This paper is focused on the automatic recognition of human events in static images. Popular techniques use knowledge of the human pose for inferring the action, and the most recent approaches tend to combine pose information with either knowledge of the scene or of the objects with which the human interacts. Our approach makes a step forward in this direction by combining the human pose with the scene in which the human is placed, together with the spatial relationships between humans and objects. Based on standard, simple descriptors like HOG and SIFT, recognition performance is enhanced when these three types of knowledge are taken into account. Results obtained in the PASCAL 2010 Action Recognition Dataset demonstrate that our technique reaches state-of-the-art results using simple descriptors and classifiers.

Abstract: The perceived colour of a stimulus is dependent on multiple factors stemming out either from the context of the stimulus or idiosyncrasies of the observer. The complexity involved in combining these multiple effects is the main reason for the gap between classical calibrated colour spaces from colour science and colour representations used in computer vision, where colour is just one more visual cue immersed in a digital image where surfaces, shadows and illuminants interact seemingly out of control. With the aim to advance a few steps towards bridging this gap we present some results on computational representations of colour for computer vision. They have been developed by introducing perceptual considerations derived from the interaction of the colour of a point with its context. We show some techniques to represent the colour of a point influenced by assimilation and contrast effects due to the image surround and we show some results on how colour saliency can be derived in real images. We outline a model for automatic assignment of colour names to image points directly trained on psychophysical data. We show how colour segments can be perceptually grouped in the image by imposing shading coherence in the colour space.

Abstract: A common way to model multi-class classification problems is by means of Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC). Given a multi-class problem, the ECOC technique designs a codeword for each class, where each position of the code identifies the membership of the class for a given binary problem.A classification decision is obtained by assigning the label of the class with the closest code. In this paper, we overview the state-of-the-art on ECOC designs and test them in real applications. Results on different multi-class data sets show the benefits of using the ensemble of classifiers when categorizing objects in images.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel technique to detect the shadows cast by urban infrastructure, such as buildings, billboards, and traffic signs, using a sequence of images taken from a fixed camera. In our approach, we compute two different background models in parallel: one for the edges and one for the reflected light intensity. An algorithm is proposed to train the system to distinguish between moving edges in general and edges that belong to static objects, creating an edge background model. Then, during operation, a background intensity model allow us to separate between moving and static objects. Those edges included in the moving objects and those that belong to the edge background model are subtracted from the current image edges. The remaining edges are the ones cast by urban infrastructure. Our method is tested on a typical crossroad scene and the results show that the approach is sound and promising.

Abstract: Cascading techniques are commonly used to speed-up the scan of an image for object detection. However, cascades of detectors are slow to train due to the high number of detectors and corresponding thresholds to learn. Furthermore, they do not use any prior knowledge about the scene structure to decide where to focus the search. To handle these problems, we propose a new way to scan an image, where we couple a recursive coarse-to-fine refinement together with spatial constraints of the object location. For doing that we split an image into a set of uniformly distributed neighborhood regions, and for each of these we apply a local greedy search over feature resolutions. The neighborhood is defined as a scanning region that only one object can occupy. Therefore the best hypothesis is obtained as the location with maximum score and no thresholds are needed. We present an implementation of our method using a pyramid of HOG features and we evaluate it on two standard databases, VOC2007 and INRIA dataset. Results show that the Recursive Coarse-to-Fine Localization (RCFL) achieves a 12x speed-up compared to standard sliding windows. Compared with a cascade of multiple resolutions approach our method has slightly better performance in speed and Average-Precision. Furthermore, in contrast to cascading approach, the speed-up is independent of image conditions, the number of detected objects and clutter.