Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed.

Abstract: By increasing popularity of wearable cameras, life-logging data analysis is becoming more and more important and useful to derive significant events out of this substantial collection of images. In this study, we introduce a new tracking method applied to visual life-logging, called bag-of-tracklets, which is based on detecting, localizing and tracking of people. Given the low spatial and temporal resolution of the image data, our model generates and groups tracklets in a unsupervised framework and extracts image sequences of person appearance according to a similarity score of the bag-of-tracklets. The model output is a meaningful sequence of events expressing human appearance and tracking them in life-logging data. The achieved results prove the robustness of our model in terms of efficiency and accuracy despite the low spatial and temporal resolution of the data.

Abstract: In this work we present an effective and computationally simple algorithm for image compression based on Hilbert Scanning of Embedded quadTrees (Hi-SET). It allows to represent an image as an embedded bitstream along a fractal function. Embedding is an important feature of modern image compression algorithms, in this way Salomon in [1, pg. 614] cite that another feature and perhaps a unique one is the fact of achieving the best quality for the number of bits input by the decoder at any point during the decoding. Hi-SET possesses also this latter feature. Furthermore, the coder is based on a quadtree partition strategy, that applied to image transformation structures such as discrete cosine or wavelet transform allows to obtain an energy clustering both in frequency and space. The coding algorithm is composed of three general steps, using just a list of significant pixels. The implementation of the proposed coder is developed for gray-scale and color image compression. Hi-SET compressed images are, on average, 6.20dB better than the ones obtained by other compression techniques based on the Hilbert scanning. Moreover, Hi-SET improves the image quality in 1.39dB and 1.00dB in gray-scale and color compression, respectively, when compared with JPEG2000 coder.

Abstract: This work aims at detecting in which regions the objects in the image are by using information about the intensity of valleys, which appear to surround ob- jects in images where the source of light is in the line of direction than the camera. We present our depth of valleys accumulation method, which consists of two stages: first, the definition of the depth of valleys image which combines the output of a ridges and valleys detector with the morphological gradient to measure how deep is a point inside a valley and second, an algorithm that denotes points of the image as interior to objects those which are inside complete or incomplete boundaries in the depth of valleys image. To evaluate the performance of our method we have tested it on several application domains. Our results on object region identification are promising, specially in the field of polyp detection in colonoscopy videos, and we also show its applicability in different areas.

Abstract: Sequential learning is that discipline of machine learning that deals with dependent data. In this paper, we use the Multi-scale Stacked Sequential Learning approach (MSSL) to solve the task of pixel-wise classification based on contextual information. The main contribution of this work is a shifting technique applied during the testing phase that makes possible, thanks to template images, to classify objects at different sizes. The results show that the proposed method robustly classifies such objects capturing their spatial relationships.

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that only using behavioural motion information, we are able to predict the interest of observers when looking at face-to-face interactions. We propose a set of movement-related features from body, face, and mouth activity in order to define a set of higher level interaction features, such as stress, activity, speaking engagement, and corporal engagement. Error-Correcting Output Codes framework with an Adaboost base classifier is used to learn to rank the perceived observer's interest in face-to-face interactions. The automatic system shows good correlation between the automatic categorization results and the manual ranking made by the observers. In particular, the learning system shows that stress features have a high predictive power for ranking interest of observers when looking at of face-to-face interactions.

Abstract: The design and the validation of an automatic plaque characterization technique based on Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) usually requires a data ground-truth. The histological analysis of post-mortem coronary arteries is commonly assumed as the state-of-the-art process for the extraction of a reliable data-set of atherosclerotic plaques. Unfortunately, the amount of data provided by this technique is usually few, due to the difficulties in collecting post-mortem cases and phenomena of tissue spoiling during histological analysis. In this paper we tackle the process of fusing in-vivo and in-vitro IVUS data starting with the analysis of recently proposed approaches for the creation of an enhanced IVUS data-set; furthermore, we propose a new approach, named pLDS, based on semi-supervised learning with a data selection criterion. The enhanced data-set obtained by each one of the analyzed approaches is used to train a classifier for tissue characterization purposes. Finally, the discriminative power of each classifier is quantitatively assessed and compared by classifying a data-set of validated in-vitro IVUS data.