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 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: Human Behavior Analysis in Uncontrolled Environments can be categorized in two main challenges: 1) Feature extraction and 2) Behavior analysis from a set of corporal language vocabulary. In this work, we present our achievements characterizing some simple behaviors from visual data on different real applications and discuss our plan for future work: low level vocabulary definition from bag-of-gesture units and high level modelling and inference of human behaviors.

Abstract: Most applications in image segmentation requires from user interaction in order to achieve accurate results. However, user wants to achieve the desired segmentation accuracy reducing effort of manual labelling. In this work, we extend standard multi-label α-expansion Graph Cut algorithm so that it analyzes the interaction of the user in order to modify the object model and improve final segmentation of objects. The approach is inspired in the fact that fast user interactions may introduce some pixel errors confusing object and background. Our results with different degrees of user interaction and input errors show high performance of the proposed approach on a multi-label human limb segmentation problem compared with classical α-expansion algorithm.

Abstract: We present a method for spotting a subgraph in a graph repository. Subgraph spotting is a very interesting research problem for various application domains where the use of a relational data structure is mandatory. Our proposed method accomplishes subgraph spotting through graph embedding. We achieve automatic indexation of a graph repository during off-line learning phase, where we (i) break the graphs into 2-node sub graphs (a.k.a. cliques of order 2), which are primitive building-blocks of a graph, (ii) embed the 2-node sub graphs into feature vectors by employing our recently proposed explicit graph embedding technique, (iii) cluster the feature vectors in classes by employing a classic agglomerative clustering technique, (iv) build an index for the graph repository and (v) learn a Bayesian network classifier. The subgraph spotting is achieved during the on-line querying phase, where we (i) break the query graph into 2-node sub graphs, (ii) embed them into feature vectors, (iii) employ the Bayesian network classifier for classifying the query 2-node sub graphs and (iv) retrieve the respective graphs by looking-up in the index of the graph repository. The graphs containing all query 2-node sub graphs form the set of result graphs for the query. Finally, we employ the adjacency matrix of each result graph along with a score function, for spotting the query graph in it. The proposed subgraph spotting method is equally applicable to a wide range of domains, offering ease of query by example (QBE) and granularity of focused retrieval. Experimental results are presented for graphs generated from two repositories of electronic and architectural document images.