Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & C.G.M. Snoek. (2010). Evaluating Color Descriptors for Object and Scene Recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(9), 1582–1596.
Abstract: Impact factor: 5.308
Image category recognition is important to access visual information on the level of objects and scene types. So far, intensity-based descriptors have been widely used for feature extraction at salient points. To increase illumination invariance and discriminative power, color descriptors have been proposed. Because many different descriptors exist, a structured overview is required of color invariant descriptors in the context of image category recognition. Therefore, this paper studies the invariance properties and the distinctiveness of color descriptors (software to compute the color descriptors from this paper is available from http://www.colordescriptors.com) in a structured way. The analytical invariance properties of color descriptors are explored, using a taxonomy based on invariance properties with respect to photometric transformations, and tested experimentally using a data set with known illumination conditions. In addition, the distinctiveness of color descriptors is assessed experimentally using two benchmarks, one from the image domain and one from the video domain. From the theoretical and experimental results, it can be derived that invariance to light intensity changes and light color changes affects category recognition. The results further reveal that, for light intensity shifts, the usefulness of invariance is category-specific. Overall, when choosing a single descriptor and no prior knowledge about the data set and object and scene categories is available, the OpponentSIFT is recommended. Furthermore, a combined set of color descriptors outperforms intensity-based SIFT and improves category recognition by 8 percent on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and by 7 percent on the Mediamill Challenge.
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Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2010). An Iterative Multiresolution Scheme for SFM with Missing Data: single and multiple object scenes. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 28(1), 164–176.
Abstract: Most of the techniques proposed for tackling the Structure from Motion problem (SFM) cannot deal with high percentages of missing data in the matrix of trajectories. Furthermore, an additional problem should be faced up when working with multiple object scenes: the rank of the matrix of trajectories should be estimated. This paper presents an iterative multiresolution scheme for SFM with missing data to be used in both the single and multiple object cases. The proposed scheme aims at recovering missing entries in the original input matrix. The objective is to improve the results by applying a factorization technique to the partially or totally filled in matrix instead of to the original input one. Experimental results obtained with synthetic and real data sequences, containing single and multiple objects, are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.
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Bogdan Raducanu, Jordi Vitria, & Ales Leonardis. (2010). Online pattern recognition and machine learning techniques for computer-vision: Theory and applications. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 28(7), 1063–1064.
Abstract: (Editorial for the Special Issue on Online pattern recognition and machine learning techniques)
In real life, visual learning is supposed to be a continuous process. This paradigm has found its way also in artificial vision systems. There is an increasing trend in pattern recognition represented by online learning approaches, which aims at continuously updating the data representation when new information arrives. Starting with a minimal dataset, the initial knowledge is expanded by incorporating incoming instances, which may have not been previously available or foreseen at the system’s design stage. An interesting characteristic of this strategy is that the train and test phases take place simultaneously. Given the increasing interest in this subject, the aim of this special issue is to be a landmark event in the development of online learning techniques and their applications with the hope that it will capture the interest of a wider audience and will attract even more researchers. We received 19 contributions, of which 9 have been accepted for publication, after having been subjected to usual peer review process.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Monica Mitiko, Sergio Shiguemi, & Debora Gil. (2010). A validation protocol for assessing cardiac phase retrieval in IntraVascular UltraSound. In Computing in Cardiology (Vol. 37, pp. 899–902). IEEE.
Abstract: A good reliable approach to cardiac triggering is of utmost importance in obtaining accurate quantitative results of atherosclerotic plaque burden from the analysis of IntraVascular UltraSound. Although, in the last years, there has been an increase in research of methods for retrospective gating, there is no general consensus in a validation protocol. Many methods are based on quality assessment of longitudinal cuts appearance and those reporting quantitative numbers do not follow a standard protocol. Such heterogeneity in validation protocols makes faithful comparison across methods a difficult task. We propose a validation protocol based on the variability of the retrieved cardiac phase and explore the capability of several quality measures for quantifying such variability. An ideal detector, suitable for its application in clinical practice, should produce stable phases. That is, it should always sample the same cardiac cycle fraction. In this context, one should measure the variability (variance) of a candidate sampling with respect a ground truth (reference) sampling, since the variance would indicate how spread we are aiming a target. In order to quantify the deviation between the sampling and the ground truth, we have considered two quality scores reported in the literature: signed distance to the closest reference sample and distance to the right of each reference sample. We have also considered the residuals of the regression line of reference against candidate sampling. The performance of the measures has been explored on a set of synthetic samplings covering different cardiac cycle fractions and variabilities. From our simulations, we conclude that the metrics related to distances are sensitive to the shift considered while the residuals are robust against fraction and variabilities as far as one can establish a pair-wise correspondence between candidate and reference. We will further investigate the impact of false positive and negative detections in experimental data.
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Fernando Vilariño, Panagiota Spyridonos, Fosca De Iorio, Jordi Vitria, Fernando Azpiroz, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Intestinal Motility Assessment With Video Capsule Endoscopy: Automatic Annotation of Phasic Intestinal Contractions. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 29(2), 246–259.
Abstract: Intestinal motility assessment with video capsule endoscopy arises as a novel and challenging clinical fieldwork. This technique is based on the analysis of the patterns of intestinal contractions shown in a video provided by an ingestible capsule with a wireless micro-camera. The manual labeling of all the motility events requires large amount of time for offline screening in search of findings with low prevalence, which turns this procedure currently unpractical. In this paper, we propose a machine learning system to automatically detect the phasic intestinal contractions in video capsule endoscopy, driving a useful but not feasible clinical routine into a feasible clinical procedure. Our proposal is based on a sequential design which involves the analysis of textural, color, and blob features together with SVM classifiers. Our approach tackles the reduction of the imbalance rate of data and allows the inclusion of domain knowledge as new stages in the cascade. We present a detailed analysis, both in a quantitative and a qualitative way, by providing several measures of performance and the assessment study of interobserver variability. Our system performs at 70% of sensitivity for individual detection, whilst obtaining equivalent patterns to those of the experts for density of contractions.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Luis Badiella, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Francesc Carreras, Sandra Pujades, et al. (2010). A Normalized Framework for the Design of Feature Spaces Assessing the Left Ventricular Function. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 29(3), 733–745.
Abstract: A through description of the left ventricle functionality requires combining complementary regional scores. A main limitation is the lack of multiparametric normality models oriented to the assessment of regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMA). This paper covers two main topics involved in RWMA assessment. We propose a general framework allowing the fusion and comparison across subjects of different regional scores. Our framework is used to explore which combination of regional scores (including 2-D motion and strains) is better suited for RWMA detection. Our statistical analysis indicates that for a proper (within interobserver variability) identification of RWMA, models should consider motion and extreme strains.
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Salim Jouili, Salvatore Tabbone, & Ernest Valveny. (2010). Comparing Graph Similarity Measures for Graphical Recognition. In Graphics Recognition. Achievements, Challenges, and Evolution. 8th International Workshop, GREC 2009. Selected Papers (Vol. 6020, pp. 37–48). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we evaluate four graph distance measures. The analysis is performed for document retrieval tasks. For this aim, different kind of documents are used including line drawings (symbols), ancient documents (ornamental letters), shapes and trademark-logos. The experimental results show that the performance of each graph distance measure depends on the kind of data and the graph representation technique.
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Santiago Segui, Laura Igual, & Jordi Vitria. (2010). Weighted Bagging for Graph based One-Class Classifiers. In 9th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems (Vol. 5997, pp. 1–10). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Most conventional learning algorithms require both positive and negative training data for achieving accurate classification results. However, the problem of learning classifiers from only positive data arises in many applications where negative data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Minimum Spanning Tree Class Descriptor (MSTCD) was presented as a method that achieves better accuracies than other one-class classifiers in high dimensional data. However, the presence of outliers in the target class severely harms the performance of this classifier. In this paper we propose two bagging strategies for MSTCD that reduce the influence of outliers in training data. We show the improved performance on both real and artificially contaminated data.
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Wenjuan Gong, Andrew Bagdanov, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Automatic Key Pose Selection for 3D Human Action Recognition. In 6th International Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (Vol. 6169, 290–299). Springer Verlag.
Abstract: This article describes a novel approach to the modeling of human actions in 3D. The method we propose is based on a “bag of poses” model that represents human actions as histograms of key-pose occurrences over the course of a video sequence. Actions are first represented as 3D poses using a sequence of 36 direction cosines corresponding to the angles 12 joints form with the world coordinate frame in an articulated human body model. These pose representations are then projected to three-dimensional, action-specific principal eigenspaces which we refer to as aSpaces. We introduce a method for key-pose selection based on a local-motion energy optimization criterion and we show that this method is more stable and more resistant to noisy data than other key-poses selection criteria for action recognition.
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Susana Alvarez, Anna Salvatella, Maria Vanrell, & Xavier Otazu. (2010). 3D Texton Spaces for color-texture retrieval. In A.C. Campilho and M.S. Kamel (Ed.), 7th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 6111, 354–363). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.
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Naveen Onkarappa, & Angel Sappa. (2010). On-Board Monocular Vision System Pose Estimation through a Dense Optical Flow. In 7th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 6111, pp. 230–239). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This paper presents a robust technique for estimating on-board monocular vision system pose. The proposed approach is based on a dense optical flow that is robust against shadows, reflections and illumination changes. A RANSAC based scheme is used to cope with the outliers in the optical flow. The proposed technique is intended to be used in driver assistance systems for applications such as obstacle or pedestrian detection. Experimental results on different scenarios, both from synthetic and real sequences, shows usefulness of the proposed approach.
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Jaume Gibert, & Ernest Valveny. (2010). Graph Embedding based on Nodes Attributes Representatives and a Graph of Words Representation. In I. Ulusoy and F. Escolano T. Windeatt R. C. W. In E.R. Hancock (Ed.), 13th International worshop on structural and syntactic pattern recognition and 8th international worshop on statistical pattern recognition (Vol. 6218, 223–232). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Although graph embedding has recently been used to extend statistical pattern recognition techniques to the graph domain, some existing embeddings are usually computationally expensive as they rely on classical graph-based operations. In this paper we present a new way to embed graphs into vector spaces by first encapsulating the information stored in the original graph under another graph representation by clustering the attributes of the graphs to be processed. This new representation makes the association of graphs to vectors an easy step by just arranging both node attributes and the adjacency matrix in the form of vectors. To test our method, we use two different databases of graphs whose nodes attributes are of different nature. A comparison with a reference method permits to show that this new embedding is better in terms of classification rates, while being much more faster.
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Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrew Bagdanov, & Juan J. Villanueva. (2010). Recursive Coarse-to-Fine Localization for fast Object Recognition. In 11th European Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 6313, 280–293). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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.
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Carles Fernandez, Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca. (2010). Automatic Learning of Background Semantics in Generic Surveilled Scenes. In 11th European Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 6313, 678–692). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Advanced surveillance systems for behavior recognition in outdoor traffic scenes depend strongly on the particular configuration of the scenario. Scene-independent trajectory analysis techniques statistically infer semantics in locations where motion occurs, and such inferences are typically limited to abnormality. Thus, it is interesting to design contributions that automatically categorize more specific semantic regions. State-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised scene labeling exploit trajectory data to segment areas like sources, sinks, or waiting zones. Our method, in addition, incorporates scene-independent knowledge to assign more meaningful labels like crosswalks, sidewalks, or parking spaces. First, a spatiotemporal scene model is obtained from trajectory analysis. Subsequently, a so-called GI-MRF inference process reinforces spatial coherence, and incorporates taxonomy-guided smoothness constraints. Our method achieves automatic and effective labeling of conceptual regions in urban scenarios, and is robust to tracking errors. Experimental validation on 5 surveillance databases has been conducted to assess the generality and accuracy of the segmentations. The resulting scene models are used for model-based behavior analysis.
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Cesar Isaza, Joaquin Salas, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2010). Toward the Detection of Urban Infrastructures Edge Shadows. In eds. Blanc–Talon et al (Ed.), 12th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (Vol. 6474, 30–37). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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.
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