Antonio Hernandez, Carlo Gatta, Sergio Escalera, Laura Igual, Victoria Martin-Yuste, Manel Sabate, et al. (2012). Accurate coronary centerline extraction, caliber estimation and catheter detection in angiographies. TITB - IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 16(6), 1332–1340.
Abstract: Segmentation of coronary arteries in X-Ray angiography is a fundamental tool to evaluate arterial diseases and choose proper coronary treatment. The accurate segmentation of coronary arteries has become an important topic for the registration of different modalities which allows physicians rapid access to different medical imaging information from Computed Tomography (CT) scans or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose an accurate fully automatic algorithm based on Graph-cuts for vessel centerline extraction, caliber estimation, and catheter detection. Vesselness, geodesic paths, and a new multi-scale edgeness map are combined to customize the Graph-cuts approach to the segmentation of tubular structures, by means of a global optimization of the Graph-cuts energy function. Moreover, a novel supervised learning methodology that integrates local and contextual information is proposed for automatic catheter detection. We evaluate the method performance on three datasets coming from different imaging systems. The method performs as good as the expert observer w.r.t. centerline detection and caliber estimation. Moreover, the method discriminates between arteries and catheter with an accuracy of 96.5%, sensitivity of 72%, and precision of 97.4%.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & D. Gatica-Perez. (2012). Inferring competitive role patterns in reality TV show through nonverbal analysis. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 56(1), 207–226.
Abstract: This paper introduces a new facet of social media, namely that depicting social interaction. More concretely, we address this problem from the perspective of nonverbal behavior-based analysis of competitive meetings. For our study, we made use of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, which features a competition for a real, highly paid corporate job. Our analysis is centered around two tasks regarding a person's role in a meeting: predicting the person with the highest status, and predicting the fired candidates. We address this problem by adopting both supervised and unsupervised strategies. The current study was carried out using nonverbal audio cues. Our approach is based only on the nonverbal interaction dynamics during the meeting without relying on the spoken words. The analysis is based on two types of data: individual and relational measures. Results obtained from the analysis of a full season of the show are promising (up to 85.7% of accuracy in the first case and up to 92.8% in the second case). Our approach has been conveniently compared with the Influence Model, demonstrating its superiority.
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Alicia Fornes, Anjan Dutta, Albert Gordo, & Josep Llados. (2012). CVC-MUSCIMA: A Ground-Truth of Handwritten Music Score Images for Writer Identification and Staff Removal. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 15(3), 243–251.
Abstract: 0,405JCR
The analysis of music scores has been an active research field in the last decades. However, there are no publicly available databases of handwritten music scores for the research community. In this paper we present the CVC-MUSCIMA database and ground-truth of handwritten music score images. The dataset consists of 1,000 music sheets written by 50 different musicians. It has been especially designed for writer identification and staff removal tasks. In addition to the description of the dataset, ground-truth, partitioning and evaluation metrics, we also provide some base-line results for easing the comparison between different approaches.
Keywords: Music scores; Handwritten documents; Writer identification; Staff removal; Performance evaluation; Graphics recognition; Ground truths
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2012). Text line extraction in graphical documents using background and foreground. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 15(3), 227–241.
Abstract: 0,405 JCR
In graphical documents (e.g., maps, engineering drawings), artistic documents etc., the text lines are annotated in multiple orientations or curvilinear way to illustrate different locations or symbols. For the optical character recognition of such documents, individual text lines from the documents need to be extracted. In this paper, we propose a novel method to segment such text lines and the method is based on the foreground and background information of the text components. To effectively utilize the background information, a water reservoir concept is used here. In the proposed scheme, at first, individual components are detected and grouped into character clusters in a hierarchical way using size and positional information. Next, the clusters are extended in two extreme sides to determine potential candidate regions. Finally, with the help of these candidate regions,
individual lines are extracted. The experimental results are presented on different datasets of graphical documents, camera-based warped documents, noisy images containing seals, etc. The results demonstrate that our approach is robust and invariant to size and orientation of the text lines present in
the document.
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Ekaterina Zaytseva, & Jordi Vitria. (2012). A search based approach to non maximum suppression in face detection. In 19th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
Abstract: Poster
paper TA.P5.12
Face detectors typically produce a large number of false positives and this leads to the need to have a further non maximum suppression stage to eliminate multiple and spurious responses. This stage is based on considering spatial heuristics: true positive responses are selected by implicitly considering several restrictions on the spatial distribution of detector responses in natural images. In this paper we analyze the limitations of this approach and propose an efficient search method to overcome them. Results show how the application of this new non-maximum suppression approach to a simple face detector boosts its performance to state of the art results.
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Jose Carlos Rubio, Joan Serrat, Antonio Lopez, & Daniel Ponsa. (2012). Multiple target tracking for intelligent headlights control. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 13(2), 594–605.
Abstract: Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.
Keywords: Intelligent Headlights
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Appearance-based Face Recognition Using A Supervised Manifold Learning Framework. In IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 465–470). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: Many natural image sets, depicting objects whose appearance is changing due to motion, pose or light variations, can be considered samples of a low-dimension nonlinear manifold embedded in the high-dimensional observation space (the space of all possible images). The main contribution of our work is represented by a Supervised Laplacian Eigemaps (S-LE) algorithm, which exploits the class label information for mapping the original data in the embedded space. Our proposed approach benefits from two important properties: i) it is discriminative, and ii) it adaptively selects the neighbors of a sample without using any predefined neighborhood size. Experiments were conducted on four face databases and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms many linear and non-linear embedding techniques. Although we've focused on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be extended to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Francesc Carreras, Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Sandra Pujadas, Chi ho Lion, R.Suarez-Arias, et al. (2012). Left ventricular torsion and longitudinal shortening: two fundamental components of myocardial mechanics assessed by tagged cine-MRI in normal subjects. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 28(2), 273–284.
Abstract: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (Cardiac MRI) has become a gold standard diagnostic technique for the assessment of cardiac mechanics, allowing the non-invasive calculation of left ventric- ular long axis longitudinal shortening (LVLS) and absolute myocardial torsion (AMT) between basal and apical left ventricular slices, a movement directly related to the helicoidal anatomic disposition of the myocardial fibers. The aim of this study is to determine AMT and LVLS behaviour and normal values from a group of healthy subjects. A group of 21 healthy volunteers (15 males) (age: 23–55 y.o., mean:30.7 ± 7.5) were prospectively included in an obser- vational study by Cardiac MRI. Left ventricular rotation (degrees) was calculated by custom-made software (Harmonic Phase Flow) in consecutive LV short axis planes tagged cine-MRI sequences. AMT was determined from the difference between basal and apical planes LV rotations. LVLS (%) was determined from the LV longitudinal and horizontal axis cine-MRI images. All the 21 cases studied were interpretable, although in three cases the value of the LV apical rotation could not be determined. The mean rotation of the basal and apical planes at end-systole were -3.71° ± 0.84° and 6.73° ± 1.69° (n:18) respectively, resulting in a LV mean AMT of 10.48° ± 1.63° (n:18). End-systolic mean LVLS was 19.07 ± 2.71%. Cardiac MRI allows for the calculation of AMT and LVLS, fundamental functional components of the ventricular twist mechanics conditioned, in turn, by the anatomical helical layout of the myocardial fibers. These values provide complementary information about systolic ventricular function in relation to the traditional parameters used in daily practice.
Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); Tagging MRI; Cardiac mechanics; Ventricular torsion
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Pierluigi Casale, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2012). Personalization and User Verification in Wearable Systems using Biometric Walking Patterns. PUC - Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(5), 563–580.
Abstract: In this article, a novel technique for user’s authentication and verification using gait as a biometric unobtrusive pattern is proposed. The method is based on a two stages pipeline. First, a general activity recognition classifier is personalized for an specific user using a small sample of her/his walking pattern. As a result, the system is much more selective with respect to the new walking pattern. A second stage verifies whether the user is an authorized one or not. This stage is defined as a one-class classification problem. In order to solve this problem, a four-layer architecture is built around the geometric concept of convex hull. This architecture allows to improve robustness to outliers, modeling non-convex shapes, and to take into account temporal coherence information. Two different scenarios are proposed as validation with two different wearable systems. First, a custom high-performance wearable system is built and used in a free environment. A second dataset is acquired from an Android-based commercial device in a ‘wild’ scenario with rough terrains, adversarial conditions, crowded places and obstacles. Results on both systems and datasets are very promising, reducing the verification error rates by an order of magnitude with respect to the state-of-the-art technologies.
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Angel Sappa, David Geronimo, Fadi Dornaika, Mohammad Rouhani, & Antonio Lopez. (2012). Moving object detection from mobile platforms using stereo data registration. In Marek R. Ogiela, & Lakhmi C. Jain (Eds.), Computational Intelligence paradigms in advanced pattern classification (Vol. 386, pp. 25–37). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This chapter describes a robust approach for detecting moving objects from on-board stereo vision systems. It relies on a feature point quaternion-based registration, which avoids common problems that appear when computationally expensive iterative-based algorithms are used on dynamic environments. The proposed approach consists of three main stages. Initially, feature points are extracted and tracked through consecutive 2D frames. Then, a RANSAC based approach is used for registering two point sets, with known correspondences in the 3D space. The computed 3D rigid displacement is used to map two consecutive 3D point clouds into the same coordinate system by means of the quaternion method. Finally, moving objects correspond to those areas with large 3D registration errors. Experimental results show the viability of the proposed approach to detect moving objects like vehicles or pedestrians in different urban scenarios.
Keywords: pedestrian detection
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Pau Baiget, Carles Fernandez, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Trajectory-Based Abnormality Categorization for Learning Route Patterns in Surveillance. In Detection and Identification of Rare Audiovisual Cues, Studies in Computational Intelligence (Vol. 384, pp. 87–95). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The recognition of abnormal behaviors in video sequences has raised as a hot topic in video understanding research. Particularly, an important challenge resides on automatically detecting abnormality. However, there is no convention about the types of anomalies that training data should derive. In surveillance, these are typically detected when new observations differ substantially from observed, previously learned behavior models, which represent normality. This paper focuses on properly defining anomalies within trajectory analysis: we propose a hierarchical representation conformed by Soft, Intermediate, and Hard Anomaly, which are identified from the extent and nature of deviation from learned models. Towards this end, a novel Gaussian Mixture Model representation of learned route patterns creates a probabilistic map of the image plane, which is applied to detect and classify anomalies in real-time. Our method overcomes limitations of similar existing approaches, and performs correctly even when the tracking is affected by different sources of noise. The reliability of our approach is demonstrated experimentally.
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Alberto Hidalgo, Ferran Poveda, Enric Marti, Debora Gil, Albert Andaluz, Francesc Carreras, et al. (2012). Evidence of continuous helical structure of the cardiac ventricular anatomy assessed by diffusion tensor imaging magnetic resonance multiresolution tractography. ECR - European Radiology, 3(1), 361–362.
Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and func- tion of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Diffusion tensor MRI provides a discrete measurement of the 3D arrangement of myocardial fibres by the observation of local anisotropic
diffusion of water molecules in biological tissues. In this work, we present a multi- scale visualisation technique based on DT-MRI streamlining capable of uncovering additional properties of the architectural organisation of the heart. Methods and Materials: We selected the John Hopkins University (JHU) Canine Heart Dataset, where the long axis cardiac plane is aligned with the scanner’s Z- axis. Their equipment included a 4-element passed array coil emitting a 1.5 T. For DTI acquisition, a 3D-FSE sequence is apply. We used 200 seeds for full-scale tractography, while we applied a MIP mapping technique for simplified tractographic reconstruction. In this case, we reduced each DTI 3D volume dimensions by order- two magnitude before streamlining.
Our simplified tractographic reconstruction method keeps the main geometric features of fibres, allowing for an easier identification of their global morphological disposition, including the ventricular basal ring. Moreover, we noticed a clearly visible helical disposition of the myocardial fibres, in line with the helical myocardial band ventricular structure described by Torrent-Guasp. Finally, our simplified visualisation with single tracts identifies the main segments of the helical ventricular architecture.
DT-MRI makes possible the identification of a continuous helical architecture of the myocardial fibres, which validates Torrent-Guasp’s helical myocardial band ventricular anatomical model.
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Naveen Onkarappa, Sujay M. Veerabhadrappa, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Optical Flow in Onboard Applications: A Study on the Relationship Between Accuracy and Scene Texture. In 4th International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (Vol. 221, pp. 257–267).
Abstract: Optical flow has got a major role in making advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) a reality. ADAS applications are expected to perform efficiently in all kinds of environments, those are highly probable, that one can drive the vehicle in different kinds of roads, times and seasons. In this work, we study the relationship of optical flow with different roads, that is by analyzing optical flow accuracy on different road textures. Texture measures such as TeX , TeX and TeX are evaluated for this purpose. Further, the relation of regularization weight to the flow accuracy in the presence of different textures is also analyzed. Additionally, we present a framework to generate synthetic sequences of different textures in ADAS scenarios with ground-truth optical flow.
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Monica Piñol, Angel Sappa, & Ricardo Toledo. (2012). MultiTable Reinforcement for Visual Object Recognition. In 4th International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (Vol. 221, pp. 469–480). LNCS. Springer India.
Abstract: This paper presents a bag of feature based method for visual object recognition. Our contribution is focussed on the selection of the best feature descriptor. It is implemented by using a novel multi-table reinforcement learning method that selects among five of classical descriptors (i.e., Spin, SIFT, SURF, C-SIFT and PHOW) the one that best describes each image. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing the improvements achieved with the proposed approach.
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Antonio Hernandez, Nadezhda Zlateva, Alexander Marinov, Miguel Reyes, Petia Radeva, Dimo Dimov, et al. (2012). Human Limb Segmentation in Depth Maps based on Spatio-Temporal Graph Cuts Optimization. JAISE - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, 4(6), 535–546.
Abstract: We present a framework for object segmentation using depth maps based on Random Forest and Graph-cuts theory, and apply it to the segmentation of human limbs. First, from a set of random depth features, Random Forest is used to infer a set of label probabilities for each data sample. This vector of probabilities is used as unary term in α−β swap Graph-cuts algorithm. Moreover, depth values of spatio-temporal neighboring data points are used as boundary potentials. Results on a new multi-label human depth data set show high performance in terms of segmentation overlapping of the novel methodology compared to classical approaches.
Keywords: Multi-modal vision processing; Random Forest; Graph-cuts; multi-label segmentation; human body segmentation
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