Abstract: Automatic analysis of visual art, such as paintings, is a challenging inter-disciplinary research problem. Conventional approaches only rely on global scene characteristics by encoding holistic information for computational painting categorization.We argue that such approaches are sub-optimal and that discriminative common visual structures provide complementary information for painting classification. We present an approach that encodes both the global scene layout and discriminative latent common structures for computational painting categorization. The region of interests are automatically extracted, without any manual part labeling, by training class-specific deformable part-based models. Both holistic and region-of-interests are then described using multi-scale dense convolutional features. These features are pooled separately using Fisher vector encoding and concatenated afterwards in a single image representation. Experiments are performed on a challenging dataset with 91 different painters and 13 diverse painting styles. Our approach outperforms the standard method, which only employs the global scene characteristics. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming a recent multi-scale deep features based approach [11] by 6.4% and 3.8% respectively on artist and style classification.

Abstract: Issues such as content identification, document and image security, audience measurement, ownership and copyright among others can be settled by the use of digital watermarking. Many recent video watermarking methods show drops in visual quality of the sequences. The present work addresses the aforementioned issue by introducing a robust and imperceptible non-blind color video frame watermarking algorithm. The method divides frames into moving and non-moving parts. The non-moving part of each color channel is processed separately using a block-based watermarking scheme. Blocks with an entropy lower than the average entropy of all blocks are subject to a further process for embedding the watermark image. Finally a watermarked frame is generated by adding moving parts to it. Several signal processing attacks are applied to each watermarked frame in order to perform experiments and are compared with some recent algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust against common signal processing attacks.

Abstract: Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.

Abstract: In the context of human action recognition using skeleton data, the 3D trajectories of joint points may be considered as multi-dimensional time series. The traditional recognition technique in the literature is based on time series dis(similarity) measures (such as Dynamic Time Warping). For these general dis(similarity) measures, k-nearest neighbor algorithms are a natural choice. However, k-NN classifiers are known to be sensitive to noise and outliers. In this paper, a new class of Support Vector Machine that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating an efficient time-series distances measure into the kernel function. More specifically, the derivative of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure is employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite (PSD) kernels in the SVM formulation. The recognition results of the proposed technique on two action recognition datasets demonstrates the ourperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, we obtained 89 % accuracy on the well-known MSRAction3D dataset using only 3D trajectories of body joints obtained by Kinect

Abstract: The big data transformation currently revolutionizing science and industry forges novel possibilities in multimodal analysis scarcely imaginable only a decade ago. One of the important economic and industrial problems that stand to benefit from the recent expansion of data availability and computational prowess is the prediction of electricity demand and renewable energy generation. Both are correlates of human activity: spatiotemporal energy consumption patterns in society are a factor of both demand (weather dependent) and supply, which determine cost – a relation expected to strengthen along with increasing renewable energy dependence. One of the main drivers of European weather patterns is the activity of the Atlantic Ocean and in particular its dominant Northern Hemisphere current: the Gulf Stream. We choose this particular current as a test case in part due to larger amount of relevant data and scientific literature available for refinement of analysis techniques.
This data richness is due not only to its economic importance but also to its size being clearly visible in radar and infrared satellite imagery, which makes it easier to detect using Computer Vision (CV). The power of CV techniques makes basic analysis thus developed scalable to other smaller and less known, but still influential, currents, which are not just curves on a map, but complex, evolving, moving branching trees in 3D projected onto a 2D image.
We investigate means of extracting, from several image modalities (including recently available Copernicus radar and earlier Infrared satellites), a parameterized presentation of the state of the Gulf Stream and its environment that is useful as feature space representation in a machine learning context, in this case with the EC’s H2020-sponsored ‘See.4C’ project, in the context of which data scientists may find novel predictors of spatiotemporal energy flow. Although automated extractors of Gulf Stream position exist, they differ in methodology and result. We shall attempt to extract more complex feature representation including branching points, eddies and parameterized changes in transport and velocity. Other related predictive features will be similarly developed, such as inference of deep water flux long the current path and wider spatial scale features such as Hough transform, surface turbulence indicators and temperature gradient indexes along with multi-time scale analysis of ocean height and temperature dynamics. The geospatial imaging and ML community may therefore benefit from a baseline of open-source techniques useful and expandable to other related prediction and/or scientific analysis tasks.

Abstract: Medial surfaces are powerful tools for shape description, but their use has been limited due to the sensibility existing methods to branching artifacts. Medial branching artifacts are associated to perturbations of the object boundary rather than to geometric features. Such instability is a main obstacle for a condent application in shape recognition and description. Medial branches correspond to singularities of the medial surface and, thus, they are problematic for existing morphological and energy-based algorithms. In this paper, we use algebraic geometry concepts in an energy-based approach to compute a medial surface presenting a stable branching topology. We also present an ecient GPU-CPU implementation using standard image processing tools. We show the method computational eciency and quality on a custom made synthetic database. Finally, we present some results on a medical imaging application for localization of abdominal pathologies.

Abstract: Analysis of branching structures represents a very important task in fields such as medical diagnosis, road detection or biometrics. Detecting intersection landmarks Becomes crucial when capturing the structure of a branching pattern. We present a very simple geometrical model to describe intersections in branching structures based on two conditions: Bounded Tangency condition (BT) and Shortest Branch (SB) condition. The proposed model precisely sets a geometrical characterization of intersections and allows us to introduce a new unsupervised operator for intersection extraction. We propose an implementation that handles the consequences of digital domain operation that,unlike existing approaches, is not restricted to a particular scale and does not require the computation of the thinned pattern. The new proposal, as well as other existing approaches in the bibliography, are evaluated in a common framework for the first time. The performance analysis is based on two manually segmented image data sets: DRIVE retinal image database and COLON-VESSEL data set, a newly created data set of vascular content in colonoscopy frames. We have created an intersection landmark ground truth for each data set besides comparing our method in the only existing ground truth. Quantitative results confirm that we are able to outperform state-of-the-art performancelevels with the advantage that neither training nor parameter tuning is needed.