Abstract: A generic method for floor plan analysis and interpretation is presented in this article. The method, which is mainly inspired by the way engineers draw and interpret floor plans, applies two recognition steps in a bottom-up manner. First, basic building blocks, i.e., walls, doors, and windows are detected using a statistical patch-based segmentation approach. Second, a graph is generated, and structural pattern recognition techniques are applied to further locate the main entities, i.e., rooms of the building. The proposed approach is able to analyze any type of floor plan regardless of the notation used. We have evaluated our method on different publicly available datasets of real architectural floor plans with different notations. The overall detection and recognition accuracy is about 95 %, which is significantly better than any other state-of-the-art method. Our approach is generic enough such that it could be easily adopted to the recognition and interpretation of any other printed machine-generated structured documents.

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.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a page classification application in a banking workflow. The proposed architecture represents administrative document images by merging visual and textual descriptions. The visual description is based on a hierarchical representation of the pixel intensity distribution. The textual description uses latent semantic analysis to represent document content as a mixture of topics. Several off-the-shelf classifiers and different strategies for combining visual and textual cues have been evaluated. A final step uses an n-gram model of the page stream allowing a finer-grained classification of pages. The proposed method has been tested in a real large-scale environment and we report results on a dataset of 70,000 pages.

Abstract: Document analysis is an active field of research, which can attain a complete understanding of the semantics of a given document. One example of the document understanding process is enabling a computer to identify the key elements of a comic book story and arrange them according to a predefined domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a knowledge-driven system that can interact with bottom-up and top-down information to progressively understand the content of a document. We model the comic book’s and the image processing domains knowledge for information consistency analysis. In addition, different image processing methods are improved or developed to extract panels, balloons, tails, texts, comic characters and their semantic relations in an unsupervised way.

Abstract: Despite all the significant advances in pedestrian detection brought by computer vision for driving assistance, it is still a challenging problem. One reason is the extremely varying lighting conditions under which such a detector should operate, namely day and night time. Recent research has shown that the combination of visible and non-visible imaging modalities may increase detection accuracy, where the infrared spectrum plays a critical role. The goal of this paper is to assess the accuracy gain of different pedestrian models (holistic, part-based, patch-based) when training with images in the far infrared spectrum. Specifically, we want to compare detection accuracy on test images recorded at day and nighttime if trained (and tested) using (a) plain color images, (b) just infrared images and (c) both of them. In order to obtain results for the last item we propose an early fusion approach to combine features from both modalities. We base the evaluation on a new dataset we have built for this purpose as well as on the publicly available KAIST multispectral dataset.

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.

Abstract: In our work, we are particularly interested in studying the shadows cast by static objects in outdoor environments, during daytime. To assess the accuracy of a shadow detection algorithm, we need ground truth information. The collection of such information is a very tedious task because it is a process that requires manual annotation. To overcome this severe limitation, we propose in this paper a methodology to automatically render ground truth using a virtual environment. To increase the degree of realism and usefulness of the simulated environment, we incorporate in the scenario the precise longitude, latitude and elevation of the actual location of the object, as well as the sun’s position for a given time and day. To evaluate our method, we consider a qualitative and a quantitative comparison. In the quantitative one, we analyze the shadow cast by a real object in a particular geographical location and its corresponding rendered model. To evaluate qualitatively the methodology, we use some ground truth images obtained both manually and automatically.

Abstract: The amount of multimedia data collected in museum databases is growing fast, while the capacity of museums to display information to visitors is acutely limited by physical space. Museums must seek the perfect balance of information given on individual pieces in order to provide sufficient information to aid visitor understanding while maintaining sparse usage of the walls and guaranteeing high appreciation of the exhibit. Moreover, museums often target the interests of average visitors instead of the entire spectrum of different interests each individual visitor might have. Finally, visiting a museum should not be an experience contained in the physical space of the museum but a door opened onto a broader context of related artworks, authors, artistic trends, etc. In this paper we describe the MNEMOSYNE system that attempts to address these issues through a new multimedia museum experience. Based on passive observation, the system builds a profile of the artworks of interest for each visitor. These profiles of interest are then used to drive an interactive table that personalizes multimedia content delivery. The natural user interface on the interactive table uses the visitor’s profile, an ontology of museum content and a recommendation system to personalize exploration of multimedia content. At the end of their visit, the visitor can take home a personalized summary of their visit on a custom mobile application. In this article we describe in detail each component of our approach as well as the first field trials of our prototype system built and deployed at our permanent exhibition space at LeMurate (http://www.lemurate.comune.fi.it/lemurate/) in Florence together with the first results of the evaluation process during the official installation in the National Museum of Bargello (http://www.uffizi.firenze.it/musei/?m=bargello).