Abstract: We present a Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words (BoVDW) model for gesture recognition, an extension of the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model, that benefits from the multimodal fusion of visual and depth features. State-of-the-art RGB and depth features, including a new proposed depth descriptor, are analysed and combined in a late fusion fashion. The method is integrated in a continuous gesture recognition pipeline, where Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm is used to perform prior segmentation of gestures. Results of the method in public data sets, within our gesture recognition pipeline, show better performance in comparison to a standard BoVW model.

Abstract: Edges are caused by several imaging cues such as shadow, material and illumination transitions. Classification methods have been proposed which are solely based on photometric information, ignoring geometry to classify the physical nature of edges in images. In this paper, the aim is to present a novel strategy to handle both photometric and geometric information for edge classification. Photometric information is obtained through the use of quasi-invariants while geometric information is derived from the orientation and contrast of edges. Different combination frameworks are compared with a new principled approach that captures both information into the same descriptor. From large scale experiments on different datasets, it is shown that, in addition to photometric information, the geometry of edges is an important visual cue to distinguish between different edge types. It is concluded that by combining both cues the performance improves by more than 7% for shadows and highlights.

Abstract: State-of-the-art handwriting recognition systems are learning-based systems that require large sets of training data. The creation of training data, and consequently the creation of a well-performing recognition system, requires therefore a substantial amount of human work. This can be reduced with semi-supervised learning, which uses unlabeled text lines for training as well. Current approaches estimate the correct transcription of the unlabeled data via handwriting recognition which is not only extremely demanding as far as computational costs are concerned but also requires a good model of the target language. In this paper, we propose a different approach that makes use of keyword spotting, which is significantly faster and does not need any language model. In a set of experiments we demonstrate its superiority over existing approaches.

Abstract: The Hierarchical Conditional Random Field(HCRF) model have been successfully applied to a number of image labeling problems, including image segmentation. However, existing HCRF models of image segmentation do not allow multiple classes to be assigned to a single region, which limits their ability to incorporate contextual information across multiple scales.
At higher scales in the image, this representation yields an oversimplied model since multiple classes can be reasonably expected to appear within large regions. This simplied model particularly limits the impact of information at higher scales. Since class-label information at these scales is usually more reliable than at lower, noisier scales, neglecting this information is undesirable. To
address these issues, we propose a new consistency potential for image labeling problems, which we call the harmony potential. It can encode any possible combi-
nation of labels, penalizing only unlikely combinations of classes. We also propose an eective sampling strategy over this expanded label set that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging, standard benchmark datasets for semantic image segmentation: PASCAL VOC 2010, and MSRC-21.

Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D
objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial
manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our
method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs,
exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.

Abstract: Optical flow is a valuable tool for motion analysis in medical imaging sequences. A reliable application requires determining the accuracy of the computed optical flow. This is a main challenge given the absence of ground truth in medical sequences. This paper presents an error analysis of Lucas-Kanade schemes in terms of intrinsic design errors and numerical stability of the algorithm. Our analysis provides a confidence measure that is naturally correlated to the accuracy of the flow field. Our experiments show the higher predictive value of our confidence measure compared to existing measures.

Abstract: Even using objective measures from DT-MRI no consensus about myocardial architecture has been achieved so far. Streamlining provides good reconstructions at low level of detail, but falls short to give global abstract interpretations. In this paper, we present a multi-resolution methodology that is able to produce simplified representations of cardiac architecture. Our approach produces a reduced set of tracts that are representative of the main geometric features of myocardial anatomical structure. Experiments show that fiber geometry is preserved along reductions, which validates the simplified model for interpretation of cardiac architecture.