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Pau Baiget, Carles Fernandez, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2009). Generation of Augmented Video Sequences Combining Behavioral Animation and Multi Object Tracking. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 20(4), 473–489.
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel approach to generate augmented video sequences in real-time, involving interactions between virtual and real agents in real scenarios. On the one hand, real agent motion is estimated by means of a multi-object tracking algorithm, which determines real objects' position over the scenario for each time step. On the other hand, virtual agents are provided with behavior models considering their interaction with the environment and with other agents. The resulting framework allows to generate video sequences involving behavior-based virtual agents that react to real agent behavior and has applications in education, simulation, and in the game and movie industries. We show the performance of the proposed approach in an indoor and outdoor scenario simulating human and vehicle agents. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We present a novel approach to generate augmented video sequences in real-time, involving interactions between virtual and real agents in real scenarios. On the one hand, real agent motion is estimated by means of a multi-object tracking algorithm, which determines real objects' position over the scenario for each time step. On the other hand, virtual agents are provided with behavior models considering their interaction with the environment and with other agents. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2009). Three-Dimensional Face Pose Detection and Tracking Using Monocular Videos: Tool and Application. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics part B, 39(4), 935–944.
Abstract: Recently, we have proposed a real-time tracker that simultaneously tracks the 3-D head pose and facial actions in monocular video sequences that can be provided by low quality cameras. This paper has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3-D face pose initialization scheme for the real-time tracker by adopting a 2-D face detector and an eigenface system. Second, we use the proposed methods-the initialization and tracking-for enhancing the human-machine interaction functionality of an AIBO robot. More precisely, we show how the orientation of the robot's camera (or any active vision system) can be controlled through the estimation of the user's head pose. Applications based on head-pose imitation such as telepresence, virtual reality, and video games can directly exploit the proposed techniques. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.
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Arnau Ramisa, Adriana Tapus, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Robust Vision-Based Localization using Combinations of Local Feature Regions Detectors. AR - Autonomous Robots, 27(4), 373–385.
Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median graph: A new exact algorithm using a distance based on the maximum common subgraph. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 579–588.
Abstract: Median graphs have been presented as a useful tool for capturing the essential information of a set of graphs. Nevertheless, computation of optimal solutions is a very hard problem. In this work we present a new and more efficient optimal algorithm for the median graph computation. With the use of a particular cost function that permits the definition of the graph edit distance in terms of the maximum common subgraph, and a prediction function in the backtracking algorithm, we reduce the size of the search space, avoiding the evaluation of a great amount of states and still obtaining the exact median. We present a set of experiments comparing our new algorithm against the previous existing exact algorithm using synthetic data. In addition, we present the first application of the exact median graph computation to real data and we compare the results against an approximate algorithm based on genetic search. These experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the previous existing exact algorithm and in addition show the potential applicability of the exact solutions to real problems.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Angel Sappa. (2009). Instantaneous 3D motion from image derivatives using the Least Trimmed Square Regression. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 535–543.
Abstract: This paper presents a new technique to the instantaneous 3D motion estimation. The main contributions are as follows. First, we show that the 3D camera or scene velocity can be retrieved from image derivatives only assuming that the scene contains a dominant plane. Second, we propose a new robust algorithm that simultaneously provides the Least Trimmed Square solution and the percentage of inliers-the non-contaminated data. Experiments on both synthetic and real image sequences demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed method. Those experiments show that the new robust approach can outperform classical robust schemes.
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Fernando Vilariño, Stephan Ameling, Gerard Lacey, Stephen Patchett, & Hugh Mulcahy. (2009). Eye Tracking Search Patterns in Expert and Trainee Colonoscopists: A Novel Method of Assessing Endoscopic Competency? GI - Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, 69(5), 370.
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Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. M. Ferre, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Fast Rigid Registration of Vascular Structures in IVUS Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 13(6), 106–1011.
Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) technology permits visualization of high-resolution images of internal vascular structures. IVUS is a unique image-guiding tool to display longitudinal view of the vessels, and estimate the length and size of vascular structures with the goal of accurate diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to pulsatile contraction and expansion of the heart, the captured images are affected by different motion artifacts that make visual inspection difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that aligns vascular structures and strongly reduces the saw-shaped oscillation, simplifying the inspection of longitudinal cuts; it reduces the motion artifacts caused by the displacement of the catheter in the short-axis plane and the catheter rotation due to vessel tortuosity. The algorithm prototype aligns 3.16 frames/s and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with similar computational cost. The speed of the algorithm is crucial since it allows to inspect the corrected sequence during patient intervention. Moreover, we improved an indirect methodology for IVUS rigid registration algorithm evaluation.
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Oriol Pujol, & David Masip. (2009). Geometry-Based Ensembles: Toward a Structural Characterization of the Classification Boundary. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 31(6), 1140–1146.
Abstract: This article introduces a novel binary discriminative learning technique based on the approximation of the non-linear decision boundary by a piece-wise linear smooth additive model. The decision border is geometrically defined by means of the characterizing boundary points – points that belong to the optimal boundary under a certain notion of robustness. Based on these points, a set of locally robust linear classifiers is defined and assembled by means of a Tikhonov regularized optimization procedure in an additive model to create a final lambda-smooth decision rule. As a result, a very simple and robust classifier with a strong geometrical meaning and non-linear behavior is obtained. The simplicity of the method allows its extension to cope with some of nowadays machine learning challenges, such as online learning, large scale learning or parallelization, with linear computational complexity. We validate our approach on the UCI database. Finally, we apply our technique in online and large scale scenarios, and in six real life computer vision and pattern recognition problems: gender recognition, intravascular ultrasound tissue classification, speed traffic sign detection, Chagas' disease severity detection, clef classification and action recognition using a 3D accelerometer data. The results are promising and this paper opens a line of research that deserves further attention
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Joost Van de Weijer, Cordelia Schmid, Jakob Verbeek, & Diane Larlus. (2009). Learning Color Names for Real-World Applications. TIP - IEEE Transaction in Image Processing, 18(7), 1512–1524.
Abstract: Color names are required in real-world applications such as image retrieval and image annotation. Traditionally, they are learned from a collection of labelled color chips. These color chips are labelled with color names within a well-defined experimental setup by human test subjects. However naming colors in real-world images differs significantly from this experimental setting. In this paper, we investigate how color names learned from color chips compare to color names learned from real-world images. To avoid hand labelling real-world images with color names we use Google Image to collect a data set. Due to limitations of Google Image this data set contains a substantial quantity of wrongly labelled data. We propose several variants of the PLSA model to learn color names from this noisy data. Experimental results show that color names learned from real-world images significantly outperform color names learned from labelled color chips for both image retrieval and image annotation.
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Jose Antonio Rodriguez, & Florent Perronnin. (2009). Handwritten word-spotting using hidden Markov models and universal vocabularies. PR - Pattern Recognition, 42(9), 2103–2116.
Abstract: Handwritten word-spotting is traditionally viewed as an image matching task between one or multiple query word-images and a set of candidate word-images in a database. This is a typical instance of the query-by-example paradigm. In this article, we introduce a statistical framework for the word-spotting problem which employs hidden Markov models (HMMs) to model keywords and a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for score normalization. We explore the use of two types of HMMs for the word modeling part: continuous HMMs (C-HMMs) and semi-continuous HMMs (SC-HMMs), i.e. HMMs with a shared set of Gaussians. We show on a challenging multi-writer corpus that the proposed statistical framework is always superior to a traditional matching system which uses dynamic time warping (DTW) for word-image distance computation. A very important finding is that the SC-HMM is superior when labeled training data is scarce—as low as one sample per keyword—thanks to the prior information which can be incorporated in the shared set of Gaussians.
Keywords: Word-spotting; Hidden Markov model; Score normalization; Universal vocabulary; Handwriting recognition
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Fadi Dornaika, & Angel Sappa. (2009). A Featureless and Stochastic Approach to On-board Stereo Vision System Pose. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 27(9), 1382–1393.
Abstract: This paper presents a direct and stochastic technique for real-time estimation of on-board stereo head’s position and orientation. Unlike existing works which rely on feature extraction either in the image domain or in 3D space, our proposed approach directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs’ brightness. The pose parameters are tracked using the particle filtering framework which implicitly enforces the smoothness constraints on the estimated parameters. The proposed technique can be used with a driver assistance applications as well as with augmented reality applications. Extended experiments on urban environments with different road geometries are presented. Comparisons with a 3D data-based approach are presented. Moreover, we provide a performance study aiming at evaluating the accuracy of the proposed approach.
Keywords: On-board stereo vision system; Pose estimation; Featureless approach; Particle filtering; Image warping
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median Graphs: A Genetic Approach based on New Theoretical Properties. PR - Pattern Recognition, 42(9), 2003–2012.
Abstract: Given a set of graphs, the median graph has been theoretically presented as a useful concept to infer a representative of the set. However, the computation of the median graph is a highly complex task and its practical application has been very limited up to now. In this work we present two major contributions. On one side, and from a theoretical point of view, we show new theoretical properties of the median graph. On the other side, using these new properties, we present a new approximate algorithm based on the genetic search, that improves the computation of the median graph. Finally, we perform a set of experiments on real data, where none of the existing algorithms for the median graph computation could be applied up to now due to their computational complexity. With these results, we show how the concept of the median graph can be used in real applications and leaves the box of the only-theoretical concepts, demonstrating, from a practical point of view, that can be a useful tool to represent a set of graphs.
Keywords: Median graph; Genetic search; Maximum common subgraph; Graph matching; Structural pattern recognition
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Oriol Ramos Terrades, Ernest Valveny, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2009). Optimal Classifier Fusion in a Non-Bayesian Probabilistic Framework. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 31(9), 1630–1644.
Abstract: The combination of the output of classifiers has been one of the strategies used to improve classification rates in general purpose classification systems. Some of the most common approaches can be explained using the Bayes' formula. In this paper, we tackle the problem of the combination of classifiers using a non-Bayesian probabilistic framework. This approach permits us to derive two linear combination rules that minimize misclassification rates under some constraints on the distribution of classifiers. In order to show the validity of this approach we have compared it with other popular combination rules from a theoretical viewpoint using a synthetic data set, and experimentally using two standard databases: the MNIST handwritten digit database and the GREC symbol database. Results on the synthetic data set show the validity of the theoretical approach. Indeed, results on real data show that the proposed methods outperform other common combination schemes.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2009). ECOC Random Fields for Lumen Segmentation in Radial Artery IVUS Sequences. In 12th International Conference on Medical Image and Computer Assisted Intervention (Vol. 5762). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The measure of lumen volume on radial arteries can be used to evaluate the vessel response to different vasodilators. In this paper, we present a framework for automatic lumen segmentation in longitudinal cut images of radial artery from Intravascular ultrasound sequences. The segmentation is tackled as a classification problem where the contextual information is exploited by means of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). A multi-class classification framework is proposed, and inference is achieved by combining binary CRFs according to the Error-Correcting-Output-Code technique. The results are validated against manually segmented sequences. Finally, the method is compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers.
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