Abstract: IF: 0.809

Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.

Abstract: Representing a graph with a feature vector is a common way of making statistical machine learning algorithms applicable to the domain of graphs. Such a transition from graphs to vectors is known as graphembedding. A key issue in graphembedding is to select a proper set of features in order to make the vectorial representation of graphs as strong and discriminative as possible. In this article, we propose features that are constructed out of frequencies of node label representatives. We first build a large set of features and then select the most discriminative ones according to different ranking criteria and feature transformation algorithms. On different classification tasks, we experimentally show that only a small significant subset of these features is needed to achieve the same classification rates as competing to state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: IF: 1.138

Abstract: Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) represent a successful framework to deal with multi-class categorization problems based on combining binary classifiers. In this paper, we present a new formulation of the ternary ECOC distance and the error-correcting capabilities in the ternary ECOC framework. Based on the new measure, we stress on how to design coding matrices preventing codification ambiguity and propose a new Sparse Random coding matrix with ternary distance maximization. The results on the UCI Repository and in a real speed traffic categorization problem show that when the coding design satisfies the new ternary measures, significant performance improvement is obtained independently of the decoding strategy applied.

Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.

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.

Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.