Abstract: Ever since computers were invented, we have wondered whether they might perform some of the human quotidian tasks. One of the most studied and still nowadays less understood problem is the capacity to learn from our experiences and how we generalize the knowledge that we acquire. One of that unaware tasks for the persons and that more interest is awakening in different scientific areas since the beginning, is the one that is known as pattern recognition. The creation of models that represent the world that surrounds us, help us for recognizing objects in our environment, to predict situations, to identify behaviors... All this information allows us to adapt ourselves and to interact with our environment. The capacity of adaptation of individuals to their environment has been related to the amount of patterns that are capable of identifying.
This thesis faces the pattern recognition problem from a Computer Vision point of view, taking one of the most paradigmatic and extended approaches to object detection as starting point. After studying this approach, two weak points are identified: The first makes reference to the description of the objects, and the second is a limitation of the learning algorithm, which hampers the utilization of best descriptors.
In order to address the learning limitations, we introduce evolutionary computation techniques to the classical object detection approach.
After testing the classical evolutionary approaches, such as genetic algorithms, we develop a new learning algorithm based on Probabilistic Darwin Machines, which better adapts to the learning problem. Once the learning limitation is avoided, we introduce a new feature set, which maintains the benefits of the classical feature set, adding the ability to describe non localities. This combination of evolutionary learning algorithm and features is tested on different public data sets, outperforming the results obtained by the classical approach.

Abstract: Usually, pattern recognition systems consist of two main parts. On the one hand, the data acquisition and, on the other hand, the classification of this data on a certain category. In order to recognize which category a certain query element belongs to, a set of pattern models must be provided beforehand. An off-line learning stage is needed to train the classifier and to offer a robust classification of the patterns. Within the pattern recognition field, we are interested in the recognition of graphics and, in particular, on the analysis of documents rich in graphical information. In this context, one of the main concerns is to see if the proposed systems remain scalable with respect to the data volume so as it can handle growing amounts of symbol models. In order to avoid to work with a database of reference symbols, symbol spotting and on-the-fly symbol recognition methods have been introduced in the past years.
Generally speaking, the symbol spotting problem can be defined as the identification of a set of regions of interest from a document image which are likely to contain an instance of a certain queriedn symbol without explicitly applying the whole pattern recognition scheme. Our application framework consists on indexing a collection of graphic-rich document images. This collection is
queried by example with a single instance of the symbol to look for and, by means of symbol spotting methods we retrieve the regions of interest where the symbol is likely to appear within the documents. This kind of applications are known as focused retrieval methods.
In order that the focused retrieval application can handle large collections of documents there is a need to provide an efficient access to the large volume of information that might be stored. We use indexing strategies in order to efficiently retrieve by similarity the locations where a certain part of the symbol appears. In that scenario, graphical patterns should be used as indices for accessing and navigating the collection of documents.
These indexing mechanism allow the user to search for similar elements using graphical information rather than textual queries.
Along this thesis we present a spotting architecture and different methods aiming to build a complete focused retrieval application dealing with a graphic-rich document collections. In addition, a protocol to evaluate the performance of symbol
spotting systems in terms of recognition abilities, location accuracy and scalability is proposed.

Abstract: Handwritten word-spotting (HWS) is the pattern analysis task that consists in finding keywords in handwritten document images. So far, HWS has been applied mostly to historical documents in order to build search engines for such image collections. This thesis addresses the problem of word-spotting for detecting important keywords in business documents. This is a first step towards the process of automatic routing of correspondence based on content.
However, the application of traditional HWS techniques fails for this type of documents. As opposed to historical documents, real business documents present a very high variability in terms of writing styles, spontaneous writing, crossed-out words, spelling mistakes, etc. The main goal of this thesis is the development of pattern recognition techniques that lead to a high-performance HWS system for this challenging type of data.
We develop a statistical framework in which word models are expressed in terms of hidden Markov models and the a priori information is encoded in a universal vocabulary of Gaussian codewords. This systems leads to a very robust performance in word-spotting task. We also find that by constraining the word models to the universal vocabulary, the a priori information of the problem of interest can be exploited for developing new contributions. These include a novel writer adaptation method, a system for searching handwritten words by generating typed text images, and a novel model-based similarity between feature vector sequences.

Abstract: At the beginning of the 21th century, traffic accidents have become a major problem not only for developed countries but also for emerging ones. As in other scientific areas in which Artificial Intelligence is becoming a key actor, advanced driver assistance systems, and concretely pedestrian protection systems based on Computer Vision, are becoming a strong topic of research aimed at improving the safety of pedestrians. However, the challenge is of considerable complexity due to the varying appearance of humans (e.g., clothes, size, aspect ratio, shape, etc.), the dynamic nature of on-board systems and the unstructured moving environments that urban scenarios represent. In addition, the required performance is demanding both in terms of computational time and detection rates. In this thesis, instead of focusing on improving specific tasks as it is frequent in the literature, we present a global approach to the problem. Such a global overview starts by the proposal of a generic architecture to be used as a framework both to review the literature and to organize the studied techniques along the thesis. We then focus the research on tasks such as foreground segmentation, object classification and refinement following a general viewpoint and exploring aspects that are not usually analyzed. In order to perform the experiments, we also present a novel pedestrian dataset that consists of three subsets, each one addressed to the evaluation of a different specific task in the system. The results presented in this thesis not only end with a proposal of a pedestrian detection system but also go one step beyond by pointing out new insights, formalizing existing and proposed algorithms, introducing new techniques and evaluating their performance, which we hope will provide new foundations for future research in the area.

Abstract: Article ID 491819
Social Signal Processing is an emergent area of research that focuses on the analysis of social constructs. Dominance and interest are two of these social constructs. Dominance refers to the level of influence a person has in a conversation. Interest, when referred in terms of group interactions, can be defined as the degree of engagement that the members of a group collectively display during their interaction. In this paper, we argue that only using behavioral motion information, we are able to predict the interest of observers when looking at face-to-face interactions as well as the dominant people. First, we propose a simple set of movement-based features from body, face, and mouth activity in order to define a higher set of interaction indicators. The considered indicators are manually annotated by observers. Based on the opinions obtained, we define an automatic binary dominance detection problem and a multiclass interest quantification problem. Error-Correcting Output Codes framework is used to learn to rank the perceived observer's interest in face-to-face interactions meanwhile Adaboost is used to solve the dominant detection problem. The automatic system shows good correlation between the automatic categorization results and the manual ranking made by the observers in both dominance and interest detection problems.

Abstract: (Feb):661−664
In this paper, we present an open source Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) library. The ECOC framework is a powerful tool to deal with multi-class categorization problems. This library contains both state-of-the-art coding (one-versus-one, one-versus-all, dense random, sparse random, DECOC, forest-ECOC, and ECOC-ONE) and decoding designs (hamming, euclidean, inverse hamming, laplacian, β-density, attenuated, loss-based, probabilistic kernel-based, and loss-weighted) with the parameters defined by the authors, as well as the option to include your own coding, decoding, and base classifier.