Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2012). Improving Color Constancy by Photometric Edge Weighting. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(5), 918–929.
Abstract: : Edge-based color constancy methods make use of image derivatives to estimate the illuminant. However, different edge types exist in real-world images such as material, shadow and highlight edges. These different edge types may have a distinctive influence on the performance of the illuminant estimation. Therefore, in this paper, an extensive analysis is provided of different edge types on the performance of edge-based color constancy methods. First, an edge-based taxonomy is presented classifying edge types based on their photometric properties (e.g. material, shadow-geometry and highlights). Then, a performance evaluation of edge-based color constancy is provided using these different edge types. From this performance evaluation it is derived that specular and shadow edge types are more valuable than material edges for the estimation of the illuminant. To this end, the (iterative) weighted Grey-Edge algorithm is proposed in which these edge types are more emphasized for the estimation of the illuminant. Images that are recorded under controlled circumstances demonstrate that the proposed iterative weighted Grey-Edge algorithm based on highlights reduces the median angular error with approximately $25\%$. In an uncontrolled environment, improvements in angular error up to $11\%$ are obtained with respect to regular edge-based color constancy.
|
Michael Holte, Bhaskar Chakraborty, Jordi Gonzalez, & Thomas B. Moeslund. (2012). A Local 3D Motion Descriptor for Multi-View Human Action Recognition from 4D Spatio-Temporal Interest Points. J-STSP - IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 6(5), 553–565.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of human action recognition in reconstructed 3-D data acquired by multi-camera systems. We contribute to this field by introducing a novel 3-D action recognition approach based on detection of 4-D (3-D space $+$ time) spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and local description of 3-D motion features. STIPs are detected in multi-view images and extended to 4-D using 3-D reconstructions of the actors and pixel-to-vertex correspondences of the multi-camera setup. Local 3-D motion descriptors, histogram of optical 3-D flow (HOF3D), are extracted from estimated 3-D optical flow in the neighborhood of each 4-D STIP and made view-invariant. The local HOF3D descriptors are divided using 3-D spatial pyramids to capture and improve the discrimination between arm- and leg-based actions. Based on these pyramids of HOF3D descriptors we build a bag-of-words (BoW) vocabulary of human actions, which is compressed and classified using agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) and support vector machines (SVMs), respectively. Experiments on the publicly available i3DPost and IXMAS datasets show promising state-of-the-art results and validate the performance and view-invariance of the approach.
|
Josep Llados, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes, David Fernandez, & Anjan Dutta. (2012). On the Influence of Word Representations for Handwritten Word Spotting in Historical Documents. IJPRAI - International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 26(5), 1263002–126027.
Abstract: 0,624 JCR
Word spotting is the process of retrieving all instances of a queried keyword from a digital library of document images. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different word descriptors to assess the advantages and disadvantages of statistical and structural models in a framework of query-by-example word spotting in historical documents. We compare four word representation models, namely sequence alignment using DTW as a baseline reference, a bag of visual words approach as statistical model, a pseudo-structural model based on a Loci features representation, and a structural approach where words are represented by graphs. The four approaches have been tested with two collections of historical data: the George Washington database and the marriage records from the Barcelona Cathedral. We experimentally demonstrate that statistical representations generally give a better performance, however it cannot be neglected that large descriptors are difficult to be implemented in a retrieval scenario where word spotting requires the indexation of data with million word images.
Keywords: Handwriting recognition; word spotting; historical documents; feature representation; shape descriptors Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218001412630025
|
Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, Josep Llados, & Mathieu Nicolas Delalandre. (2012). Multi-oriented touching text character segmentation in graphical documents using dynamic programming. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(5), 1972–1983.
Abstract: 2,292 JCR
The touching character segmentation problem becomes complex when touching strings are multi-oriented. Moreover in graphical documents sometimes characters in a single-touching string have different orientations. Segmentation of such complex touching is more challenging. In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region in the background portion. Based on the convex hull information, at first, we use this background information to find some initial points for segmentation of a touching string into possible primitives (a primitive consists of a single character or part of a character). Next, the primitives are merged to get optimum segmentation. A dynamic programming algorithm is applied for this purpose using the total likelihood of characters as the objective function. A SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experiments were performed in different databases of real and synthetic touching characters and the results show that the method is efficient in segmenting touching characters of arbitrary orientations and sizes.
|
Fernando Barrera, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Multimodal Stereo Vision System: 3D Data Extraction and Algorithm Evaluation. J-STSP - IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 6(5), 437–446.
Abstract: This paper proposes an imaging system for computing sparse depth maps from multispectral images. A special stereo head consisting of an infrared and a color camera defines the proposed multimodal acquisition system. The cameras are rigidly attached so that their image planes are parallel. Details about the calibration and image rectification procedure are provided. Sparse disparity maps are obtained by the combined use of mutual information enriched with gradient information. The proposed approach is evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Furthermore, a multispectral dataset, color and infrared images, together with their corresponding ground truth disparity maps, is generated and used as a test bed. Experimental results in real outdoor scenarios are provided showing its viability and that the proposed approach is not restricted to a specific domain.
|
Noha Elfiky, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Discriminative Compact Pyramids for Object and Scene Recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(4), 1627–1636.
Abstract: Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporating spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. In this paper, we present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. First, we investigate the usage of the divisive information theoretic feature clustering (DITC) algorithm in creating a compact pyramid representation. In many cases this method allows us to reduce the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation up to an order of magnitude with little or no loss in accuracy. Furthermore, comparison to clustering based on agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) shows that our method obtains superior results at significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, we investigate the optimal combination of multiple features in the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, experiments show that the method can obtain state-of-the-art results on several challenging data sets.
|
Mohammad Rouhani, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Implicit Polynomial Representation through a Fast Fitting Error Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(4), 2089–2098.
Abstract: Impact Factor
This paper presents a simple distance estimation for implicit polynomial fitting. It is computed as the height of a simplex built between the point and the surface (i.e., a triangle in 2-D or a tetrahedron in 3-D), which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the orthogonal distance. The proposed distance can be described as a function of the coefficients of the implicit polynomial. Moreover, it is differentiable and has a smooth behavior . Hence, it can be used in any gradient-based optimization. In this paper, its use in a Levenberg-Marquardt framework is shown, which is particularly devoted for nonlinear least squares problems. The proposed estimation is a generalization of the gradient-based distance estimation, which is widely used in the literature. Experimental results, both in 2-D and 3-D data sets, are provided. Comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques are presented, showing the advantages of the proposed approach.
|
Marina Alberti, Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Joana Silva, et al. (2012). Automatic Bifurcation Detection in Coronary IVUS Sequences. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 59(4), 1022–2031.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a fully automatic method which identifies every bifurcation in an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequence, the corresponding frames, the angular orientation with respect to the IVUS acquisition, and the extension. This goal is reached using a two-level classification scheme: first, a classifier is applied to a set of textural features extracted from each image of a sequence. A comparison among three state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers (AdaBoost, random forest, and support vector machine) is performed to identify the most suitable method for the branching detection task. Second, the results are improved by exploiting contextual information using a multiscale stacked sequential learning scheme. The results are then successively refined using a-priori information about branching dimensions and geometry. The proposed approach provides a robust tool for the quick review of pullback sequences, facilitating the evaluation of the lesion at bifurcation sites. The proposed method reaches an F-Measure score of 86.35%, while the F-Measure scores for inter- and intraobserver variability are 71.63% and 76.18%, respectively. The obtained results are positive. Especially, considering the branching detection task is very challenging, due to high variability in bifurcation dimensions and appearance.
|
Javier Vazquez, Maria Vanrell, Ramon Baldrich, & Francesc Tous. (2012). Color Constancy by Category Correlation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(4), 1997–2007.
Abstract: Finding color representations which are stable to illuminant changes is still an open problem in computer vision. Until now most approaches have been based on physical constraints or statistical assumptions derived from the scene, while very little attention has been paid to the effects that selected illuminants have
on the final color image representation. The novelty of this work is to propose
perceptual constraints that are computed on the corrected images. We define the
category hypothesis, which weights the set of feasible illuminants according to their ability to map the corrected image onto specific colors. Here we choose these colors as the universal color categories related to basic linguistic terms which have been psychophysically measured. These color categories encode natural color statistics, and their relevance across different cultures is indicated by the fact that they have received a common color name. From this category hypothesis we propose a fast implementation that allows the sampling of a large set of illuminants. Experiments prove that our method rivals current state-of-art performance without the need for training algorithmic parameters. Additionally, the method can be used as a framework to insert top-down information from other sources, thus opening further research directions in solving for color constancy.
|
Bhaskar Chakraborty, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Selective Spatio-Temporal Interest Points. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 396–410.
Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.
|
Carolina Malagelada, F.De Lorio, Santiago Segui, S. Mendez, Michal Drozdzal, Jordi Vitria, et al. (2012). Functional gut disorders or disordered gut function? Small bowel dysmotility evidenced by an original technique. NEUMOT - Neurogastroenterology & Motility, 24(3), 223–230.
Abstract: JCR Impact Factor 2010: 3.349
Background This study aimed to determine the proportion of cases with abnormal intestinal motility among patients with functional bowel disorders. To this end, we applied an original method, previously developed in our laboratory, for analysis of endoluminal images obtained by capsule endoscopy. This novel technology is based on computer vision and machine learning techniques.
Methods The endoscopic capsule (Pillcam SB1; Given Imaging, Yokneam, Israel) was administered to 80 patients with functional bowel disorders and 70 healthy subjects. Endoluminal image analysis was performed with a computer vision program developed for the evaluation of contractile events (luminal occlusions and radial wrinkles), non-contractile patterns (open tunnel and smooth wall patterns), type of content (secretions, chyme) and motion of wall and contents. Normality range and discrimination of abnormal cases were established by a machine learning technique. Specifically, an iterative classifier (one-class support vector machine) was applied in a random population of 50 healthy subjects as a training set and the remaining subjects (20 healthy subjects and 80 patients) as a test set.
Key Results The classifier identified as abnormal 29% of patients with functional diseases of the bowel (23 of 80), and as normal 97% of healthy subjects (68 of 70) (P < 0.05 by chi-squared test). Patients identified as abnormal clustered in two groups, which exhibited either a hyper- or a hypodynamic motility pattern. The motor behavior was unrelated to clinical features.
Conclusions & Inferences With appropriate methodology, abnormal intestinal motility can be demonstrated in a significant proportion of patients with functional bowel disorders, implying a pathologic disturbance of gut physiology.
Keywords: capsule endoscopy;computer vision analysis;machine learning technique;small bowel motility
|
R. Valenti, N. Sebe, & Theo Gevers. (2012). What are you looking at? Improving Visual gaze Estimation by Saliency. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(3), 324–334.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 5.15
Impact factor 2011/12?: 5.36
In this paper we present a novel mechanism to obtain enhanced gaze estimation for subjects looking at a scene or an image. The system makes use of prior knowledge about the scene (e.g. an image on a computer screen), to define a probability map of the scene the subject is gazing at, in order to find the most probable location. The proposed system helps in correcting the fixations which are erroneously estimated by the gaze estimation device by employing a saliency framework to adjust the resulting gaze point vector. The system is tested on three scenarios: using eye tracking data, enhancing a low accuracy webcam based eye tracker, and using a head pose tracker. The correlation between the subjects in the commercial eye tracking data is improved by an average of 13.91%. The correlation on the low accuracy eye gaze tracker is improved by 59.85%, and for the head pose tracker we obtain an improvement of 10.23%. These results show the potential of the system as a way to enhance and self-calibrate different visual gaze estimation systems.
|
Jordi Gonzalez, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Liang Wang. (2012). Semantic Understanding of Human Behaviors in Image Sequences: From video-surveillance to video-hermeneutics. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 305–306.
Abstract: Purpose: Atheromatic plaque progression is affected, among others phenomena, by biomechanical, biochemical, and physiological factors. In this paper, the authors introduce a novel framework able to provide both morphological (vessel radius, plaque thickness, and type) and biomechanical (wall shear stress and Von Mises stress) indices of coronary arteries.Methods: First, the approach reconstructs the three-dimensional morphology of the vessel from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and Angiographic sequences, requiring minimal user interaction. Then, a computational pipeline allows to automatically assess fluid-dynamic and mechanical indices. Ten coronary arteries are analyzed illustrating the capabilities of the tool and confirming previous technical and clinical observations.Results: The relations between the arterial indices obtained by IVUS measurement and simulations have been quantitatively analyzed along the whole surface of the artery, extending the analysis of the coronary arteries shown in previous state of the art studies. Additionally, for the first time in the literature, the framework allows the computation of the membrane stresses using a simplified mechanical model of the arterial wall.Conclusions: Circumferentially (within a given frame), statistical analysis shows an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque thickness. At the global level (comparing a frame within the entire vessel), it is observed that heavy plaque accumulations are in general calcified and are located in the areas of the vessel having high wall shear stress. Finally, in their experiments the inverse proportionality between fluid and structural stresses is observed.
|
Pau Baiget, Carles Fernandez, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Trajectory-Based Abnormality Categorization for Learning Route Patterns in Surveillance. In Detection and Identification of Rare Audiovisual Cues, Studies in Computational Intelligence (Vol. 384, pp. 87–95). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The recognition of abnormal behaviors in video sequences has raised as a hot topic in video understanding research. Particularly, an important challenge resides on automatically detecting abnormality. However, there is no convention about the types of anomalies that training data should derive. In surveillance, these are typically detected when new observations differ substantially from observed, previously learned behavior models, which represent normality. This paper focuses on properly defining anomalies within trajectory analysis: we propose a hierarchical representation conformed by Soft, Intermediate, and Hard Anomaly, which are identified from the extent and nature of deviation from learned models. Towards this end, a novel Gaussian Mixture Model representation of learned route patterns creates a probabilistic map of the image plane, which is applied to detect and classify anomalies in real-time. Our method overcomes limitations of similar existing approaches, and performs correctly even when the tracking is affected by different sources of noise. The reliability of our approach is demonstrated experimentally.
|
|
Ernest Valveny, Robert Benavente, Agata Lapedriza, Miquel Ferrer, Jaume Garcia, & Gemma Sanchez. (2012). Adaptation of a computer programming course to the EXHE requirements: evaluation five years later (Vol. 37).
|
