Abstract: A qualitative research study is presented herein with the purpose of identifying mathematics learning opportunities in students between 10 and 12 years old while playing a commercial version of a Tower Defense game. These learning opportunities are understood as mathematicisable moments of the game and involve the establishment of relationships between the game and mathematical problem solving. Based on the analysis of these mathematicisable moments, we conclude that the game can promote problem-solving processes and learning opportunities that can be associated with different mathematical contents that appears in mathematics curricula, thought it seems that teacher or new game elements might be needed to facilitate the processes.

Abstract: A main weakness of virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) is unsuccessful segmentation of distal branches approaching peripheral pulmonary nodules (PPN). CT scan acquisition protocol is pivotal for segmentation covering the utmost periphery. We hypothesize that application of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) during CT acquisition could improve visualization and segmentation of peripheral bronchi. The purpose of the present pilot study is to compare quality of segmentations under 4 CT acquisition modes: inspiration (INSP), expiration (EXP) and both with CPAP (INSP-CPAP and EXP-CPAP).

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel CNN architecture for the multi-thermal image super-resolution problem. In the proposed scheme, the multi-images are synthetically generated by downsampling and slightly shifting the given image; noise is also added to each of these synthesized images. The proposed architecture uses two
attention blocks paths to extract high-frequency details taking advantage of the large information extracted from multiple images of the same scene. Experimental results are provided, showing the proposed scheme has overcome the state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: Deformable models have received much popularity due to their ability to include high-level knowledge on the application domain into low-level image processing. Still, most proposed active contour models do not sufficiently profit from the application information and they are too generalized, leading to non-optimal final results of segmentation, tracking or 3D reconstruction processes. In this paper we propose a new deformable model defined in a statistical framework to segment objects of natural scenes. We perform a supervised learning of local appearance of the textured objects and construct a feature space using a set of co-occurrence matrix measures. Linear Discriminant Analysis allows us to obtain an optimal reduced feature space where a mixture model is applied to construct a likelihood map. Instead of using a heuristic potential field, our active model is deformed on a regularized version of the likelihood map in order to segment objects characterized by the same texture pattern. Different tests on synthetic images, natural scene and medical images show the advantages of our statistic deformable model.

Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.

Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.

Abstract: The visual enrichment of digital terrain models with plausible synthetic detail requires the segmentation of aerial images into a suitable collection of categories. In this paper we present a complete pipeline for segmenting high-resolution aerial images into a user-defined set of categories distinguishing e.g. terrain, sand, snow, water, and different types of vegetation. This segmentation-for-synthesis problem implies that per-pixel categories must be established according to the algorithms chosen for rendering the synthetic detail. This precludes the definition of a universal set of labels and hinders the construction of large training sets. Since artists might choose to add new categories on the fly, the whole pipeline must be robust against unbalanced datasets, and fast on both training and inference. Under these constraints, we analyze the contribution of common per-pixel descriptors, and compare the performance of state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms. We report the findings of two user studies. The first one was conducted to analyze human accuracy when manually labeling aerial images. The second user study compares detailed terrains built using different segmentation strategies, including official land cover maps. These studies demonstrate that our approach can be used to turn digital elevation models into fully-featured, detailed terrains with minimal authoring efforts.