Abstract: Feature Detection and Feature Description are clearly nowadays topics. Many Computer Vision applications rely on the use of several of these techniques in order to extract the most significant aspects of an image so they can help in some tasks such as image retrieval, image registration, object recognition, object categorization and texture classification, among others. In this paper we define what Feature Detection and Description are and then we present an extensive collection of several methods in order to show the different techniques that are being used right now. The aim of this report is to provide a glimpse of what is being used currently in these fields and to serve as a starting point for future endeavours.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for tracking, modelling and recognition of facial expressions. The main contributions are: (i) a view- and texture independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker; (ii) the complexity of the non-linear facial expression space is modelled through a manifold, whose structure is learned using Laplacian Eigenmaps. The projected facial expressions are afterwards recognized based on Nearest Neighbor classifier; (iii) with the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the perceived facial expression.

Abstract: The classication of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the Machine Learning eld. In literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classiers. In this scope, the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for the combination of classiers. However, most of the state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a minimal design of ECOC in terms of the number of classiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classiers and looking for the best Minimal ECOC code conguration. The results over several public UCI data sets and a challenging multi-class Computer Vision problem show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable and even better results than state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.

Abstract: Post Conference IEEE-IS 2008
The Chagas’ disease is endemic in all Latin America, affecting millions of people in the continent. In order to diagnose and treat the chagas’ disease, it is important to detect and measure the coronary damage of the patient. In this paper,
we analyze and categorize patients into different groups based on the coronary damage produced by the disease. Based on the features of the heart cycle extracted using high resolution ECG, a multi-class scheme of Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC)is formulated and successfully applied. The results show that the proposed scheme obtains significant performance improvements compared to previous works and state-of-the-art ECOC designs.

Abstract: Intestinal motility analysis is an important examination in detection of various intestinal malfunctions. One of the big challenges of automatic motility analysis is how to compare sequence of images and extract dynamic paterns taking into account the high deformability of the intestine wall as well as the capsule motion. From clinical point of view the ability to align endoluminal scene sequences will help to find regions of similar intestinal activity and in this way will provide a valuable information on intestinal motility problems. This work, for first time, addresses the problem of aligning endoluminal sequences taking into account motion and structure of the intestine. To describe motility in the sequence, we propose different descriptors based on the Sift Flow algorithm, namely: (1) Histograms of Sift Flow Directions to describe the flow course, (2) Sift Descriptors to represent image intestine structure and (3) Sift Flow Magnitude to quantify intestine deformation. We show that the merge of all three descriptors provides robust information on sequence description in terms of motility. Moreover, we develop a novel methodology to rank the intestinal sequences based on the expert feedback about relevance of the results. The experimental results show that the selected descriptors are useful in the alignment and similarity description and the proposed method allows the analysis of the WCE.

Abstract: Humans constantly evaluate the personalities of other people using their faces. Facial trait judgments have been studied in the psychological field, and have been determined to influence important social outcomes of our lives, such as elections outcomes and social relationships. Recent work on textual descriptions of faces has shown that trait judgments are highly correlated. Further, behavioral studies suggest that two orthogonal dimensions, valence and dominance, can describe the basis of the human judgments from faces. In this paper, we used a corpus of behavioral data of judgments on different trait dimensions to automatically learn a trait predictor from facial pixel images. We study whether trait evaluations performed by humans can be learned using machine learning classifiers, and used later in automatic evaluations of new facial images. The experiments performed using local point-based descriptors show promising results in the evaluation of the main traits.