Abstract: The increasing ubiquitousness of digital information in our daily lives has positioned
video as a favored information vehicle, and given rise to an astonishing generation of
social media and surveillance footage. This raises a series of technological demands
for automatic video understanding and management, which together with the compromising attentional limitations of human operators, have motivated the research
community to guide its steps towards a better attainment of such capabilities. As
a result, current trends on cognitive vision promise to recognize complex events and
self-adapt to different environments, while managing and integrating several types of
knowledge. Future directions suggest to reinforce the multi-modal fusion of information sources and the communication with end-users.
In this thesis we tackle the problem of recognizing and describing meaningful
events in video sequences from different domains, and communicating the resulting
knowledge to end-users by means of advanced interfaces for human–computer interaction. This problem is addressed by designing the high-level modules of a cognitive
vision framework exploiting ontological knowledge. Ontologies allow us to define the
relevant concepts in a domain and the relationships among them; we prove that the
use of ontologies to organize, centralize, link, and reuse different types of knowledge
is a key factor in the materialization of our objectives.
The proposed framework contributes to: (i) automatically learn the characteristics
of different scenarios in a domain; (ii) reason about uncertain, incomplete, or vague
information from visual –camera’s– or linguistic –end-user’s– inputs; (iii) derive plausible interpretations of complex events from basic spatiotemporal developments; (iv)
facilitate natural interfaces that adapt to the needs of end-users, and allow them to
communicate efficiently with the system at different levels of interaction; and finally,
(v) find mechanisms to guide modeling processes, maintain and extend the resulting
models, and to exploit multimodal resources synergically to enhance the former tasks.
We describe a holistic methodology to achieve these goals. First, the use of prior
taxonomical knowledge is proved useful to guide MAP-MRF inference processes in
the automatic identification of semantic regions, with independence of a particular scenario. Towards the recognition of complex video events, we combine fuzzy
metric-temporal reasoning with SGTs, thus assessing high-level interpretations from
spatiotemporal data. Here, ontological resources like T–Boxes, onomasticons, or factual databases become useful to derive video indexing and retrieval capabilities, and
also to forward highlighted content to smart user interfaces. There, we explore the
application of ontologies to discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic principles, or scene augmentation techniques towards advanced communication by means of natural language dialogs and synthetic visualizations. Ontologies become fundamental to
coordinate, adapt, and reuse the different modules in the system.
The suitability of our ontological framework is demonstrated by a series of applications that especially benefit the field of smart video surveillance, viz. automatic generation of linguistic reports about the content of video sequences in multiple natural
languages; content-based filtering and summarization of these reports; dialogue-based
interfaces to query and browse video contents; automatic learning of semantic regions
in a scenario; and tools to evaluate the performance of components and models in the
system, via simulation and augmented reality.

Abstract: With the advent research of Document Image Analysis and Recognition (DIAR), an
important line of research is explored on indexing and retrieval of graphics rich documents. It aims at finding relevant documents relying on segmentation and recognition
of text and graphics components underlying in non-standard layout where commercial
OCRs can not be applied due to complexity. This thesis is focused towards text information extraction approaches in graphical documents and retrieval of such documents
using text information.
Automatic text recognition in graphical documents (map, engineering drawing,
etc.) involves many challenges because text characters are usually printed in multioriented and multi-scale way along with different graphical objects. Text characters
are used to annotate the graphical curve lines and hence, many times they follow
curvi-linear paths too. For OCR of such documents, individual text lines and their
corresponding words/characters need to be extracted.
For recognition of multi-font, multi-scale and multi-oriented characters, we have
proposed a feature descriptor for character shape using angular information from contour pixels to take care of the invariance nature. To improve the efficiency of OCR, an
approach towards the segmentation of multi-oriented touching strings into individual
characters is also discussed. Convex hull based background information is used to
segment a touching string into possible primitive segments and later these primitive
segments are merged to get optimum segmentation using dynamic programming. To
overcome the touching/overlapping problem of text with graphical lines, a character
spotting approach using SIFT and skeleton information is included. Afterwards, we
propose a novel method to extract individual curvi-linear text lines using the foreground and background information of the characters of the text and a water reservoir
concept is used to utilize the background information.
We have also formulated the methodologies for graphical document retrieval applications using query words and seals. The retrieval approaches are performed using
recognition results of individual components in the document. Given a query text,
the system extracts positional knowledge from the query word and uses the same to
generate hypothetical locations in the document. Indexing of documents is also performed based on automatic detection of seals from documents containing cluttered
background. A seal is characterized by scale and rotation invariant spatial feature
descriptors computed from labelled text characters and a concept based on the Generalized Hough Transform is used to locate the seal in documents.

Abstract: This book contains the papers presented at the Eighth CVC Workshop on Computer Vision Trends and Challenges (CVCR&D'2013). The workshop was held at the Computer Vision Center (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), the October 25th, 2013. The CVC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for young researchers and project engineers to share new ideas and knowledge about the progress of their work, and also, to discuss about challenges and future perspectives. In addition, the workshop is the welcome event for new people that recently have joined the institute.
The program of CVCR&D is organized in a single-track single-day workshop. It comprises several sessions dedicated to specific topics. For each session, a doctor working on the topic introduces the general research lines. The PhD students expose their specific research. A poster session will be held for open questions. Session topics cover the current research lines and development projects of the CVC: Medical Imaging, Medical Imaging, Color & Texture Analysis, Object Recognition, Image Sequence Evaluation, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Machine Vision, Document Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Applications. We want to thank all paper authors and Program Committee members. Their contribution shows that the CVC has a dynamic, active, and promising scientific community.
We hope you all enjoy this Eighth workshop and we are looking forward to meeting you and new people next year in the Ninth CVCR&D.

Abstract: In the quality evaluation of high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) images, a number of works have concluded that native HDR metrics, such as HDR visual difference predictor (HDR-VDP), HDR video quality metric (HDR-VQM), or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based visibility metrics for HDR content, provide the best results. These metrics consider only the luminance component, but several color difference metrics have been specifically developed for, and validated with, HDR/WCG images. In this paper, we perform subjective evaluation experiments in a professional HDR/WCG production setting, under a real use case scenario. The results are quite relevant in that they show, firstly, that the performance of HDR metrics is worse than that of a classic, simple standard dynamic range (SDR) metric applied directly to the HDR content; and secondly, that the chrominance metrics specifically developed for HDR/WCG imaging have poor correlation with observer scores and are also outperformed by an SDR metric. Based on these findings, we show how a very simple framework for creating color HDR metrics, that uses only luminance SDR metrics, transfer functions, and classic color spaces, is able to consistently outperform, by a considerable margin, state-of-the-art HDR metrics on a varied set of HDR content, for both perceptual quantization (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) encoding, luminance and chroma distortions, and on different color spaces of common use.

Abstract: Analysis of branching structures represents a very important task in fields such as medical diagnosis, road detection or biometrics. Detecting intersection landmarks Becomes crucial when capturing the structure of a branching pattern. We present a very simple geometrical model to describe intersections in branching structures based on two conditions: Bounded Tangency condition (BT) and Shortest Branch (SB) condition. The proposed model precisely sets a geometrical characterization of intersections and allows us to introduce a new unsupervised operator for intersection extraction. We propose an implementation that handles the consequences of digital domain operation that,unlike existing approaches, is not restricted to a particular scale and does not require the computation of the thinned pattern. The new proposal, as well as other existing approaches in the bibliography, are evaluated in a common framework for the first time. The performance analysis is based on two manually segmented image data sets: DRIVE retinal image database and COLON-VESSEL data set, a newly created data set of vascular content in colonoscopy frames. We have created an intersection landmark ground truth for each data set besides comparing our method in the only existing ground truth. Quantitative results confirm that we are able to outperform state-of-the-art performancelevels with the advantage that neither training nor parameter tuning is needed.