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Author Jaime Moreno edit  url
isbn  openurl
  Title Perceptual Criteria on Image Compresions Type Book Whole
  Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Nowadays, digital images are used in many areas in everyday life, but they tend to be big. This increases amount of information leads us to the problem of image data storage. For example, it is common to have a representation a color pixel as a 24-bit number, where the channels red, green, and blue employ 8 bits each. In consequence, this kind of color pixel can specify one of 224 ¼ 16:78 million colors. Therefore, an image at a resolution of 512 £ 512 that allocates 24 bits per pixel, occupies 786,432 bytes. That is why image compression is important. An important feature of image compression is that it can be lossy or lossless. A compressed image is acceptable provided these losses of image information are not perceived by the eye. It is possible to assume that a portion of this information is redundant. Lossless Image Compression is defined as to mathematically decode the same image which was encoded. In Lossy Image Compression needs to identify two features inside the image: the redundancy and the irrelevancy of information. Thus, lossy compression modifies the image data in such a way when they are encoded and decoded, the recovered image is similar enough to the original one. How similar is the recovered image in comparison to the original image is defined prior to the compression process, and it depends on the implementation to be performed. In lossy compression, current image compression schemes remove information considered irrelevant by using mathematical criteria. One of the problems of these schemes is that although the numerical quality of the compressed image is low, it shows a high visual image quality, e.g. it does not show a lot of visible artifacts. It is because these mathematical criteria, used to remove information, do not take into account if the viewed information is perceived by the Human Visual System. Therefore, the aim of an image compression scheme designed to obtain images that do not show artifacts although their numerical quality can be low, is to eliminate the information that is not visible by the Human Visual System. Hence, this Ph.D. thesis proposes to exploit the visual redundancy existing in an image by reducing those features that can be unperceivable for the Human Visual System. First, we define an image quality assessment, which is highly correlated with the psychophysical experiments performed by human observers. The proposed CwPSNR metrics weights the well-known PSNR by using a particular perceptual low level model of the Human Visual System, e.g. the Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model (CIWaM). Second, we propose an image compression algorithm (called Hi-SET), which exploits the high correlation and self-similarity of pixels in a given area or neighborhood by means of a fractal function. Hi-SET possesses the main features that modern image compressors have, that is, it is an embedded coder, which allows a progressive transmission. Third, we propose a perceptual quantizer (½SQ), which is a modification of the uniform scalar quantizer. The ½SQ is applied to a pixel set in a certain Wavelet sub-band, that is, a global quantization. Unlike this, the proposed modification allows to perform a local pixel-by-pixel forward and inverse quantization, introducing into this process a perceptual distortion which depends on the surround spatial information of the pixel. Combining ½SQ method with the Hi-SET image compressor, we define a perceptual image compressor, called ©SET. Finally, a coding method for Region of Interest areas is presented, ½GBbBShift, which perceptually weights pixels into these areas and maintains only the more important perceivable features in the rest of the image. Results presented in this report show that CwPSNR is the best-ranked image quality method when it is applied to the most common image compression distortions such as JPEG and JPEG2000. CwPSNR shows the best correlation with the judgement of human observers, which is based on the results of psychophysical experiments obtained for relevant image quality databases such as TID2008, LIVE, CSIQ and IVC. Furthermore, Hi-SET coder obtains better results both for compression ratios and perceptual image quality than the JPEG2000 coder and other coders that use a Hilbert Fractal for image compression. Hence, when the proposed perceptual quantization is introduced to Hi-SET coder, our compressor improves its numerical and perceptual e±ciency. When ½GBbBShift method applied to Hi-SET is compared against MaxShift method applied to the JPEG2000 standard and Hi-SET, the images coded by our ROI method get the best results when the overall image quality is estimated. Both the proposed perceptual quantization and the ½GBbBShift method are generalized algorithms that can be applied to other Wavelet based image compression algorithms such as JPEG2000, SPIHT or SPECK.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-938351-3-2 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mor2011 Serial 1786  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Eduard Vazquez edit  openurl
  Title Unsupervised image segmentation based on material reflectance description and saliency Type Book Whole
  Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Image segmentations aims to partition an image into a set of non-overlapped regions, called segments. Despite the simplicity of the definition, image segmentation raises as a very complex problem in all its stages. The definition of segment is still unclear. When asking to a human to perform a segmentation, this person segments at different levels of abstraction. Some segments might be a single, well-defined texture whereas some others correspond with an object in the scene which might including multiple textures and colors. For this reason, segmentation is divided in bottom-up segmentation and top-down segmentation. Bottom up-segmentation is problem independent, that is, focused on general properties of the images such as textures or illumination. Top-down segmentation is a problem-dependent approach which looks for specific entities in the scene, such as known objects. This work is focused on bottom-up segmentation. Beginning from the analysis of the lacks of current methods, we propose an approach called RAD. Our approach overcomes the main shortcomings of those methods which use the physics of the light to perform the segmentation. RAD is a topological approach which describes a single-material reflectance. Afterwards, we cope with one of the main problems in image segmentation: non supervised adaptability to image content. To yield a non-supervised method, we use a model of saliency yet presented in this thesis. It computes the saliency of the chromatic transitions of an image by means of a statistical analysis of the images derivatives. This method of saliency is used to build our final approach of segmentation: spRAD. This method is a non-supervised segmentation approach. Our saliency approach has been validated with a psychophysical experiment as well as computationally, overcoming a state-of-the-art saliency method. spRAD also outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation techniques as results obtained with a widely-used segmentation dataset show  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Ramon Baldrich  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Vaz2011b Serial 1835  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Fahad Shahbaz Khan edit  openurl
  Title Coloring bag-of-words based image representations Type Book Whole
  Year 2011 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Put succinctly, the bag-of-words based image representation is the most successful approach for object and scene recognition. Within the bag-of-words framework the optimal fusion of multiple cues, such as shape, texture and color, still remains an active research domain. There exist two main approaches to combine color and shape information within the bag-of-words framework. The first approach called, early fusion, fuses color and shape at the feature level as a result of which a joint colorshape vocabulary is produced. The second approach, called late fusion, concatenates histogram representation of both color and shape, obtained independently. In the first part of this thesis, we analyze the theoretical implications of both early and late feature fusion. We demonstrate that both these approaches are suboptimal for a subset of object categories. Consequently, we propose a novel method for recognizing object categories when using multiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom-up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, the color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. Shape features are given more weight in regions with higher attention and vice versa. The approach is tested on several benchmark object recognition data sets and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate the problem of obtaining compact spatial pyramid representations for object and scene recognition. Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback of spatial pyramids is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. We present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. The approach reduces the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation upto an order of magnitude without any significant reduction in accuracy. Moreover, we also investigate the optimal combination of multiple features such as color and shape within the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, we describe a novel technique to build discriminative visual words from multiple cues learned independently from training images. To this end, we use an information theoretic vocabulary compression technique to find discriminative combinations of visual cues and the resulting visual vocabulary is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. The approach is tested on standard object recognition data sets. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Kha2011 Serial 1838  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Shida Beigpour edit  openurl
  Title Illumination and object reflectance modeling Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.  
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Bei2013 Serial 2267  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Susana Alvarez edit  openurl
  Title Revisión de la teoría de los Textons Enfoque computacional en color Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract El color y la textura son dos estímulos visuales importantes para la interpretación de las imágenes. La definición de descriptores computacionales que combinan estas dos características es aún un problema abierto. La dificultad se deriva esencialmente de la propia naturaleza de ambas, mientras que la textura es una propiedad de una región, el color es una propiedad de un punto.

Hasta ahora se han utilizado tres los tipos de aproximaciones para la combinación, (a) se describe la textura directamente en cada uno de los canales color, (b) se describen textura y color por separado y se combinan al final, y (c) la combinación se realiza con técnicas de aprendizaje automático. Considerando que este problema se resuelve en el sistema visual humano en niveles muy tempranos, en esta tesis se propone estudiar el problema a partir de la implementación directa de una teoría perceptual, la teoría de los textons, y explorar así su extensión a color.

Puesto que la teoría de los textons se basa en la descripción de la textura a partir de las densidades de los atributos locales, esto se adapta perfectamente al marco de trabajo de los descriptores holísticos (bag-of-words). Se han estudiado diversos descriptores basados en diferentes espacios de textons, y diferentes representaciones de las imágenes. Asimismo se ha estudiado la viabilidad de estos descriptores en una representación conceptual de nivel intermedio.

Los descriptores propuestos han demostrado ser muy eficientes en aplicaciones de recuperación y clasificación de imágenes, presentando ventajas en la generación de vocabularios. Los vocabularios se obtienen cuantificando directamente espacios de baja dimensión y la perceptualidad de estos espacios permite asociar semántica de bajo nivel a las palabras visuales. El estudio de los resultados permite concluir que si bien la aproximación holística es muy eficiente, la introducción de co-ocurrencia espacial de las propiedades de forma y color de los blobs de la imagen es un elemento clave para su combinación, hecho que no contradice las evidencias en percepción
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;Xavier Otazu  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Alv2012b Serial 2216  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Naila Murray edit  openurl
  Title Predicting Saliency and Aesthetics in Images: A Bottom-up Perspective Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.

In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.

Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.

As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Xavier Otazu;Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Mur2012 Serial 2212  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jordi Roca edit  openurl
  Title Constancy and inconstancy in categorical colour perception Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract To recognise objects is perhaps the most important task an autonomous system, either biological or artificial needs to perform. In the context of human vision, this is partly achieved by recognizing the colour of surfaces despite changes in the wavelength distribution of the illumination, a property called colour constancy. Correct surface colour recognition may be adequately accomplished by colour category matching without the need to match colours precisely, therefore categorical colour constancy is likely to play an important role for object identification to be successful. The main aim of this work is to study the relationship between colour constancy and categorical colour perception. Previous studies of colour constancy have shown the influence of factors such the spatio-chromatic properties of the background, individual observer's performance, semantics, etc. However there is very little systematic study of these influences. To this end, we developed a new approach to colour constancy which includes both individual observers' categorical perception, the categorical structure of the background, and their interrelations resulting in a more comprehensive characterization of the phenomenon. In our study, we first developed a new method to analyse the categorical structure of 3D colour space, which allowed us to characterize individual categorical colour perception as well as quantify inter-individual variations in terms of shape and centroid location of 3D categorical regions. Second, we developed a new colour constancy paradigm, termed chromatic setting, which allows measuring the precise location of nine categorically-relevant points in colour space under immersive illumination. Additionally, we derived from these measurements a new colour constancy index which takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift, memory effects and the interrelations among colours and a model of colour naming tuned to each observer/adaptation state. Our results lead to the following conclusions: (1) There exists large inter-individual variations in the categorical structure of colour space, and thus colour naming ability varies significantly but this is not well predicted by low-level chromatic discrimination ability; (2) Analysis of the average colour naming space suggested the need for an additional three basic colour terms (turquoise, lilac and lime) for optimal colour communication; (3) Chromatic setting improved the precision of more complex linear colour constancy models and suggested that mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain colour constancy; (4) The categorical structure of colour space is broadly stable under illuminant changes for categorically balanced backgrounds; (5) Categorical inconstancy exists for categorically unbalanced backgrounds thus indicating that categorical information perceived in the initial stages of adaptation may constrain further categorical perception.  
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;C. Alejandro Parraga  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Roc2012 Serial 2893  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Ivet Rafegas edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Color in Visual Recognition: from flat to deep representations and some biological parallelisms Type Book Whole
  Year 2017 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.

Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.

Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.
 
  Address November 2017  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-7-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Raf2017 Serial 3100  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Hassan Ahmed Sial edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Estimating Light Effects from a Single Image: Deep Architectures and Ground-Truth Generation Type Book Whole
  Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract In this thesis, we explore how to estimate the effects of the light interacting with the scene objects from a single image. To achieve this goal, we focus on recovering intrinsic components like reflectance, shading, or light properties such as color and position using deep architectures. The success of these approaches relies on training on large and diversified image datasets. Therefore, we present several contributions on this such as: (a) a data-augmentation technique; (b) a ground-truth for an existing multi-illuminant dataset; (c) a family of synthetic datasets, SID for Surreal Intrinsic Datasets, with diversified backgrounds and coherent light conditions; and (d) a practical pipeline to create hybrid ground-truths to overcome the complexity of acquiring realistic light conditions in a massive way. In parallel with the creation of datasets, we trained different flexible encoder-decoder deep architectures incorporating physical constraints from the image formation models.

In the last part of the thesis, we apply all the previous experience to two different problems. Firstly, we create a large hybrid Doc3DShade dataset with real shading and synthetic reflectance under complex illumination conditions, that is used to train a two-stage architecture that improves the character recognition task in complex lighting conditions of unwrapped documents. Secondly, we tackle the problem of single image scene relighting by extending both, the SID dataset to present stronger shading and shadows effects, and the deep architectures to use intrinsic components to estimate new relit images.
 
  Address September 2021  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher IMPRIMA Place of Publication Editor Maria Vanrell;Ramon Baldrich  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-8-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC; Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Sia2021 Serial 3607  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Marc Serra edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Modeling, estimation and evaluation of intrinsic images considering color information Type Book Whole
  Year 2015 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Image values are the result of a combination of visual information coming from multiple sources. Recovering information from the multiple factors thatproduced an image seems a hard and ill-posed problem. However, it is important to observe that humans develop the ability to interpret images and recognize and isolate specific physical properties of the scene.

Images describing a single physical characteristic of an scene are called intrinsic images. These images would benefit most computer vision tasks which are often affected by the multiple complex effects that are usually found in natural images (e.g. cast shadows, specularities, interreflections...).

In this thesis we analyze the problem of intrinsic image estimation from different perspectives, including the theoretical formulation of the problem, the visual cues that can be used to estimate the intrinsic components and the evaluation mechanisms of the problem.
 
  Address September 2015  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Robert Benavente;Olivier Penacchio  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-943427-4-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) CIC; 600.074 Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Ser2015 Serial 2688  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Marçal Rusiñol edit  openurl
  Title Geometric and Structural-based Symbol Spotting. Application to Focused Retrieval in Graphic Document Collections Type Book Whole
  Year 2009 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  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.
 
  Address Barcelona (Spain)  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Josep Llados  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) DAG Approved no  
  Call Number DAG @ dag @ Rus2009 Serial 1264  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Joan Mas edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title A Syntactic Pattern Recognition Approach based on a Distribution Tolerant Adjacency Grammar and a Spatial Indexed Parser. Application to Sketched Document Recognition Type Book Whole
  Year 2010 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Sketch recognition is a discipline which has gained an increasing interest in the last
20 years. This is due to the appearance of new devices such as PDA, Tablet PC’s
or digital pen & paper protocols. From the wide range of sketched documents we
focus on those that represent structured documents such as: architectural floor-plans,
engineering drawing, UML diagrams, etc. To recognize and understand these kinds
of documents, first we have to recognize the different compounding symbols and then
we have to identify the relations between these elements. From the way that a sketch
is captured, there are two categories: on-line and off-line. On-line input modes refer
to draw directly on a PDA or a Tablet PC’s while off-line input modes refer to scan
a previously drawn sketch.
This thesis is an overlapping of three different areas on Computer Science: Pattern
Recognition, Document Analysis and Human-Computer Interaction. The aim of this
thesis is to interpret sketched documents independently on whether they are captured
on-line or off-line. For this reason, the proposed approach should contain the following
features. First, as we are working with sketches the elements present in our input
contain distortions. Second, as we would work in on-line or off-line input modes, the
order in the input of the primitives is indifferent. Finally, the proposed method should
be applied in real scenarios, its response time must be slow.
To interpret a sketched document we propose a syntactic approach. A syntactic
approach is composed of two correlated components: a grammar and a parser. The
grammar allows describing the different elements on the document as well as their
relations. The parser, given a document checks whether it belongs to the language
generated by the grammar or not. Thus, the grammar should be able to cope with
the distortions appearing on the instances of the elements. Moreover, it would be
necessary to define a symbol independently of the order of their primitives. Concerning to the parser when analyzing 2D sentences, it does not assume an order in the
primitives. Then, at each new primitive in the input, the parser searches among the
previous analyzed symbols candidates to produce a valid reduction.
Taking into account these features, we have proposed a grammar based on Adjacency Grammars. This kind of grammars defines their productions as a multiset
of symbols rather than a list. This allows describing a symbol without an order in
their components. To cope with distortion we have proposed a distortion model.
This distortion model is an attributed estimated over the constraints of the grammar and passed through the productions. This measure gives an idea on how far is the
symbol from its ideal model. In addition to the distortion on the constraints other
distortions appear when working with sketches. These distortions are: overtracing,
overlapping, gaps or spurious strokes. Some grammatical productions have been defined to cope with these errors. Concerning the recognition, we have proposed an
incremental parser with an indexation mechanism. Incremental parsers analyze the
input symbol by symbol given a response to the user when a primitive is analyzed.
This makes incremental parser suitable to work in on-line as well as off-line input
modes. The parser has been adapted with an indexation mechanism based on a spatial division. This indexation mechanism allows setting the primitives in the space
and reducing the search to a neighbourhood.
A third contribution is a grammatical inference algorithm. This method given a
set of symbols captures the production describing it. In the field of formal languages,
different approaches has been proposed but in the graphical domain not so much work
is done in this field. The proposed method is able to capture the production from
a set of symbol although they are drawn in different order. A matching step based
on the Haussdorff distance and the Hungarian method has been proposed to match
the primitives of the different symbols. In addition the proposed approach is able to
capture the variability in the parameters of the constraints.
From the experimental results, we may conclude that we have proposed a robust
approach to describe and recognize sketches. Moreover, the addition of new symbols
to the alphabet is not restricted to an expert. Finally, the proposed approach has
been used in two real scenarios obtaining a good performance.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Gemma Sanchez;Josep Llados  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-937261-4-0 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) DAG Approved no  
  Call Number DAG @ dag @ Mas2010 Serial 1334  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Albert Gordo edit  openurl
  Title Document Image Representation, Classification and Retrieval in Large-Scale Domains Type Book Whole
  Year 2013 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Despite the “paperless office” ideal that started in the decade of the seventies, businesses still strive against an increasing amount of paper documentation. Companies still receive huge amounts of paper documentation that need to be analyzed and processed, mostly in a manual way. A solution for this task consists in, first, automatically scanning the incoming documents. Then, document images can be analyzed and information can be extracted from the data. Documents can also be automatically dispatched to the appropriate workflows, used to retrieve similar documents in the dataset to transfer information, etc.

Due to the nature of this “digital mailroom”, we need document representation methods to be general, i.e., able to cope with very different types of documents. We need the methods to be sound, i.e., able to cope with unexpected types of documents, noise, etc. And, we need to methods to be scalable, i.e., able to cope with thousands or millions of documents that need to be processed, stored, and consulted. Unfortunately, current techniques of document representation, classification and retrieval are not apt for this digital mailroom framework, since they do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.

Through this thesis we focus on the problem of document representation aimed at classification and retrieval tasks under this digital mailroom framework. We first propose a novel document representation based on runlength histograms, and extend it to cope with more complex documents such as multiple-page documents, or documents that contain more sources of information such as extracted OCR text. Then we focus on the scalability requirements and propose a novel binarization method which we dubbed PCAE, as well as two general asymmetric distances between binary embeddings that can significantly improve the retrieval results at a minimal extra computational cost. Finally, we note the importance of supervised learning when performing large-scale retrieval, and study several approaches that can significantly boost the results at no extra cost at query time.
 
  Address Barcelona  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Ernest Valveny;Florent Perronnin  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gor2013 Serial 2277  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Jaume Gibert edit  openurl
  Title Vector Space Embedding of Graphs via Statistics of Labelling Information Type Book Whole
  Year 2012 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Pattern recognition is the task that aims at distinguishing objects among different classes. When such a task wants to be solved in an automatic way a crucial step is how to formally represent such patterns to the computer. Based on the different representational formalisms, we may distinguish between statistical and structural pattern recognition. The former describes objects as a set of measurements arranged in the form of what is called a feature vector. The latter assumes that relations between parts of the underlying objects need to be explicitly represented and thus it uses relational structures such as graphs for encoding their inherent information. Vector spaces are a very flexible mathematical structure that has allowed to come up with several efficient ways for the analysis of patterns under the form of feature vectors. Nevertheless, such a representation cannot explicitly cope with binary relations between parts of the objects and it is restricted to measure the exact same number of features for each pattern under study regardless of their complexity. Graph-based representations present the contrary situation. They can easily adapt to the inherent complexity of the patterns but introduce a problem of high computational complexity, hindering the design of efficient tools to process and analyse patterns.

Solving this paradox is the main goal of this thesis. The ideal situation for solving pattern recognition problems would be to represent the patterns using relational structures such as graphs, and to be able to use the wealthy repository of data processing tools from the statistical pattern recognition domain. An elegant solution to this problem is to transform the graph domain into a vector domain where any processing algorithm can be applied. In other words, by mapping each graph to a point in a vector space we automatically get access to the rich set of algorithms from the statistical domain to be applied in the graph domain. Such methodology is called graph embedding.

In this thesis we propose to associate feature vectors to graphs in a simple and very efficient way by just putting attention on the labelling information that graphs store. In particular, we count frequencies of node labels and of edges between labels. Although their locality, these features are able to robustly represent structurally global properties of graphs, when considered together in the form of a vector. We initially deal with the case of discrete attributed graphs, where features are easy to compute. The continuous case is tackled as a natural generalization of the discrete one, where rather than counting node and edge labelling instances, we count statistics of some representatives of them. We encounter how the proposed vectorial representations of graphs suffer from high dimensionality and correlation among components and we face these problems by feature selection algorithms. We also explore how the diversity of different embedding representations can be exploited in order to boost the performance of base classifiers in a multiple classifier systems framework. An extensive experimental evaluation finally shows how the methodology we propose can be efficiently computed and compete with other graph matching and embedding methodologies.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Ernest Valveny  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Gib2012 Serial 2204  
Permanent link to this record
 

 
Author Francisco Cruz edit  isbn
openurl 
  Title Probabilistic Graphical Models for Document Analysis Type Book Whole
  Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
  Keywords  
  Abstract Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.

Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.

In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.
 
  Address  
  Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis  
  Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Oriol Ramos Terrades  
  Language Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-2-5 Medium  
  Area Expedition Conference  
  Notes (up) DAG Approved no  
  Call Number Admin @ si @ Cru2016 Serial 2861  
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