Wenjuan Gong, Jordi Gonzalez, Joao Manuel R. S. Taveres, & Xavier Roca. (2012). A New Image Dataset on Human Interactions. In 7th Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (Vol. 7378, pp. 204–209). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This article describes a new collection of still image dataset which are dedicated to interactions between people. Human action recognition from still images have been a hot topic recently, but most of them are actions performed by a single person, like running, walking, riding bikes, phoning and so on and there is no interactions between people in one image. The dataset collected in this paper are concentrating on human interaction between two people aiming to explore this new topic in the research area of action recognition from still images.
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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.
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Josep M. Gonfaus, Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Edge Classification using Photo-Geo metric features. In 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 1497–1500).
Abstract: Edges are caused by several imaging cues such as shadow, material and illumination transitions. Classification methods have been proposed which are solely based on photometric information, ignoring geometry to classify the physical nature of edges in images. In this paper, the aim is to present a novel strategy to handle both photometric and geometric information for edge classification. Photometric information is obtained through the use of quasi-invariants while geometric information is derived from the orientation and contrast of edges. Different combination frameworks are compared with a new principled approach that captures both information into the same descriptor. From large scale experiments on different datasets, it is shown that, in addition to photometric information, the geometry of edges is an important visual cue to distinguish between different edge types. It is concluded that by combining both cues the performance improves by more than 7% for shadows and highlights.
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Adela Barbulescu, Wenjuan Gong, Jordi Gonzalez, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Xavier Roca. (2012). 3D Human Pose Estimation Using 2D Body Part Detectors. In 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 2484–2487).
Abstract: Automatic 3D reconstruction of human poses from monocular images is a challenging and popular topic in the computer vision community, which provides a wide range of applications in multiple areas. Solutions for 3D pose estimation involve various learning approaches, such as support vector machines and Gaussian processes, but many encounter difficulties in cluttered scenarios and require additional input data, such as silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. We present a framework that is capable of estimating the 3D pose of a person from single images or monocular image sequences without requiring background information and which is robust to camera variations. The framework models the non-linearity present in human pose estimation as it benefits from flexible learning approaches, including a highly customizable 2D detector. Results on the HumanEva benchmark show how they perform and influence the quality of the 3D pose estimates.
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Ariel Amato. (2012). Environment-Independent Moving Cast Shadow Suppression in Video Surveillance (Mikhail Mozerov, & Jordi Gonzalez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: This thesis is devoted to moving shadows detection and suppression. Shadows could be defined as the parts of the scene that are not directly illuminated by a light source due to obstructing object or objects. Often, moving shadows in images sequences are undesirable since they could cause degradation of the expected results during processing of images for object detection, segmentation, scene surveillance or similar purposes. In this thesis first moving shadow detection methods are exhaustively overviewed. Beside the mentioned methods from literature and to compensate their limitations a new moving shadow detection method is proposed. It requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to assumptions about specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. In the thesis how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy is shown, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared with the most sophisticated state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.
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Noha Elfiky. (2012). Compact, Adaptive and Discriminative Spatial Pyramids for Improved Object and Scene Classification (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The release of challenging datasets with a vast number of images, requires the development of efficient image representations and algorithms which are able to manipulate these large-scale datasets efficiently. Nowadays the Bag-of-Words (BoW) is the most successful approach in the context of object and scene classification tasks. However, its main drawback is the absence of the important spatial information. Spatial pyramids (SP) have been successfully applied to incorporate spatial information into BoW-based image representation. Observing the remarkable performance of spatial pyramids, their growing number of applications to a broad range of vision problems, and finally its geometry inclusion, a question can be asked what are the limits of spatial pyramids. Within the SP framework, the optimal way for obtaining an image spatial representation, which is able to cope with it’s most foremost shortcomings, concretely, it’s high dimensionality and the rigidity of the resulting image representation, still remains an active research domain. In summary, the main concern of this thesis is to search for the limits of spatial pyramids and try to figure out solutions for them.
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Marco Pedersoli. (2012). Hierarchical Multiresolution Models for fast Object Detection (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The ability to automatically detect and recognize objects in unconstrained images is becoming more and more critical: from security systems and autonomous robots, to smart phones and augmented reality, intelligent devices need to understand the meaning of images as a composition of semantic objects. This Thesis tackles the problem of fast object detection based on template models. Detection consists of searching for an object in an image by evaluating the similarity between a template model and an image region at each possible location and scale. In this work, we show that using a template model representation based on a multiple resolution hierarchy is an optimal choice that can lead to excellent detection accuracy and fast computation. We implement two different approaches that make use of a hierarchy of multiresolution models: a multiresolution cascade and a coarse-to-fine search. Also, we extend the coarse-to-fine search by introducing a deformable part-based model that achieves state-of-the-art results together with a very reduced computational cost. Finally, we specialize our approach to the challenging task of pedestrian detection from moving vehicles and show that the overall quality of the system outperforms previous works in terms of speed and accuracy.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty. (2012). Model free approach to human action recognition (Jordi Gonzalez, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Automatic understanding of human activity and action is very important and challenging research area of Computer Vision with wide applications in video surveillance, motion analysis, virtual reality interfaces, video indexing, content based video retrieval, HCI and health care. This thesis presents a series of techniques to solve the problem of human action recognition in video. First approach towards this goal is based on a probabilistic optimization model of body parts using Hidden Markov Model. This strong model based approach is able to distinguish between similar actions by only considering the body parts having major contributions to the actions. In next approach, we apply a weak model based human detector and actions are represented by Bag-of-key poses model to capture the human pose changes during the actions. To tackle the problem of human action recognition in complex scenes, a selective spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) detector is proposed by using a mechanism similar to that of the non-classical receptive field inhibition that is exhibited by most oriented selective neuron in the primary visual cortex. An extension of the selective STIP detector is applied to multi-view action recognition system by introducing a novel 4D STIPs (3D space + time). Finally, we use our STIP detector on large scale continuous visual event recognition problem and propose a novel generalized max-margin Hough transformation framework for activity detection
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Josep M. Gonfaus. (2012). Towards Deep Image Understanding: From pixels to semantics (Jordi Gonzalez, & Theo Gevers, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Understanding the content of the images is one of the greatest challenges of computer vision. Recognition of objects appearing in images, identifying and interpreting their actions are the main purposes of Image Understanding. This thesis seeks to identify what is present in a picture by categorizing and locating all the objects in the scene.
Images are composed by pixels, and one possibility consists of assigning to each pixel an object category, which is commonly known as semantic segmentation. By incorporating information as a contextual cue, we are able to resolve the ambiguity within categories at the pixel-level. We propose three levels of scale in order to resolve such ambiguity.
Another possibility to represent the objects is the object detection task. In this case, the aim is to recognize and localize the whole object by accurately placing a bounding box around it. We present two new approaches. The first one is focused on improving the object representation of deformable part models with the concept of factorized appearances. The second approach addresses the issue of reducing the computational cost for multi-class recognition. The results given have been validated on several commonly used datasets, reaching international recognition and state-of-the-art within the field
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, F. Javier Sanchez, Frederic Perez, Marius G. Linguraru, et al. (2012). Computation and Evaluation of Medial Surfaces for Shape Representation of Abdominal Organs. In H. Yoshida et al (Ed.), Workshop on Computational and Clinical Applications in Abdominal Imaging (Vol. 7029, 223–230). LNCS. Berlin: Springer Link.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D
objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial
manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our
method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs,
exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
Keywords: medial manifolds, abdomen.
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Antonio Lopez, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2012). Multilocal Creaseness Measure. IJ - The Insight Journal.
Abstract: This document describes the implementation using the Insight Toolkit of an algorithm for detecting creases (ridges and valleys) in N-dimensional images, based on the Local Structure Tensor of the image. In addition to the filter used to calculate the creaseness image, a filter for the computation of the structure tensor is also included in this submission.
Keywords: Ridges, Valley, Creaseness, Structure Tensor, Skeleton,
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Patricia Marquez, Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2012). A Complete Confidence Framework for Optical Flow. In Rita Cucchiara V. M. Andrea Fusiello (Ed.), 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations (Vol. 7584, pp. 124–133). LNCS. Florence, Italy, October 7-13, 2012: Springer-Verlag.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
Keywords: Optical flow, confidence measures, sparsification plots, error prediction plots
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, & Debora Gil. (2012). The Benefits of IVUS Dynamics for Retrieving Stable Models of Arteries. In Yasuhiro Honda (Ed.), Intravascular Ultrasound (pp. 185–206). Intech.
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Francesc Carreras, Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Sandra Pujadas, Chi ho Lion, R.Suarez-Arias, et al. (2012). Left ventricular torsion and longitudinal shortening: two fundamental components of myocardial mechanics assessed by tagged cine-MRI in normal subjects. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 28(2), 273–284.
Abstract: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (Cardiac MRI) has become a gold standard diagnostic technique for the assessment of cardiac mechanics, allowing the non-invasive calculation of left ventric- ular long axis longitudinal shortening (LVLS) and absolute myocardial torsion (AMT) between basal and apical left ventricular slices, a movement directly related to the helicoidal anatomic disposition of the myocardial fibers. The aim of this study is to determine AMT and LVLS behaviour and normal values from a group of healthy subjects. A group of 21 healthy volunteers (15 males) (age: 23–55 y.o., mean:30.7 ± 7.5) were prospectively included in an obser- vational study by Cardiac MRI. Left ventricular rotation (degrees) was calculated by custom-made software (Harmonic Phase Flow) in consecutive LV short axis planes tagged cine-MRI sequences. AMT was determined from the difference between basal and apical planes LV rotations. LVLS (%) was determined from the LV longitudinal and horizontal axis cine-MRI images. All the 21 cases studied were interpretable, although in three cases the value of the LV apical rotation could not be determined. The mean rotation of the basal and apical planes at end-systole were -3.71° ± 0.84° and 6.73° ± 1.69° (n:18) respectively, resulting in a LV mean AMT of 10.48° ± 1.63° (n:18). End-systolic mean LVLS was 19.07 ± 2.71%. Cardiac MRI allows for the calculation of AMT and LVLS, fundamental functional components of the ventricular twist mechanics conditioned, in turn, by the anatomical helical layout of the myocardial fibers. These values provide complementary information about systolic ventricular function in relation to the traditional parameters used in daily practice.
Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); Tagging MRI; Cardiac mechanics; Ventricular torsion
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David Roche, Debora Gil, & Jesus Giraldo. (2012). Assessing agonist efficacy in an uncertain Em world. In A. Christopoulus and M. Bouvier (Ed.), 40th Keystone Symposia on mollecular and celular biology (79). Keystone Symposia.
Abstract: The operational model of agonism has been widely used for the analysis of agonist action since its formulation in 1983. The model includes the Em parameter, which is defined as the maximum response of the system. The methods for Em estimation provide Em values not significantly higher than the maximum responses achieved by full agonists. However, it has been found that that some classes of compounds as, for instance, superagonists and positive allosteric modulators can increase the full agonist maximum response, implying upper limits for Em and thereby posing doubts on the validity of Em estimates. Because of the correlation between Em and operational efficacy, τ, wrong Em estimates will yield wrong τ estimates.
In this presentation, the operational model of agonism and various methods for the simulation of allosteric modulation will be analyzed. Alternatives for curve fitting will be presented and discussed.
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