Abstract: Deformable models have recently been accepted as a standard technique to segment different features in facial images. Despite they give a good approximation of the salient features in a facial image, the resulting shapes of the segmentation process seem somewhat artificial with respect to the natural feature shapes. In this paper we show that active contour models (in particular, rubber snakes) give more close and natural representation of the detected feature shape. Besides, using snakes for facial segmentation frees us from the problem of determination of the numerous weigths of deformable models. Another advantage of rubber snakes is their reduced computational cost. Our experiments using rubber snakes for segmentation of facial snapshots have shown a significant improvement compared to deformable models.

Abstract: Symbol spotting problem requires feature extraction strategies able to generalize from training samples and to localize the target object while discarding most part of the image. In the case of document analysis, symbol spotting techniques have to deal with a high variability of symbols' appearance. In this paper, we propose the Circular Blurred Shape Model descriptor. Feature extraction is performed capturing the spatial arrangement of significant object characteristics in a correlogram structure. Shape information from objects is shared among correlogram regions, being tolerant to the irregular deformations. Descriptors are learnt using a cascade of classifiers and Abadoost as the base classifier. Finally, symbol spotting is performed by means of a windowing strategy using the learnt cascade over plan and old musical score documents. Spotting and multi-class categorization results show better performance comparing with the state-of-the-art descriptors.

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.