Abstract: Video synchronization and alignment is a rather recent topic in computer vision. It usually deals with the problem of aligning sequences recorded simultaneously by static, jointly- or independently-moving cameras. In this paper, we investigate the more difficult problem of matching videos captured at different times from independently-moving cameras, whose trajectories are approximately coincident or parallel. To this end, we propose a novel method that pixel-wise aligns videos and allows thus to automatically highlight their differences. This primarily aims at visual surveillance but the method can be adopted as is by other related video applications, like object transfer (augmented reality) or high dynamic range video. We build upon a slice matching scheme to first synchronize the sequences, while we develop a spatio-temporal alignment scheme to spatially register corresponding frames and refine the temporal mapping. We investigate the performance of the proposed method on videos recorded from vehicles driven along different types of roads and compare with related previous works.

Abstract: This work presents a region descriptor based on the integration of the information that the depth of valleys image provides. The depth of valleys image is based on the presence of intensity valleys around polyps due to the image acquisition. Our proposed method consists of defining, for each point, a series of radial sectors around it and then accumulates the maxima of the depth of valleys image only if the orientation of the intensity valley coincides with the orientation of the sector above. We apply our descriptor to a prior segmentation of the images and we present promising results on polyp detection, outperforming other approaches that also integrate depth of valleys information.

Abstract: We present a method for the automatic detection of key frames in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) sequences. The key frames are markers delimiting morphological changes along the vessel. The aim of defining key frames is two-fold: (1) they allow to summarize the content of the pullback into few representative frames; (2) they represent the basis for the automatic detection of clinical events in IVUS. The proposed approach achieved a compression ratio of 0.016 with respect to the original sequence and an average inter-frame distance of 61.76 frame, minimizing the number of missed clinical events.

Abstract: Graphical symbol recognition and spotting recently have become an important research activity. In this work we present a descriptor for symbols, especially for line drawings. The descriptor is based on the graph representation of graphical objects. We construct graphs from the vectorized information of the binarized images, where the critical points detected by the vectorization algorithm are considered as nodes and the lines joining them are considered as edges. Graph paths between two nodes in a graph are the finite sequences of nodes following the order from the starting to the final node. The occurrences of different graph paths in a given graph is an important feature, as they capture the geometrical and structural attributes of a graph. So the graph representing a symbol can efficiently be represent by the occurrences of its different paths. Their occurrences in a symbol can be obtained in terms of a histogram counting the number of some fixed prototype paths, we call the histogram as the Bag-of-GraphPaths (BOGP). These BOGP histograms are used as a descriptor to measure the distance among the symbols in vector space. We use the descriptor for three applications, they are: (1) classification of the graphical symbols, (2) spotting of the architectural symbols on floorplans, (3) classification of the historical handwritten words.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel non-linear discriminative analysis technique for manifold learning. The proposed approach is a discriminant version of Laplacian Eigenmaps which takes into account the class label information in order to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction. By following the large margin concept, the graph Laplacian is split in two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques. The experimental results confirm that our method outperforms, in general, the existing ones. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.

Abstract: In volume visualization, the voxel visibitity and materials are carried out through an interactive editing of Transfer Function. In this paper, we present a two-level GPU-based labeling method that computes in times of rendering a set of labeled structures using the Adaboost machine learning classifier. In a pre-processing step, Adaboost trains a binary classifier from a pre-labeled dataset and, in each sample, takes into account a set of features. This binary classifier is a weighted combination of weak classifiers, which can be expressed as simple decision functions estimated on a single feature values. Then, at the testing stage, each weak classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabeled samples. We propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allow a GPU-based parallelizated testing stage embedded into the visualization pipeline. The empirical results confirm the OpenCL-based classification of biomedical datasets as a tough problem where an opportunity for further research emerges.

Abstract: This paper presents a patient-sensitive simulation strategy capable of using the most efficient way the high-performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players: Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists and Cardiologists, each one mastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme but focusing on the CMS side presents a massively parallel implementation of computational electrophysiology applied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem: equations, numerical issues, the algorithm and parallel implementation. The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains up to very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems but also for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly well suited for solving this highly transient problems, with very short time-scale.

Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.