Abstract: The design and the validation of an automatic plaque characterization technique based on Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) usually requires a data ground-truth. The histological analysis of post-mortem coronary arteries is commonly assumed as the state-of-the-art process for the extraction of a reliable data-set of atherosclerotic plaques. Unfortunately, the amount of data provided by this technique is usually few, due to the difficulties in collecting post-mortem cases and phenomena of tissue spoiling during histological analysis. In this paper we tackle the process of fusing in-vivo and in-vitro IVUS data starting with the analysis of recently proposed approaches for the creation of an enhanced IVUS data-set; furthermore, we propose a new approach, named pLDS, based on semi-supervised learning with a data selection criterion. The enhanced data-set obtained by each one of the analyzed approaches is used to train a classifier for tissue characterization purposes. Finally, the discriminative power of each classifier is quantitatively assessed and compared by classifying a data-set of validated in-vitro IVUS data.

Abstract: General object recognition in mobile robots is of primary importance in order to enhance the representation of the environment that robots will use for their reasoning processes. Therefore, we contribute reduce this gap by evaluating the SIFT Object Recognition method in a challenging dataset, focusing on issues relevant to mobile robotics. Resistance of the method to the robotics working conditions was found, but it was limited mainly to well-textured objects.

Abstract: Document classification usually requires of structural features such as the physical layout to obtain good accuracy rates on complex documents. This paper introduces a descriptor of the layout and a distance measure based on the cyclic dynamic time warping which can be computed in O(n2). This descriptor is translation invariant and can be easily modified to be scale and rotation invariant. Experiments with this descriptor and its rotation invariant modification are performed on the Girona archives database and compared against another common layout distance, the minimum weight edge cover. The experiments show that these methods outperform the MWEC both in accuracy and speed, particularly on rotated documents.

Abstract: The use of graphology in recruitment processes has become a popular tool in many human resources companies. This paper presents a model that links features from handwritten images to a number of personality characteristics used to measure applicant aptitudes for the job in a particular hiring scenario. In particular we propose a model of measuring active personality and leadership of the writer. Graphological features that define such a profile are measured in terms of document and script attributes like layout configuration, letter size, shape, slant and skew angle of lines, etc. After the extraction, data is classified using a neural network. An experimental framework with real samples has been constructed to illustrate the performance of the approach.

Abstract: Reliable indexing of documents having seal instances can be achieved by recognizing seal information. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting and classifying such multi-oriented seals in these documents. First, Hough Transform based methods are applied to extract the seal regions in documents. Next, isolated text characters within these regions are detected. Rotation and size invariant features and a support vector machine based classifier have been used to recognize these detected text characters. Next, for each pair of character, we encode their relative spatial organization using their distance and angular position with respect to the centre of the seal, and enter this code into a hash table. Given an input seal, we recognize the individual text characters and compute the code for pair-wise character based on the relative spatial organization. The code obtained from the input seal helps to retrieve model hypothesis from the hash table. The seal model to which we get maximum hypothesis is selected for the recognition of the input seal. The methodology is tested to index seal in rotation and size invariant environment and we obtained encouraging results.

Abstract: A new handwritten text database, GERMANA, is presented to facilitate empirical comparison of different approaches to text line extraction and off-line handwriting recognition. GERMANA is the result of digitising and annotating a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891, in which most pages only contain nearly calligraphed text written on ruled sheets of well-separated lines. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available database for handwriting research, mostly written in Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases. Due to its sequential book structure, it is also well-suited for realistic assessment of interactive handwriting recognition systems. To provide baseline results for reference in future studies, empirical results are also reported, using standard techniques and tools for preprocessing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modelling, and language modelling.

Abstract: This paper addresses the novel problem of characterizing conversational group dynamics. It is well documented in social psychology that depending on the objectives a group, the dynamics are different. For example, a competitive meeting has a different objective from that of a collaborative meeting. We propose a method to characterize group dynamics based on the joint description of a group members' aggregated acoustical nonverbal behaviour to classify two meeting datasets (one being cooperative-type and the other being competitive-type). We use 4.5 hours of real behavioural multi-party data and show that our methodology can achieve a classification rate of upto 100%.