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.

Abstract: This article presents an adaptation of a factorization technique to tackle the photometric stereo problem. That is to recover the surface normals and reflectance of an object from a set of images obtained under different lighting conditions. The main contribution of the proposed approach is to consider pixels in shadow and saturated regions as missing data, in order to reduce their influence to the result. Concretely, an adapted Alternation technique is used to deal with missing data. Experimental results considering both synthetic and real images show the viability of the proposed factorization-based strategy. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 21, 115–119, 2011.

Abstract: Today, we witness the appearance of many lifelogging cameras that are able to capture the life of a person wearing the camera and which produce a large number of images everyday. Automatically characterizing the experience and extracting patterns of behavior of individuals from this huge collection of unlabeled and unstructured egocentric data present major challenges and require novel and efficient algorithmic solutions. The main goal of this work is to propose a new method to automatically assess day similarity from the lifelogging images of a person. We propose a technique to measure the similarity between images based on the Swain’s distance and generalize it to detect the similarity between daily visual data. To this purpose, we apply the dynamic time warping (DTW) combined with the Swain’s distance for final day similarity estimation. For validation, we apply our technique on the Egocentric Dataset of University of Barcelona (EDUB) of 4912 daily images acquired by four persons with preliminary encouraging results.

Abstract: Sketch-RGB cross-modality person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging task that aims to match a sketch portrait drawn by a professional artist with a full-body photo taken by surveillance equipment to deal with situations where the monitoring equipment is damaged at the accident scene. However, sketch portraits only provide highly abstract frontal body contour information and lack other important features such as color, pose, behavior, etc. The difference in saliency between the two modalities brings new challenges to cross-modality person ReID. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel dual-stream model for cross-modality person ReID, which is able to mine modality-invariant features to reduce the discrepancy between sketch and camera images end-to-end. More specifically, we propose a multi-spectrum image fusion (MSIF) method, which aims to exploit the image appearance changes brought by multiple spectrums and guide the network to mine modality-invariant commonalities during training. It only processes the spectrum of the input images without adding additional calculations and model complexity, which can be easily integrated into other models. Moreover, we introduce a joint structure via a generalized mean pooling (GMP) layer and a self-attention (SA) mechanism to balance background and texture information and obtain the regional features with a large amount of information in the image. To further shrink the intra-class distance, a weighted regularized triplet (WRT) loss is developed without introducing additional hyperparameters. The model was first evaluated on the PKU Sketch ReID dataset, and extensive experimental results show that the Rank-1/mAP accuracy of our method is 87.00%/91.12%, reaching the current state-of-the-art performance. To further validate the effectiveness of our approach in handling cross-modality person ReID, we conducted experiments on two commonly used IR-RGB datasets (SYSU-MM01 and RegDB). The obtained results show that our method achieves competitive performance. These results confirm the ability of our method to effectively process images from different modalities.

Abstract: Graph-based representations of patterns are very flexible and powerful, but they are not easily processed due to the lack of learning algorithms in the domain of graphs. Embedding a graph into a vector space solves this problem since graphs are turned into feature vectors and thus all the statistical learning machinery becomes available for graph input patterns. In this work we present a new way of embedding discrete attributed graphs into vector spaces using node and edge label frequencies. The methodology is experimentally tested on graph classification problems, using patterns of different nature, and it is shown to be competitive to state-of-the-art classification algorithms for graphs, while being computationally much more efficient.