Abstract: A novel specular highlights detection method in colonoscopy videos is presented. The method is based on a model of appearance dening specular
highlights as bright spots which are highly contrasted with respect to adjacent regions. Our approach proposes two stages; segmentation, and then classication
of bright spot regions. The former denes a set of candidate regions obtained through a region growing process with local maxima as initial region seeds. This process creates a tree structure which keeps track, at each growing iteration, of the region frontier contrast; nal regions provided depend on restrictions over contrast value. Non-specular regions are ltered through a classication stage performed by a linear SVM classier using model-based features from each region. We introduce a new validation database with more than 25; 000 regions along with their corresponding pixel-wise annotations. We perform a comparative study against other approaches. Results show that our method is superior to other approaches, with our segmented regions being
closer to actual specular regions in the image. Finally, we also present how our methodology can also be used to obtain an accurate prediction of polyp histology.

Abstract: Most approaches to human attribute and action recognition in still images are based on image representation in which multi-scale local features are pooled across scale into a single, scale-invariant encoding. Both in bag-of-words and the recently popular representations based on convolutional neural networks, local features are computed at multiple scales. However, these multi-scale convolutional features are pooled into a single scale-invariant representation. We argue that entirely scale-invariant image representations are sub-optimal and investigate approaches to scale coding within a bag of deep features framework. Our approach encodes multi-scale information explicitly during the image encoding stage. We propose two strategies to encode multi-scale information explicitly in the final image representation. We validate our two scale coding techniques on five datasets: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010, PASCAL VOC 2012, Stanford-40 and Human Attributes (HAT-27). On all datasets, the proposed scale coding approaches outperform both the scale-invariant method and the standard deep features of the same network. Further, combining our scale coding approaches with standard deep features leads to consistent improvement over the state of the art.

Abstract: With the ongoing progress in digitization, huge document collections and archives have become available to a broad audience. Scanned document images can be transmitted electronically and studied simultaneously throughout the world. While this is very beneficial, it is often impossible to perform automated searches on these document collections. Optical character recognition usually fails when it comes to handwritten or historic documents. In order to address the need for exploring document collections rapidly, researchers are working on word spotting. In query-by-example word spotting scenarios, the user selects an exemplary occurrence of the query word in a document image. The word spotting system then retrieves all regions in the collection that are visually similar to the given example of the query word. The best matching regions are presented to the user and no actual transcription is required.
An important property of a word spotting system is the computational speed with which queries can be executed. In our previous work, we presented a relatively slow but high-precision method. In the present work, we will extend this baseline system to an integrated two-stage approach. In a coarse-grained first stage, we will filter document images efficiently in order to identify regions that are likely to contain the query word. In the fine-grained second stage, these regions will be analyzed with our previously presented high-precision method. Finally, we will report recognition results and query times for the well-known George Washington
benchmark in our evaluation. We achieve state-of-the-art recognition results while the query times can be reduced to 50% in comparison with our baseline.

Abstract: We describe an equivalence of categories between the category of mixed Hodge structures and a category of equivariant vector bundles on a toric model of the complex projective plane which verify some semistability condition. We then apply this correspondence to define an invariant which generalizes the notion of R-split mixed Hodge structure and give calculations for the first group of cohomology of possibly non smooth or non-complete curves of genus 0 and 1. Finally, we describe some extension groups of mixed Hodge structures in terms of equivariant extensions of coherent sheaves. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Abstract: In this paper we study and compare several approaches to detect floods and evidence for passability of roads by conventional means in Twitter. We focus on tweets containing both visual information (a picture shared by the user) and metadata, a combination of text and related extra information intrinsic to the Twitter API. This work has been done in the context of the MediaEval 2018 Multimedia Satellite Task.