Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach towards the retrieval of words from graphical document images. In graphical documents, due to presence of multi-oriented characters in non-structured layout, word indexing is a challenging task. The proposed approach uses recognition results of individual components to form character pairs with the neighboring components. An indexing scheme is designed to store the spatial description of components and to access them efficiently. Given a query text word (ascii/unicode format), the character pairs present in it are searched in the document. Next the retrieved character pairs are linked sequentially to form character string. Dynamic programming is applied to find different instances of query words. A string edit distance is used here to match the query word as the objective function. Recognition of multi-scale and multi-oriented character component is done using Support Vector Machine classifier. To consider multi-oriented character strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experimental results show that the method is efficient to locate a query word from multi-oriented text in graphical documents.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel rotation and scale invariant method for colour logo retrieval and classification, which involves performing a simple colour segmentation and subsequently describing each of the resultant colour components based on a set of topological and colour features. A polar representation is used to represent the logo and the subsequent logo matching is based on Cyclic Dynamic Time Warping (CDTW). We also show how combining information about the global distribution of the logo components and their local neighbourhood using the Delaunay triangulation allows to improve the results. All experiments are performed on a dataset of 2500 instances of 100 colour logo images in different rotations and scales.

Abstract: Most conventional learning algorithms require both positive and negative training data for achieving accurate classification results. However, the problem of learning classifiers from only positive data arises in many applications where negative data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Minimum Spanning Tree Class Descriptor (MSTCD) was presented as a method that achieves better accuracies than other one-class classifiers in high dimensional data. However, the presence of outliers in the target class severely harms the performance of this classifier. In this paper we propose two bagging strategies for MSTCD that reduce the influence of outliers in training data. We show the improved performance on both real and artificially contaminated data.

Abstract: In this article, a method to extract the rooms of an architectural floor plan image is described. We first present a line detection algorithm to extract long lines in the image. Those lines are analyzed to identify the existing walls. From this point, room extraction can be seen as a classical segmentation task for which each region corresponds to a room. The chosen resolution strategy consists in recursively decomposing the image until getting nearly convex regions. The notion of convexity is difficult to quantify, and the selection of separation lines can also be rough. Thus, we take advantage of knowledge associated to architectural floor plans in order to obtain mainly rectangular rooms. Preliminary tests on a set of real documents show promising results.

Abstract: A good reliable approach to cardiac triggering is of utmost importance in obtaining accurate quantitative results of atherosclerotic plaque burden from the analysis of IntraVascular UltraSound. Although, in the last years, there has been an increase in research of methods for retrospective gating, there is no general consensus in a validation protocol. Many methods are based on quality assessment of longitudinal cuts appearance and those reporting quantitative numbers do not follow a standard protocol. Such heterogeneity in validation protocols makes faithful comparison across methods a difficult task. We propose a validation protocol based on the variability of the retrieved cardiac phase and explore the capability of several quality measures for quantifying such variability. An ideal detector, suitable for its application in clinical practice, should produce stable phases. That is, it should always sample the same cardiac cycle fraction. In this context, one should measure the variability (variance) of a candidate sampling with respect a ground truth (reference) sampling, since the variance would indicate how spread we are aiming a target. In order to quantify the deviation between the sampling and the ground truth, we have considered two quality scores reported in the literature: signed distance to the closest reference sample and distance to the right of each reference sample. We have also considered the residuals of the regression line of reference against candidate sampling. The performance of the measures has been explored on a set of synthetic samplings covering different cardiac cycle fractions and variabilities. From our simulations, we conclude that the metrics related to distances are sensitive to the shift considered while the residuals are robust against fraction and variabilities as far as one can establish a pair-wise correspondence between candidate and reference. We will further investigate the impact of false positive and negative detections in experimental data.