Abstract: The design of a slide presentation is a creative process. In this process first, humans visualize in their minds what they want to explain. Then, they have to be able to represent this knowledge in an understandable way. There exists a lot of commercial software that allows to create our own slide presentations but the creativity of the user is rather limited. In this article we present an application that allows the user to create and visualize a slide presentation from a sketch. A slide may be seen as a graphical document or a diagram where its elements are placed in a particular spatial arrangement. To describe and recognize slides a syntactic approach is proposed. This approach is based on an Adjacency Grammar and a parsing methodology to cope with this kind of grammars. The experimental evaluation shows the performance of our methodology from a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. Six different slides containing different number of symbols, from 4 to 7, have been given to the users and they have drawn them without restrictions in the order of the elements. The quantitative results give an idea on how suitable is our methodology to describe and recognize the different elements in a slide.

Abstract: In this paper we present an algorithm for performance characterization of symbol localization systems. This algorithm is aimed to be a more “reliable” and “open” solution to characterize the performance. To achieve that, it exploits only single points as the result of localization and offers the possibility to reconsider the localization results provided by a system. We use the information about context in groundtruth, and overall localization results, to detect the ambiguous localization results. A probability score is computed for each matching between a localization point and a groundtruth region, depending on the spatial distribution of the other regions in the groundtruth. Final characterization is given with detection rate/probability score plots, describing the sets of possible interpretations of the localization results, according to a given confidence rate. We present experimentation details along with the results for the symbol localization system of [1], exploiting a synthetic dataset of architectural floorplans and electrical diagrams (composed of 200 images and 3861 symbols).

Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot must face the correspondence or data association problem in order to carry out tasks like place recognition or unknown environment mapping. In order to put into correspondence two maps, most methods estimate the transformation relating the maps from matches established between low level feature extracted from sensor data. However, finding explicit matches between features is a challenging and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method to align obstacle maps without searching explicit matches between features. The maps are obtained from a stereo pair. Then, we use a vocabulary tree approach to identify putative corresponding maps followed by the Newton minimization algorithm to find the transformation that relates both maps. The proposed method is evaluated in a typical office environment showing good performance.

Abstract: In this paper we present a pixel-level object categorization method suitable to be applied under real-time constraints. Since pixels are categorized using a bag of features scheme, the major bottleneck of such an approach would be the feature pooling in local histograms of visual words. Therefore, we propose to bypass this time-consuming step and directly obtain the score from a linear Support Vector Machine classifier. This is achieved by creating an integral image of the components of the SVM which can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 10 additions and 2 products, regardless of its size. Besides, we evaluated the performance of two efficient feature quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means and the Extremely Randomized Forest. All experiments have been done in the Graz02 database, showing comparable, or even better results to related work with a lower computational cost.

Abstract: In this work, we present a registration framework for cardiac cine MRI (cMRI), tagged (tMRI) and delay-enhancement MRI (deMRI), where the two main issues to find an accurate alignment between these images have been taking into account: the presence of tags in tMRI and respiration artifacts in all sequences. A steerable pyramid image decomposition has been used for detagging purposes since it is suitable to extract high-order oriented structures by directional adaptive filtering. Shift correction of cMRI is achieved by firstly maximizing the similarity between the Long Axis and Short Axis cMRI. Subsequently, these shift-corrected images are used as target images in a rigid registration procedure with their corresponding tMRI/deMRI in order to correct their shift. The proposed registration framework has been evaluated by 840 registration tests, considerably improving the alignment of the MR images (mean RMS error of 2.04mm vs. 5.44mm).

Abstract: Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue, obtaining a reliable ground truth. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available study cases due to the complex procedure of histological analysis. In this work we propose a novel semi-supervised approach to enhance the in-vitro training set by including examples from in-vivo coronary plaques data set. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is applied on in-vivo data and plaque characterization performances are evaluated by Leave-One-Patient-Out cross-validation technique. Supervised data inclusion improves global classification accuracy from 89.39% to 91.82%.

Abstract: Document classification is an important task in all the processes related to document storage and retrieval. In the case of complex documents, structural features are needed to achieve a correct classification. Unfortunately, physical layout analysis is error prone. In this paper we present a pre-segmentation step based on a divide & conquer strategy that can be used to improve the page segmentation results, independently of the segmentation algorithm used. This pre-segmentation step is evaluated in classification and retrieval using the selective CRLA algorithm for layout segmentation together with a clustering based on the voronoi area diagram, and tested on two different databases, MARG and Girona Archives.