Abstract: Optical Flow (OF) is the input of a wide range of decision support systems such as car driver assistance, UAV guiding or medical diagnose. In these real situations, the absence of ground truth forces to assess OF quality using quantities computed from either sequences or the computed optical flow itself. These quantities are generally known as Confidence Measures, CM. Even if we have a proper confidence measure we still need a way to evaluate its ability to discard pixels with an OF prone to have a large error. Current approaches only provide a descriptive evaluation of the CM performance but such approaches are not capable to fairly compare different confidence measures and optical flow algorithms. Thus, it is of prime importance to define a framework and a general road map for the evaluation of optical flow performance.
This thesis provides a framework able to decide which pairs “ optical flow – confidence measure” (OF-CM) are best suited for optical flow error bounding given a confidence level determined by a decision support system. To design this framework we cover the following points:
Descriptive scores. As a first step, we summarize and analyze the sources of inaccuracies in the output of optical flow algorithms. Second, we present several descriptive plots that visually assess CM capabilities for OF error bounding. In addition to the descriptive plots, given a plot representing OF-CM capabilities to bound the error, we provide a numeric score that categorizes the plot according to its decreasing profile, that is, a score assessing CM performance.
Statistical framework. We provide a comparison framework that assesses the best suited OF-CM pair for error bounding that uses a two stage cascade process. First of all we assess the predictive value of the confidence measures by means of a descriptive plot. Then, for a sample of descriptive plots computed over training frames, we obtain a generic curve that will be used for sequences with no ground truth. As a second step, we evaluate the obtained general curve and its capabilities to really reflect the predictive value of a confidence measure using the variability across train frames by means of ANOVA.
The presented framework has shown its potential in the application on clinical decision support systems. In particular, we have analyzed the impact of the different image artifacts such as noise and decay to the output of optical flow in a cardiac diagnose system and we have improved the navigation inside the bronchial tree on bronchoscopy.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios, in which situations like illumination changes, noisy images, unexpected objects, uncontrolled scenarios and variant appearance of objects occur constantly. All these problems force the development of more robust detectors for relevant applications like vision-based autonomous vehicles, intelligent surveillance, and pedestrian tracking for behavior analysis. Most reliable vision-based pedestrian detectors base their decision on features extracted using a single sensor capturing complementary features, e.g., appearance, and texture. These features usually are extracted from the current frame, ignoring temporal information, or including it in a post process step e.g., tracking or temporal coherence. Taking into account these issues we formulate the following question: can we generate more robust pedestrian detectors by introducing new information sources in the feature extraction step?
In order to answer this question we develop different approaches for introducing new information sources to well-known pedestrian detectors. We start by the inclusion of temporal information following the Stacked Sequential Learning (SSL) paradigm which suggests that information extracted from the neighboring samples in a sequence can improve the accuracy of a base classifier.
We then focus on the inclusion of complementary information from different sensors like 3D point clouds (LIDAR – depth), far infrared images (FIR), or disparity maps (stereo pair cameras). For this end we develop a multi-modal framework in which information from different sensors is used for increasing detection accuracy (by increasing information redundancy). Finally we propose a multi-view pedestrian detector, this multi-view approach splits the detection problem in n sub-problems.
Each sub-problem will detect objects in a given specific view reducing in that way the variability problem faced when a single detectors is used for the whole problem. We show that these approaches obtain competitive results with other state-of-the-art methods but instead of design new features, we reuse existing ones boosting their performance.

Abstract: Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide and the second most common malignant tumor in Europe. Screening tests have shown to be very eective in increasing the survival rates since they allow an early detection of polyps. Among the dierent screening techniques, colonoscopy is considered the gold standard although clinical studies mention several problems that have an impact in the quality of the procedure. The navigation through the rectum and colon track can be challenging for the physicians which can increase polyp miss rates. The thorough visualization of the colon track must be ensured so that
the chances of missing lesions are minimized. The visual analysis of colonoscopy images can provide important information to the physicians and support their navigation during the procedure.
Blood vessels and their branching patterns can provide descriptive power to potentially develop biometric markers. Anatomical markers based on blood vessel patterns could be used to identify a particular scene in colonoscopy videos and to support endoscope navigation by generating a sequence of ordered scenes through the dierent colon sections. By verifying the presence of vascular content in the endoluminal scene it is also possible to certify a proper
inspection of the colon mucosa and to improve polyp localization. Considering the potential uses of blood vessel description, this contribution studies the characterization of the vascular content and the analysis of the descriptive power of its branching patterns.
Blood vessel characterization in colonoscopy images is shown to be a challenging task. The endoluminal scene is conformed by several elements whose similar characteristics hinder the development of particular models for each of them. To overcome such diculties we propose the use of the blood vessel branching characteristics as key features for pattern description. We present a model to characterize junctions in binary patterns. The implementation
of the junction model allows us to develop a junction localization method. We
created two data sets including manually labeled vessel information as well as manual ground truths of two types of keypoint landmarks: junctions and endpoints. The proposed method outperforms the available algorithms in the literature in experiments in both, our newly created colon vessel data set, and in DRIVE retinal fundus image data set. In the latter case, we created a manual ground truth of junction coordinates. Since we want to explore the descriptive potential of junctions and vessels, we propose a graph-based approach to
create anatomical markers. In the context of polyp localization, we present a new method to inhibit the in uence of blood vessels in the extraction valley-prole information. The results show that our methodology decreases vessel in
uence, increases polyp information and leads to an improvement in state-of-the-art polyp localization performance. We also propose a polyp-specic segmentation method that outperforms other general and specic approaches.

Abstract: Describing textures is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The classification problem involves assigning a category label to the texture class it belongs to. Several factors such as variations in scale, illumination and viewpoint make the problem of texture description extremely challenging. A variety of histogram based texture representations exists in literature.
However, combining multiple texture descriptors and assessing their complementarity is still an open research problem. In this paper, we first show that combining multiple local texture descriptors significantly improves the recognition performance compared to using a single best method alone. This
gain in performance is achieved at the cost of high-dimensional final image representation. To counter this problem, we propose to use an information-theoretic compression technique to obtain a compact texture description without any significant loss in accuracy. In addition, we perform a comprehensive
evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object recognition, for the problem of texture classification. Experiments are performed on four challenging texture datasets namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10. The experiments clearly demonstrate that our proposed compact multi-texture approach outperforms the single best texture method alone. In all cases, discriminative color names outperforms other color features for texture classification. Finally, we show that combining discriminative color names with compact texture representation outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7:8%, 4:3% and 5:0% on KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b and Texture-10 datasets respectively.

Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.

Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new method for egocentric video temporal segmentation based on integrating a statistical mean change detector and agglomerative clustering(AC) within an energy-minimization framework. Given the tendency of most AC methods to oversegment video sequences when clustering their frames, we combine the clustering with a concept drift detection technique (ADWIN) that has rigorous guarantee of performances. ADWIN serves as a statistical upper bound for the clustering-based video segmentation. We integrate both techniques in an energy-minimization framework that serves to disambiguate the decision of both techniques and to complete the segmentation taking into account the temporal continuity of video frames descriptors. We present experiments over egocentric sets of more than 13.000 images acquired with different wearable cameras, showing that our method outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods.