Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median graph: A new exact algorithm using a distance based on the maximum common subgraph. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 579–588.
Abstract: Median graphs have been presented as a useful tool for capturing the essential information of a set of graphs. Nevertheless, computation of optimal solutions is a very hard problem. In this work we present a new and more efficient optimal algorithm for the median graph computation. With the use of a particular cost function that permits the definition of the graph edit distance in terms of the maximum common subgraph, and a prediction function in the backtracking algorithm, we reduce the size of the search space, avoiding the evaluation of a great amount of states and still obtaining the exact median. We present a set of experiments comparing our new algorithm against the previous existing exact algorithm using synthetic data. In addition, we present the first application of the exact median graph computation to real data and we compare the results against an approximate algorithm based on genetic search. These experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the previous existing exact algorithm and in addition show the potential applicability of the exact solutions to real problems.
|
Fadi Dornaika, & Angel Sappa. (2009). Instantaneous 3D motion from image derivatives using the Least Trimmed Square Regression. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 535–543.
Abstract: This paper presents a new technique to the instantaneous 3D motion estimation. The main contributions are as follows. First, we show that the 3D camera or scene velocity can be retrieved from image derivatives only assuming that the scene contains a dominant plane. Second, we propose a new robust algorithm that simultaneously provides the Least Trimmed Square solution and the percentage of inliers-the non-contaminated data. Experiments on both synthetic and real image sequences demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed method. Those experiments show that the new robust approach can outperform classical robust schemes.
|
Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2006). Inhibition of false landmarks. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 27(9), 1022–1030.
Abstract: Corners and junctions are landmarks characterized by the lack of differentiability in the unit tangent to the image level curve. Detectors based on differential operators are not, by their own definition, the best posed as they require a higher degree of differentiability to yield a reliable response. We argue that a corner detector should be based on the degree of continuity of the tangent vector to the image level sets, work on the image domain and need no assumptions on neither the image local structure nor the particular geometry of the corner/junction. An operator measuring the degree of differentiability of the projection matrix on the image gradient fulfills the above requirements. Because using smoothing kernels leads to corner misplacement, we suggest an alternative fake response remover based on the receptive field inhibition of spurious details. The combination of both orientation discontinuity detection and noise inhibition produce our inhibition orientation energy (IOE) landmark locator.
|
Ernest Valveny, & Enric Marti. (2003). A model for image generation and symbol recognition through the deformation of lineal shapes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 24(15), 2857–2867.
Abstract: We describe a general framework for the recognition of distorted images of lineal shapes, which relies on three items: a model to represent lineal shapes and their deformations, a model for the generation of distorted binary images and the combination of both models in a common probabilistic framework, where the generation of deformations is related to an internal energy, and the generation of binary images to an external energy. Then, recognition consists in the minimization of a global energy function, performed by using the EM algorithm. This general framework has been applied to the recognition of hand-drawn lineal symbols in graphic documents.
|
David Sanchez-Mendoza, David Masip, & Agata Lapedriza. (2015). Emotion recognition from mid-level features. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 67(Part 1), 66–74.
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.
Keywords: Facial expression; Emotion recognition; Action units; Computer vision
|
Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2016). On the completeness of feature-driven maximally stable extremal regions. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 74, 9–16.
Abstract: By definition, local image features provide a compact representation of the image in which most of the image information is preserved. This capability offered by local features has been overlooked, despite being relevant in many application scenarios. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the performance of feature-driven Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) in terms of the coverage of informative image parts (completeness). This type of features results from an MSER extraction on saliency maps in which features related to objects boundaries or even symmetry axes are highlighted. These maps are intended to be suitable domains for MSER detection, allowing this detector to provide a better coverage of informative image parts. Our experimental results, which were based on a large-scale evaluation, show that feature-driven MSER have relatively high completeness values and provide more complete sets than a traditional MSER detection even when sets of similar cardinality are considered.
Keywords: Local features; Completeness; Maximally Stable Extremal Regions
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Agnes Borras, & Josep Llados. (2010). Relational Indexing of Vectorial Primitives for Symbol Spotting in Line-Drawing Images. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(3), 188–201.
Abstract: This paper presents a symbol spotting approach for indexing by content a database of line-drawing images. As line-drawings are digital-born documents designed by vectorial softwares, instead of using a pixel-based approach, we present a spotting method based on vector primitives. Graphical symbols are represented by a set of vectorial primitives which are described by an off-the-shelf shape descriptor. A relational indexing strategy aims to retrieve symbol locations into the target documents by using a combined numerical-relational description of 2D structures. The zones which are likely to contain the queried symbol are validated by a Hough-like voting scheme. In addition, a performance evaluation framework for symbol spotting in graphical documents is proposed. The presented methodology has been evaluated with a benchmarking set of architectural documents achieving good performance results.
Keywords: Document image analysis and recognition, Graphics recognition, Symbol spotting ,Vectorial representations, Line-drawings
|
Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Florent Perronnin, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2010). Unsupervised writer adaptation of whole-word HMMs with application to word-spotting. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(8), 742–749.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel approach for writer adaptation in a handwritten word-spotting task. The method exploits the fact that the semi-continuous hidden Markov model separates the word model parameters into (i) a codebook of shapes and (ii) a set of word-specific parameters.
Our main contribution is to employ this property to derive writer-specific word models by statistically adapting an initial universal codebook to each document. This process is unsupervised and does not even require the appearance of the keyword(s) in the searched document. Experimental results show an increase in performance when this adaptation technique is applied. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work dealing with adaptation for word-spotting. The preliminary version of this paper obtained an IBM Best Student Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Keywords: Word-spotting; Handwriting recognition; Writer adaptation; Hidden Markov model; Document analysis
|
Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Re-coding ECOCs without retraining. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(7), 555–562.
Abstract: A standard way to deal with multi-class categorization problems is by the combination of binary classifiers in a pairwise voting procedure. Recently, this classical approach has been formalized in the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In the ECOC framework, the one-versus-one coding demonstrates to achieve higher performance than the rest of coding designs. The binary problems that we train in the one-versus-one strategy are significantly smaller than in the rest of designs, and usually easier to be learnt, taking into account the smaller overlapping between classes. However, a high percentage of the positions coded by zero of the coding matrix, which implies a high sparseness degree, does not codify meta-class membership information. In this paper, we show that using the training data we can redefine without re-training, in a problem-dependent way, the one-versus-one coding matrix so that the new coded information helps the system to increase its generalization capability. Moreover, the new re-coding strategy is generalized to be applied over any binary code. The results over several UCI Machine Learning repository data sets and two real multi-class problems show that performance improvements can be obtained re-coding the classical one-versus-one and Sparse random designs compared to different state-of-the-art ECOC configurations.
|
Josep Llados, Horst Bunke, & Enric Marti. (1997). Finding rotational symmetries by cyclic string matching. PRL - Pattern recognition letters, 18(14), 1435–1442.
Abstract: Symmetry is an important shape feature. In this paper, a simple and fast method to detect perfect and distorted rotational symmetries of 2D objects is described. The boundary of a shape is polygonally approximated and represented as a string. Rotational symmetries are found by cyclic string matching between two identical copies of the shape string. The set of minimum cost edit sequences that transform the shape string to a cyclically shifted version of itself define the rotational symmetry and its order. Finally, a modification of the algorithm is proposed to detect reflectional symmetries. Some experimental results are presented to show the reliability of the proposed algorithm
Keywords: Rotational symmetry; Reflectional symmetry; String matching
|
Sergio Escalera, David Masip, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Online Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(3), 458–467.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.
|
Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Augmenting Video Surveillance Footage with Virtual Agents for Incremental Event Evaluation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(6), 878–889.
Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.
|
Miguel Angel Bautista, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Minimal Design of Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 33(6), 693–702.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the pattern recognition field. In literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers. In this scope, the Error-correcting output codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a minimal design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best minimal ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI datasets and different multi-class computer vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.
Keywords: Multi-class classification; Error-correcting output codes; Ensemble of classifiers
|
Albert Clapes, Miguel Reyes, & Sergio Escalera. (2013). Multi-modal User Identification and Object Recognition Surveillance System. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 34(7), 799–808.
Abstract: We propose an automatic surveillance system for user identification and object recognition based on multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis. We model a RGBD environment learning a pixel-based background Gaussian distribution. Then, user and object candidate regions are detected and recognized using robust statistical approaches. The system robustly recognizes users and updates the system in an online way, identifying and detecting new actors in the scene. Moreover, segmented objects are described, matched, recognized, and updated online using view-point 3D descriptions, being robust to partial occlusions and local 3D viewpoint rotations. Finally, the system saves the historic of user–object assignments, being specially useful for surveillance scenarios. The system has been evaluated on a novel data set containing different indoor/outdoor scenarios, objects, and users, showing accurate recognition and better performance than standard state-of-the-art approaches.
Keywords: Multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis; User identification; Object recognition; Intelligent surveillance; Visual features; Statistical learning
|
Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Alicia Fornes, Yousri Kessentini, & Beata Megyesi. (2022). Few shots are all you need: A progressive learning approach for low resource handwritten text recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 160, 43–49.
Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching
|