Abstract: In this paper we propose an original sparse vector model for symbol retrieval task. More specically, we apply the K-SVD algorithm for learning a visual dictionary based on symbol descriptors locally computed around interest points. Results on benchmark datasets show that the obtained sparse representation is competitive related to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our sparse representation is invariant to rotation and scale transforms and also robust to degraded images and distorted symbols. Thereby, the learned visual dictionary is able to represent instances of unseen classes of symbols.

Abstract: The representation (or feature) learning has been an emerging concept in the last years, since it collects a set of techniques that are present in any theoretical or practical methodology referring to artificial intelligence. In computer vision, a very common representation has adopted the form of the well-known Bag of Visual Words. This representation appears implicitly in most approaches where images are described, and is also present in a huge number of areas and domains: image content retrieval, pedestrian detection, human-computer interaction, surveillance, e-health, and social computing, amongst others. The early stages of this dissertation provide an approach for learning visual representations inside evolutionary algorithms, which consists of evolving weighting schemes to improve the BoVW representations for the task of recognizing categories of videos and images. Thus, we demonstrate the applicability of the most common weighting schemes, which are often used in text mining but are less frequently found in computer vision tasks. Beyond learning these visual representations, we provide an approach based on fusion strategies for learning spatiotemporal representations, from multimodal data obtained by depth sensors. Besides, we specially aim at the evolutionary and dynamic modelling, where the temporal factor is present in the nature of the data, such as video sequences of gestures and actions. Indeed, we explore the effects of probabilistic modelling for those approaches based on dynamic programming, so as to handle the temporal deformation and variance amongst video sequences of different categories. Finally, we integrate dynamic programming and generative models into an evolutionary computation framework, with the aim of learning Bags of SubGestures (BoSG) representations and hence to improve the generalization capability of standard gesture recognition approaches. The results obtained in the experimentation demonstrate, first, that evolutionary algorithms are useful for improving the representation of BoVW approaches in several datasets for recognizing categories in still images and video sequences. On the other hand, our experimentation reveals that both, the use of dynamic programming and generative models to align video sequences, and the representations obtained from applying fusion strategies in multimodal data, entail an enhancement on the performance when recognizing some gesture categories. Furthermore, the combination of evolutionary algorithms with models based on dynamic programming and generative approaches results, when aiming at the classification of video categories on large video datasets, in a considerable improvement over standard gesture and action recognition approaches. Finally, we demonstrate the applications of these representations in several domains for human analysis: classification of images where humans may be present, action and gesture recognition for general applications, and in particular for conversational settings within the field of restorative justice

Abstract: Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.
Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.
In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.

Abstract: Natural and intuitive human interaction with robotic systems is a key point to develop robots assisting people in an easy and effective way. In this paper, a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to recognize gestures usually employed in human non-verbal communication is introduced, and an in-depth study of its usability is performed. The system deals with dynamic gestures such as waving or nodding which are recognized using a Dynamic Time Warping approach based on gesture specific features computed from depth maps. A static gesture consisting in pointing at an object is also recognized. The pointed location is then estimated in order to detect candidate objects the user may refer to. When the pointed object is unclear for the robot, a disambiguation procedure by means of either a verbal or gestural dialogue is performed. This skill would lead to the robot picking an object in behalf of the user, which could present difficulties to do it by itself. The overall system — which is composed by a NAO and Wifibot robots, a KinectTM v2 sensor and two laptops — is firstly evaluated in a structured lab setup. Then, a broad set of user tests has been completed, which allows to assess correct performance in terms of recognition rates, easiness of use and response times.

Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the usage of fused cross-spectral images in a monocular visual odometry approach. Fused images are obtained through a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) scheme, where the best setup is empirically obtained by means of a mutual information based evaluation metric. The objective is to have a flexible scheme where fusion parameters are adapted according to the characteristics of the given images. Visual odometry is computed from the fused monocular images using an off the shelf approach. Experimental results using data sets obtained with two different platforms are presented. Additionally, comparison with a previous approach as well as with monocular-visible/infrared spectra are also provided showing the advantages of the proposed scheme.