Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune, systemic, inflammatory disorder that mainly af- fects bone joints. While there is no cure for this disease, continuous advances on palliative treatments require frequent verification of patient’s illness evolution. Such evolution is mea- sured through several available semi-quantitative methods that require evaluation of hand and foot X-ray images. Accurate assessment is a time consuming task that requires highly trained personnel. This hinders a generalized use in clinical practice for early diagnose and disease follow-up. In the context of the automatization of such evaluation methods we present a method for detection and characterization of finger joints in hand radiography images. Several measures for assessing the reduction of joint space width are proposed. We compare for the first time such measures to the Van der Heijde score, the gold standard method for rheumatoid arthritis assessment. The proposed method outperforms existing strategies with a detection rate above 95%. Our comparison to Van der Heijde index shows a promising correlation that encourages further research.

Abstract: The recognition of continuous natural gestures is a complex and challenging problem due to the multi-modal nature of involved visual cues (e.g. fingers and lips movements, subtle facial expressions, body pose, etc.), as well as technical limitations such as spatial and temporal resolution and unreliable
depth cues. In order to promote the research advance on this field, we organized a challenge on multi-modal gesture recognition. We made available a large video database of 13; 858 gestures from a lexicon of 20 Italian gesture categories recorded with a KinectTM camera, providing the audio, skeletal model, user mask, RGB and depth images. The focus of the challenge was on user independent multiple gesture learning. There are no resting positions and the gestures are performed in continuous sequences lasting 1-2 minutes, containing between 8 and 20 gesture instances in each sequence. As a result, the dataset contains around 1:720:800 frames. In addition to the 20 main gesture categories, ‘distracter’ gestures are included, meaning that additional audio
and gestures out of the vocabulary are included. The final evaluation of the challenge was defined in terms of the Levenshtein edit distance, where the goal was to indicate the real order of gestures within the sequence. 54 international teams participated in the challenge, and outstanding results
were obtained by the first ranked participants.

Abstract: El presente proyecto se desarrolló a lo largo del año 2005 y 2006, probando un prototipo de un sistema de verificación facial con imágenes extraídas de las cámaras de video-vigilancia del aeropuerto de Barajas. Se diseñaron varios experimentos, agrupados en dos clases. En el primer tipo, el sistema es entre- nado con imágenes obtenidas en condiciones de laboratorio y luego probado con imágenes extraídas de las cámaras de video-vigilancia del aeropuerto de Barajas. En el segundo caso, tanto las imágenes de entrenamiento como las de prueba corresponden a imágenes extraídas de Barajas.
Se ha desarrollado un sistema completo, que incluye adquisición y digitalización de las imágenes, localización y recorte de las caras en escena, verificación de sujetos y obtención de resultados. Los resultados muestran que, en general, un sistema de verificación facial basado en imágenes puede ser una valiosa ayuda a un operario que deba estar vigilando amplias zonas.

Abstract: A main challenge in Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) is determining a termination condition ensuring stabilization close to the optimum in real-world applications. Although for known test functions distribution-based quantities are good candidates (as far as suitable parameters are used), in real-world problems an open question still remains unsolved. How can we estimate an upper-bound for the termination condition value ensuring a given accuracy for the (unknown) EA solution?
We claim that the termination problem would be fully solved if we defined a quantity (depending only on the EA output) behaving like the solution accuracy. The open question would be, then, satisfactorily answered if we had a model relating both quantities, since accuracy could be predicted from the alternative quantity. We present a statistical inference framework addressing two topics: checking the correlation between the two quantities and defining a regression model for predicting (at a given confidence level) accuracy values from the EA output.

Abstract: Obstacle avoidance remains a challenging task for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV), due to their limited payload capacity to carry advanced sensors. Unlike larger vehicles, MAV can only carry light weight sensors, for instance a camera, which is our main assumption in this work. We explore passive monocular depth estimation and propose a novel method Position Aided Depth Estimation
(PADE). We analyse PADE performance and compare it against the extensively used Time To Collision (TTC). We evaluate the accuracy, robustness to noise and speed of three Optical Flow (OF) techniques, combined with both depth estimation methods. Our results show PADE is more accurate than TTC at depths between 0-12 meters and is less sensitive to noise. Our findings highlight the potential application of PADE for MAV to perform safe autonomous navigation in
unknown and unstructured environments.

Abstract: This study presents an efficient super-pixel extraction algorithm with major contributions to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. Segmentation accuracy is improved through convexity constrained geodesic distance utilization; while computational efficiency is achieved by replacing complete region processing with boundary adaptation idea. Starting from the uniformly distributed rectangular equal-sized super-pixels, region boundaries are adapted to intensity edges iteratively by assigning boundary pixels to the most similar neighboring super-pixels. At each iteration, super-pixel regions are updated and hence progressively converging to compact pixel groups. Experimental results with state-of-the-art comparisons, validate the performance of the proposed technique in terms of both accuracy and speed.