Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique through hashing the shape descriptors of graph paths (Hamiltonian paths). Complex graphical structures in line drawings can be efficiently represented by graphs, which ease the accurate localization of the model symbol. Graph paths are the factorized substructures of graphs which enable robust recognition even in the presence of noise and distortion. In our framework, the entire database of the graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by the locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. The spotting method is formulated by a spatial voting scheme to the list of locations of the paths that are decided during the hash table lookup process. We perform detailed experiments with various dataset of line drawings and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the technique.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the first Challenge of ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition. Challenge 1 is focused on the extraction of text from born-digital images, specifically from images found in Web pages and emails. The challenge was organized in terms of three tasks that look at different stages of the process: text localization, text segmentation and word recognition. In this paper we present the results of the challenge for all three tasks, and make an open call for continuous participation outside the context of ICDAR 2011.

Abstract: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise viz. spurious nodes and spurios edges of graph and their discontinuity etc. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance.
But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical
graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
This study used intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to evaluate radial artery volume changes after intraarterial administration of nitroglycerin and/or verapamil.
BACKGROUND:
Radial artery spasm, which is associated with radial artery size, is the main limitation of the transradial approach in percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI).
METHODS:
This prospective, randomized study compared the effect of two intra-arterial vasodilator regimens on radial artery volume: 0.2 mg of nitroglycerin plus 2.5 mg of verapamil (Group 1; n = 15) versus 2.5 mg of verapamil alone (Group 2; n = 15). Radial artery lumen volume was assessed using IVUS at two time points: at baseline (5 minutes after sheath insertion) and post-vasodilator (1 minute after drug administration). The luminal volume of the radial artery was computed using ECOC Random Fields (ECOC-RF), a technique used for automatic segmentation of luminal borders in longitudinal cut images from IVUS sequences.
RESULTS:
There was a significant increase in arterial lumen volume in both groups, with an increase from 451 ± 177 mm³ to 508 ± 192 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 1 and from 456 ± 188 mm³ to 509 ± 170 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 2. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of absolute volume increase (58 mm³ versus 53 mm³, respectively; p = 0.65) or in relative volume increase (14% versus 20%, respectively; p = 0.69).
CONCLUSIONS:
Administration of nitroglycerin plus verapamil or verapamil alone to the radial artery resulted in similar increases in arterial lumen volume according to ECOC-RF IVUS measurements.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a complete framework that automatically provides fluid-dynamic and plaque analysis from IVUS and Angiographic sequences. Such framework is used to analyze, in three coronary arteries, the relation between wall shear stress with type and amount of plaque. Preliminary qualitative results show an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque burden, which is confirmed by the fact that the plaque growth is higher on the wall having concave curvature. Regarding the plaque type it was observed that regions having low shear stress are predominantly fibro-lipidic while the heavy calcifications are in general located in areas of the vessel having high WSS.

Abstract: This paper deals with a subgraph matching problem in Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. RAG is a very important, efficient and natural way of representing graphical information with a graph but this is limited to cases where the information is well defined with perfectly delineated regions. What if the information we are interested in is not confined within well defined regions? This paper addresses this particular problem and solves it by defining near convex grouping of oriented line segments which results in near convex regions. Pure convexity imposes hard constraints and can not handle all the cases efficiently. Hence to solve this problem we have defined a new type of convexity of regions, which allows convex regions to have concavity to some extend. We call this kind of regions Near Convex Regions (NCRs). These NCRs are then used to create the Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph (NCRAG) and with this representation we have formulated the problem of symbol spotting in graphical documents as a subgraph matching problem. For subgraph matching we have used the Approximate Edit Distance Algorithm (AEDA) on the neighborhood string, which starts working after finding a key node in the input or target graph and iteratively identifies similar nodes of the query graph in the neighborhood of the key node. The experiments are performed on artificial, real and distorted datasets.

Abstract: This paper describes an approach to human action recognition based on a probabilistic optimization model of body parts using hidden Markov model (HMM). Our method is able to distinguish between similar actions by only considering the body parts having major contribution to the actions, for example, legs for walking, jogging and running; arms for boxing, waving and clapping. We apply HMMs to model the stochastic movement of the body parts for action recognition. The HMM construction uses an ensemble of body-part detectors, followed by grouping of part detections, to perform human identification. Three example-based body-part detectors are trained to detect three components of the human body: the head, legs and arms. These detectors cope with viewpoint changes and self-occlusions through the use of ten sub-classifiers that detect body parts over a specific range of viewpoints. Each sub-classifier is a support vector machine trained on features selected for the discriminative power for each particular part/viewpoint combination. Grouping of these detections is performed using a simple geometric constraint model that yields a viewpoint-invariant human detector. We test our approach on three publicly available action datasets: the KTH dataset, Weizmann dataset and HumanEva dataset. Our results illustrate that with a simple and compact representation we can achieve robust recognition of human actions comparable to the most complex, state-of-the-art methods.