Abstract: We present a new method for explicit graph embedding. Our algorithm extracts a feature vector for an undirected attributed graph. The proposed feature vector encodes details about the number of nodes, number of edges, node degrees, the attributes of nodes and the attributes of edges in the graph. The first two features are for the number of nodes and the number of edges. These are followed by w features for node degrees, m features for k node attributes and n features for l edge attributes — which represent the distribution of node degrees, node attribute values and edge attribute values, and are obtained by defining (in an unsupervised fashion), fuzzy-intervals over the list of node degrees, node attributes and edge attributes. Experimental results are provided for sample data of ICPR2010 contest GEPR.

Abstract: This paper presents a first approach to build colour and structural descriptors for information retrieval on a people database. Queries are formulated in terms of their appearance that allows to seek people wearing specific clothes of a given colour name or texture. Descriptors are automatically computed by following three essential steps. A colour naming labelling from pixel properties. A region seg- mentation step based on colour properties of pixels combined with edge information. And a high level step that models the region arrangements in order to build clothes structure. Results are tested on large set of images from real scenes taken at the entrance desk of a building

Abstract: Wireless endoscopy is a very recent and at the same time unique technique allowing to visualize and study the occurrence of con- tractions and to analyze the intestine motility. Feature extraction is es- sential for getting efficient patterns to detect contractions in wireless video endoscopy of small intestine. We propose a novel method based on anisotropic image filtering and efficient statistical classification of con- traction features. In particular, we apply the image gradient tensor for mining informative skeletons from the original image and a sequence of descriptors for capturing the characteristic pattern of contractions. Fea- tures extracted from the endoluminal images were evaluated in terms of their discriminatory ability in correct classifying images as either belong- ing to contractions or not. Classification was performed by means of a support vector machine classifier with a radial basis function kernel. Our classification rates gave sensitivity of the order of 90.84% and specificity of the order of 94.43% respectively. These preliminary results highlight the high efficiency of the selected descriptors and support the feasibility of the proposed method in assisting the automatic detection and analysis of contractions.

Abstract: Small Bowel Motility Assessment by means of Wireless Capsule Video Endoscopy constitutes a novel clinical methodology in which a capsule with a micro-camera attached to it is swallowed by the patient, emitting a RF signal which is recorded as a video of its trip throughout the gut. In order to overcome the main drawbacks associated with this technique -mainly related to the large amount of visualization time required-, our efforts have been focused on the development of a machine learning system, built up in sequential stages, which provides the specialists with the useful part of the video, rejecting those parts not valid for analysis. We successfully used Self Organized Maps in a general semi-supervised framework with the aim of tackling the different learning stages of our system. The analysis of the diverse types of images and the automatic detection of intestinal contractions is performed under the perspective of intestinal motility assessment in a clinical environment.

Abstract: This article describes a novel approach to the modeling of human actions in 3D. The method we propose is based on a “bag of poses” model that represents human actions as histograms of key-pose occurrences over the course of a video sequence. Actions are first represented as 3D poses using a sequence of 36 direction cosines corresponding to the angles 12 joints form with the world coordinate frame in an articulated human body model. These pose representations are then projected to three-dimensional, action-specific principal eigenspaces which we refer to as aSpaces. We introduce a method for key-pose selection based on a local-motion energy optimization criterion and we show that this method is more stable and more resistant to noisy data than other key-poses selection criteria for action recognition.

Abstract: Impact factor: 3.508 (the last available from JCR2009SCI). Position 4/103 in the category Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Quartile
Color is a powerful visual cue in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation and object recognition. However, most of the existing color models depend on the imaging conditions that negatively affect the performance of the task at hand. Often, a reflection model (e.g., Lambertian or dichromatic reflectance) is used to derive color invariant models. However, this approach may be too restricted to model real-world scenes in which different reflectance mechanisms can hold simultaneously.
Therefore, in this paper, we aim to derive color invariance by learning from color models to obtain diversified color invariant ensembles. First, a photometrical orthogonal and non-redundant color model set is computed composed of both color variants and invariants. Then, the proposed method combines these color models to arrive at a diversified color ensemble yielding a proper balance between invariance (repeatability) and discriminative power (distinctiveness). To achieve this, our fusion method uses a multi-view approach to minimize the estimation error. In this way, the proposed method is robust to data uncertainty and produces properly diversified color invariant ensembles. Further, the proposed method is extended to deal with temporal data by predicting the evolution of observations over time.
Experiments are conducted on three different image datasets to validate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the method is robust against severe variations in imaging conditions. The method is not restricted to a certain reflection model or parameter tuning, and outperforms state-of-the-art detection techniques in the field of object, skin and road recognition. Considering sequential data, the proposed method (extended to deal with future observations) outperforms the other methods

Abstract: In this article we investigate the problem of human action recognition in static images. By action recognition we intend a class of problems which includes both action classification and action detection (i.e. simultaneous localization and classification). Bag-of-words image representations yield promising results for action classification, and deformable part models perform very well object detection. The representations for action recognition typically use only shape cues and ignore color information. Inspired by the recent success of color in image classification and object detection, we investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in static images. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of color descriptors and fusion approaches for action recognition. Experiments were conducted on the three datasets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010 and Stanford-40. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating color information considerably improves recognition performance, and that a descriptor based on color names outperforms pure color descriptors. Our experiments demonstrate that late fusion of color and shape information outperforms other approaches on action recognition. Finally, we show that the different color–shape fusion approaches result in complementary information and combining them yields state-of-the-art performance for action classification.

Abstract: In our work, we are particularly interested in studying the shadows cast by static objects in outdoor environments, during daytime. To assess the accuracy of a shadow detection algorithm, we need ground truth information. The collection of such information is a very tedious task because it is a process that requires manual annotation. To overcome this severe limitation, we propose in this paper a methodology to automatically render ground truth using a virtual environment. To increase the degree of realism and usefulness of the simulated environment, we incorporate in the scenario the precise longitude, latitude and elevation of the actual location of the object, as well as the sun’s position for a given time and day. To evaluate our method, we consider a qualitative and a quantitative comparison. In the quantitative one, we analyze the shadow cast by a real object in a particular geographical location and its corresponding rendered model. To evaluate qualitatively the methodology, we use some ground truth images obtained both manually and automatically.