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Yaxing Wang. (2020). Transferring and Learning Representations for Image Generation and Translation (Joost Van de Weijer, Abel Gonzalez, & Luis Herranz, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Image generation is arguably one of the most attractive, compelling, and challenging tasks in computer vision. Among the methods which perform image generation, generative adversarial networks (GANs) play a key role. The most common image generation models based on GANs can be divided into two main approaches. The first one, called simply image generation takes random noise as an input and synthesizes an image which follows the same distribution as the images in the training set. The second class, which is called image-to-image translation, aims to map an image from a source domain to one that is indistinguishable from those in the target domain. Image-to-image translation methods can further be divided into paired and unpaired image-to-image translation based on whether they require paired data or not. In this thesis, we aim to address some challenges of both image generation and image-to-image generation.GANs highly rely upon having access to vast quantities of data, and fail to generate realistic images from random noise when applied to domains with few images. To address this problem, we aim to transfer knowledge from a model trained on a large dataset (source domain) to the one learned on limited data (target domain). We find that both GANs andconditional GANs can benefit from models trained on large datasets. Our experiments show that transferring the discriminator is more important than the generator. Using both the generator and discriminator results in the best performance. We found, however, that this method suffers from overfitting, since we update all parameters to adapt to the target data. We propose a novel architecture, which is tailored to address knowledge transfer to very small target domains. Our approach effectively exploreswhich part of the latent space is more related to the target domain. Additionally, the proposed method is able to transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs. Although image-to-image translation has achieved outstanding performance, it still facesseveral problems. First, for translation between complex domains (such as translations between different modalities) image-to-image translation methods require paired data. We show that when only some of the pairwise translations have been seen (i.e. during training), we can infer the remaining unseen translations (where training pairs are not available). We propose a new approach where we align multiple encoders and decoders in such a way that the desired translation can be obtained by simply cascadingthe source encoder and the target decoder, even when they have not interacted during the training stage (i.e. unseen). Second, we address the issue of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets unavoidably contain undesired changes, which are dueto the fact that the target dataset has a particular underlying visual distribution. We use carefully designed semantic constraints to reduce the effects of the bias. The semantic constraint aims to enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Finally, current approaches fail to generate diverse outputs or perform scalable image transfer in a single model. To alleviate this problem, we propose a scalable and diverse image-to-image translation. We employ random noise to control the diversity. The scalabitlity is determined by conditioning the domain label.computer vision, deep learning, imitation learning, adversarial generative networks, image generation, image-to-image translation.
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Carola Figueroa Flores. (2021). Visual Saliency for Object Recognition, and Object Recognition for Visual Saliency (Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: For humans, the recognition of objects is an almost instantaneous, precise and
extremely adaptable process. Furthermore, we have the innate capability to learn new object classes from only few examples. The human brain lowers the complexity of the incoming data by filtering out part of the information and only processing those things that capture our attention. This, mixed with our biological predisposition to respond to certain shapes or colors, allows us to recognize in a simple glance the most important or salient regions from an image. This mechanism can be observed by analyzing on which parts of images subjects place attention; where they fix their eyes when an image is shown to them. The most accurate way to record this behavior is to track eye movements while displaying images. Computational saliency estimation aims to identify to what extent regions or objects stand out with respect to their surroundings to human observers. Saliency maps can be used in a wide range of applications including object detection, image and video compression, and visual tracking. The majority of research in the field has focused on automatically estimating saliency maps given an input image. Instead, in this thesis, we set out to incorporate saliency maps in an object recognition pipeline: we want to investigate whether saliency maps can improve object recognition results. In this thesis, we identify several problems related to visual saliency estimation. First, to what extent the estimation of saliency can be exploited to improve the training of an object recognition model when scarce training data is available. To solve this problem, we design an image classification network that incorporates saliency information as input. This network processes the saliency map through a dedicated network branch and uses the resulting characteristics to modulate the standard bottom-up visual characteristics of the original image input. We will refer to this technique as saliency-modulated image classification (SMIC). In extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets for fine-grained object recognition, we show that our proposed architecture can significantly improve performance, especially on dataset with scarce training data. Next, we address the main drawback of the above pipeline: SMIC requires an explicit saliency algorithm that must be trained on a saliency dataset. To solve this, we implement a hallucination mechanism that allows us to incorporate the saliency estimation branch in an end-to-end trained neural network architecture that only needs the RGB image as an input. A side-effect of this architecture is the estimation of saliency maps. In experiments, we show that this architecture can obtain similar results on object recognition as SMIC but without the requirement of ground truth saliency maps to train the system. Finally, we evaluated the accuracy of the saliency maps that occur as a sideeffect of object recognition. For this purpose, we use a set of benchmark datasets for saliency evaluation based on eye-tracking experiments. Surprisingly, the estimated saliency maps are very similar to the maps that are computed from human eye-tracking experiments. Our results show that these saliency maps can obtain competitive results on benchmark saliency maps. On one synthetic saliency dataset this method even obtains the state-of-the-art without the need of ever having seen an actual saliency image for training. Keywords: computer vision; visual saliency; fine-grained object recognition; convolutional neural networks; images classification
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Gabriel Villalonga. (2021). Leveraging Synthetic Data to Create Autonomous Driving Perception Systems (Antonio Lopez, & German Ros, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Manually annotating images to develop vision models has been a major bottleneck
since computer vision and machine learning started to walk together. This has been more evident since computer vision falls on the shoulders of data-hungry deep learning techniques. When addressing on-board perception for autonomous driving, the curse of data annotation is exacerbated due to the use of additional sensors such as LiDAR. Therefore, any approach aiming at reducing such a timeconsuming and costly work is of high interest for addressing autonomous driving and, in fact, for any application requiring some sort of artificial perception. In the last decade, it has been shown that leveraging from synthetic data is a paradigm worth to pursue in order to minimizing manual data annotation. The reason is that the automatic process of generating synthetic data can also produce different types of associated annotations (e.g. object bounding boxes for synthetic images and LiDAR pointclouds, pixel/point-wise semantic information, etc.). Directly using synthetic data for training deep perception models may not be the definitive solution in all circumstances since it can appear a synth-to-real domain shift. In this context, this work focuses on leveraging synthetic data to alleviate manual annotation for three perception tasks related to driving assistance and autonomous driving. In all cases, we assume the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to develop our perception models. The first task addresses traffic sign recognition (TSR), a kind of multi-class classification problem. We assume that the number of sign classes to be recognized must be suddenly increased without having annotated samples to perform the corresponding TSR CNN re-training. We show that leveraging synthetic samples of such new classes and transforming them by a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on the known classes (i.e. without using samples from the new classes), it is possible to re-train the TSR CNN to properly classify all the signs for a ∼ 1/4 ratio of new/known sign classes. The second task addresses on-board 2D object detection, focusing on vehicles and pedestrians. In this case, we assume that we receive a set of images without the annotations required to train an object detector, i.e. without object bounding boxes. Therefore, our goal is to self-annotate these images so that they can later be used to train the desired object detector. In order to reach this goal, we leverage from synthetic data and propose a semi-supervised learning approach based on the co-training idea. In fact, we use a GAN to reduce the synthto-real domain shift before applying co-training. Our quantitative results show that co-training and GAN-based image-to-image translation complement each other up to allow the training of object detectors without manual annotation, and still almost reaching the upper-bound performances of the detectors trained from human annotations. While in previous tasks we focus on vision-based perception, the third task we address focuses on LiDAR pointclouds. Our initial goal was to develop a 3D object detector trained on synthetic LiDAR-style pointclouds. While for images we may expect synth/real-to-real domain shift due to differences in their appearance (e.g. when source and target images come from different camera sensors), we did not expect so for LiDAR pointclouds since these active sensors factor out appearance and provide sampled shapes. However, in practice, we have seen that it can be domain shift even among real-world LiDAR pointclouds. Factors such as the sampling parameters of the LiDARs, the sensor suite configuration onboard the ego-vehicle, and the human annotation of 3D bounding boxes, do induce a domain shift. We show it through comprehensive experiments with different publicly available datasets and 3D detectors. This redirected our goal towards the design of a GAN for pointcloud-to-pointcloud translation, a relatively unexplored topic. Finally, it is worth to mention that all the synthetic datasets used for these three tasks, have been designed and generated in the context of this PhD work and will be publicly released. Overall, we think this PhD presents several steps forward to encourage leveraging synthetic data for developing deep perception models in the field of driving assistance and autonomous driving. |
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Pau Riba. (2020). Distilling Structure from Imagery: Graph-based Models for the Interpretation of Document Images (Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: From its early stages, the community of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision has considered the importance of leveraging the structural information when understanding images. Usually, graphs have been proposed as a suitable model to represent this kind of information due to their flexibility and representational power able to codify both, the components, objects, or entities and their pairwise relationship. Even though graphs have been successfully applied to a huge variety of tasks, as a result of their symbolic and relational nature, graphs have always suffered from some limitations compared to statistical approaches. Indeed, some trivial mathematical operations do not have an equivalence in the graph domain. For instance, in the core of many pattern recognition applications, there is a need to compare two objects. This operation, which is trivial when considering feature vectors defined in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), is not properly defined for graphs.
In this thesis, we have investigated the importance of the structural information from two perspectives, the traditional graph-based methods and the new advances on Geometric Deep Learning. On the one hand, we explore the problem of defining a graph representation and how to deal with it on a large scale and noisy scenario. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks are proposed to first redefine a Graph Edit Distance methodologies as a metric learning problem, and second, to apply them in a real use case scenario for the detection of repetitive patterns which define tables in invoice documents. As experimental framework, we have validated the different methodological contributions in the domain of Document Image Analysis and Recognition. |
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Raul Gomez. (2020). Exploiting the Interplay between Visual and Textual Data for Scene Interpretation (Dimosthenis Karatzas, Lluis Gomez, & Jaume Gibert, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Machine learning experimentation under controlled scenarios and standard datasets is necessary to compare algorithms performance by evaluating all of them in the same setup. However, experimentation on how those algorithms perform on unconstrained data and applied tasks to solve real world problems is also a must to ascertain how that research can contribute to our society.
In this dissertation we experiment with the latest computer vision and natural language processing algorithms applying them to multimodal scene interpretation. Particularly, we research on how image and text understanding can be jointly exploited to address real world problems, focusing on learning from Social Media data. We address several tasks that involve image and textual information, discuss their characteristics and offer our experimentation conclusions. First, we work on detection of scene text in images. Then, we work with Social Media posts, exploiting the captions associated to images as supervision to learn visual features, which we apply to multimodal semantic image retrieval. Subsequently, we work with geolocated Social Media images with associated tags, experimenting on how to use the tags as supervision, on location sensitive image retrieval and on exploiting location information for image tagging. Finally, we work on a specific classification problem of Social Media publications consisting on an image and a text: Multimodal hate speech classification. |
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Sounak Dey. (2020). Mapping between Images and Conceptual Spaces: Sketch-based Image Retrieval (Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: This thesis presents several contributions to the literature of sketch based image retrieval (SBIR). In SBIR the first challenge we face is how to map two different domains to common space for effective retrieval of images, while tackling the different levels of abstraction people use to express their notion of objects around while sketching. To this extent we first propose a cross-modal learning framework that maps both sketches and text into a joint embedding space invariant to depictive style, while preserving semantics. Then we have also investigated different query types possible to encompass people's dilema in sketching certain world objects. For this we propose an approach for multi-modal image retrieval in multi-labelled images. A multi-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model sketches and text as input query modalities into a common embedding space, which is then further aligned with the image feature space. This permits encoding the object-based features and its alignment with the query irrespective of the availability of the co-occurrence of different objects in the training set.
Finally, we explore the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognises two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended. We also in this dissertation pave the path to the future direction of research in this domain. |
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Marc Masana. (2020). Lifelong Learning of Neural Networks: Detecting Novelty and Adapting to New Domains without Forgetting (Joost Van de Weijer, & Andrew Bagdanov, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Computer vision has gone through considerable changes in the last decade as neural networks have come into common use. As available computational capabilities have grown, neural networks have achieved breakthroughs in many computer vision tasks, and have even surpassed human performance in others. With accuracy being so high, focus has shifted to other issues and challenges. One research direction that saw a notable increase in interest is on lifelong learning systems. Such systems should be capable of efficiently performing tasks, identifying and learning new ones, and should moreover be able to deploy smaller versions of themselves which are experts on specific tasks. In this thesis, we contribute to research on lifelong learning and address the compression and adaptation of networks to small target domains, the incremental learning of networks faced with a variety of tasks, and finally the detection of out-of-distribution samples at inference time.
We explore how knowledge can be transferred from large pretrained models to more task-specific networks capable of running on smaller devices by extracting the most relevant information. Using a pretrained model provides more robust representations and a more stable initialization when learning a smaller task, which leads to higher performance and is known as domain adaptation. However, those models are too large for certain applications that need to be deployed on devices with limited memory and computational capacity. In this thesis we show that, after performing domain adaptation, some learned activations barely contribute to the predictions of the model. Therefore, we propose to apply network compression based on low-rank matrix decomposition using the activation statistics. This results in a significant reduction of the model size and the computational cost. Like human intelligence, machine intelligence aims to have the ability to learn and remember knowledge. However, when a trained neural network is presented with learning a new task, it ends up forgetting previous ones. This is known as catastrophic forgetting and its avoidance is studied in continual learning. The work presented in this thesis extensively surveys continual learning techniques and presents an approach to avoid catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning scenarios. Our technique is based on using ternary masks in order to update a network to new tasks, reusing the knowledge of previous ones while not forgetting anything about them. In contrast to earlier work, our masks are applied to the activations of each layer instead of the weights. This considerably reduces the number of parameters to be added for each new task. Furthermore, the analysis on a wide range of work on incremental learning without access to the task-ID, provides insight on current state-of-the-art approaches that focus on avoiding catastrophic forgetting by using regularization, rehearsal of previous tasks from a small memory, or compensating the task-recency bias. Neural networks trained with a cross-entropy loss force the outputs of the model to tend toward a one-hot encoded vector. This leads to models being too overly confident when presented with images or classes that were not present in the training distribution. The capacity of a system to be aware of the boundaries of the learned tasks and identify anomalies or classes which have not been learned yet is key to lifelong learning and autonomous systems. In this thesis, we present a metric learning approach to out-of-distribution detection that learns the task at hand on an embedding space. |
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Lei Kang. (2020). Robust Handwritten Text Recognition in Scarce Labeling Scenarios: Disentanglement, Adaptation and Generation (Alicia Fornes, Marçal Rusiñol, & Mauricio Villegas, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Handwritten documents are not only preserved in historical archives but also widely used in administrative documents such as cheques and claims. With the rise of the deep learning era, many state-of-the-art approaches have achieved good performance on specific datasets for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, it is still challenging to solve real use cases because of the varied handwriting styles across different writers and the limited labeled data. Thus, both explorin a more robust handwriting recognition architectures and proposing methods to diminish the gap between the source and target data in an unsupervised way are
demanded. In this thesis, firstly, we explore novel architectures for HTR, from Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) method with attention mechanism to non-recurrent Transformer-based method. Secondly, we focus on diminishing the performance gap between source and target data in an unsupervised way. Finally, we propose a group of generative methods for handwritten text images, which could be utilized to increase the training set to obtain a more robust recognizer. In addition, by simply modifying the generative method and joining it with a recognizer, we end up with an effective disentanglement method to distill textual content from handwriting styles so as to achieve a generalized recognition performance. We outperform state-of-the-art HTR performances in the experimental results among different scientific and industrial datasets, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. To the best of our knowledge, the non-recurrent recognizer and the disentanglement method are the first contributions in the handwriting recognition field. Furthermore, we have outlined the potential research lines, which would be interesting to explore in the future. |
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Manuel Carbonell. (2020). Neural Information Extraction from Semi-structured Documents A (Alicia Fornes, Mauricio Villegas, & Josep Llados, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Sectors as fintech, legaltech or insurance process an inflow of millions of forms, invoices, id documents, claims or similar every day. Together with these, historical archives provide gigantic amounts of digitized documents containing useful information that needs to be stored in machine encoded text with a meaningful structure. This procedure, known as information extraction (IE) comprises the steps of localizing and recognizing text, identifying named entities contained in it and optionally finding relationships among its elements. In this work we explore multi-task neural models at image and graph level to solve all steps in a unified way. While doing so we find benefits and limitations of these end-to-end approaches in comparison with sequential separate methods. More specifically, we first propose a method to produce textual as well as semantic labels with a unified model from handwritten text line images. We do so with the use of a convolutional recurrent neural model trained with connectionist temporal classification to predict the textual as well as semantic information encoded in the images. Secondly, motivated by the success of this approach we investigate the unification of the localization and recognition tasks of handwritten text in full pages with an end-to-end model, observing benefits in doing so. Having two models that tackle information extraction subsequent task pairs in an end-to-end to end manner, we lastly contribute with a method to put them all together in a single neural network to solve the whole information extraction pipeline in a unified way. Doing so we observe some benefits and some limitations in the approach, suggesting that in certain cases it is beneficial to train specialized models that excel at a single challenging task of the information extraction process, as it can be the recognition of named entities or the extraction of relationships between them. For this reason we lastly study the use of the recently arrived graph neural network architectures for the semantic tasks of the information extraction process, which are recognition of named entities and relation extraction, achieving promising results on the relation extraction part.
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Gemma Rotger. (2021). Lifelike Humans: Detailed Reconstruction of Expressive Human Faces (Felipe Lumbreras, & Antonio Agudo, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Developing human-like digital characters is a challenging task since humans are used to recognizing our fellows, and find the computed generated characters inadequately humanized. To fulfill the standards of the videogame and digital film productions it is necessary to model and animate these characters the most closely to human beings. However, it is an arduous and expensive task, since many artists and specialists are required to work on a single character. Therefore, to fulfill these requirements we found an interesting option to study the automatic creation of detailed characters through inexpensive setups. In this work, we develop novel techniques to bring detailed characters by combining different aspects that stand out when developing realistic characters, skin detail, facial hairs, expressions, and microexpressions. We examine each of the mentioned areas with the aim of automatically recover each of the parts without user interaction nor training data. We study the problems for their robustness but also for the simplicity of the setup, preferring single-image with uncontrolled illumination and methods that can be easily computed with the commodity of a standard laptop. A detailed face with wrinkles and skin details is vital to develop a realistic character. In this work, we introduce our method to automatically describe facial wrinkles on the image and transfer to the recovered base face. Then we advance to facial hair recovery by resolving a fitting problem with a novel parametrization model. As of last, we develop a mapping function that allows transfer expressions and microexpressions between different meshes, which provides realistic animations to our detailed mesh. We cover all the mentioned points with the focus on key aspects as (i) how to describe skin wrinkles in a simple and straightforward manner, (ii) how to recover 3D from 2D detections, (iii) how to recover and model facial hair from 2D to 3D, (iv) how to transfer expressions between models holding both skin detail and facial hair, (v) how to perform all the described actions without training data nor user interaction. In this work, we present our proposals to solve these aspects with an efficient and simple setup. We validate our work with several datasets both synthetic and real data, prooving remarkable results even in challenging cases as occlusions as glasses, thick beards, and indeed working with different face topologies like single-eyed cyclops.
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Petia Radeva, Amir Amini, Jintao Huang, & Enric Marti. (1996). Deformable B-Solids: application for localization and tracking of MRI-SPAMM data. CVC (UAB).
Abstract: To date, MRI-SPAMM data from different image slices have been analyzed independently. In this paper, we propose an approach for 3D tag localization and tracking of SPAMM data by a novel deformable B-solid. The solid is defined in terms of a 3D tensor product B-spline. The isoparametric curves of the B-spline solid have special importance. These are termed implicit snakes as they deform under image forces from tag lines in different image slices. The localization and tracking of tag lines is performed under constraints of continuity and smoothness of the B-solid. The framework unifies the problems of localization, and displacement fitting and interpolation into the same procedure utilizing B-spline bases for interpolation. To track motion from boundaries and restrict image forces to the myocardium, a volumetric model is employed as a pair of coupled endocardial and epicardial B-spline surfaces. To recover deformations in the LV an energy-minimization problem is posed where both tag and ...
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Albert Andaluz. (2012). Harmonic Phase Flow: User's guide. Barcelona: CVC.
Abstract: HPF is a plugin for the computation of clinical scores under Osirix.
This manual provides a basic guide for experienced clinical staff. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical background in which this plugin is based. Next, in chapter 2 we provide basic instructions for installing and uninstalling this plugin. chapter 3we shows a step-by-step scenario to compute clinical scores from tagged-MRI images with HPF. Finally, in chapter 4 we provide a quick guide for plugin developers |
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Debora Gil. (2002). Regularized Curvature Flow. Computer Vision Centre.
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Enric Marti. (1996). Análisis de elementos gráficos en documentos. CVC UAB: Computer Vision Centre.
Abstract: En este texto se presenta un estudio sobre las t’ecnicas y aplicaciones de an’alisis de documentos, y más concretamente abordando la problem’atica del an’alisis de de entidades gr’aficas. El ’area de an’alisis de documentos tiene como objetivo la interpretaci’on de documentos impresos sobre papel por m’etodos computacionales, para obtener una descripci’on con un alto nivel de abstracci’on, que permita su posterior tratamiento y archivo por m’etodos inform’aticos. Este objetivo, junto a los trabajos realizados hasta el momento, le otorgan a esta ’area un amplio ’ambito de aplicaciones para la manipulaci’on y archivo de documentos sobre papel, que puede llegar a significar un salto cualitativo importante (del papel al disco ’optico) en el uso de soportes de informaci’on, debido a las importantes prestaciones de acceso y capacidad de archivo que suponen los medios inform’aticos. Generalmente los documentos son introducidos en los sistemas de an’alisis de documentos mediante scanner, obt...
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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2003). Curvature based Distance Maps. Computer Vision Center.
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