Abstract: One of the most widely used assumptions in supervised learning is that data is independent and identically distributed. This assumption does not hold true in many real cases. Sequential learning is the discipline of machine learning that deals with dependent data such that neighboring examples exhibit some kind of relationship. In the literature, there are different approaches that try to capture and exploit this correlation, by means of different methodologies. In this paper we focus on meta-learning strategies and, in particular, the stacked sequential learning approach. The main contribution of this work is two-fold: first, we generalize the stacked sequential learning. This generalization reflects the key role of neighboring interactions modeling. Second, we propose an effective and efficient way of capturing and exploiting sequential correlations that takes into account long-range interactions by means of a multi-scale pyramidal decomposition of the predicted labels. Additionally, this new method subsumes the standard stacked sequential learning approach. We tested the proposed method on two different classification tasks: text lines classification in a FAQ data set and image classification. Results on these tasks clearly show that our approach outperforms the standard stacked sequential learning. Moreover, we show that the proposed method allows to control the trade-off between the detail and the desired range of the interactions.

Abstract: An improved method for visual gamma correction is developed for LCD displays to increase the accuracy of digital colour reproduction. Rather than utilising a photometric measurement device, we use observ- ers’ visual luminance judgements for gamma correction. Eight half tone patterns were designed to gen- erate relative luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 for each colour channel. A psychophysical experiment was conducted on an LCD display to find the digital signals corresponding to each relative luminance by visually matching the half-tone background to a uniform colour patch. Both inter- and intra-observer vari- ability for the eight luminance matches in each channel were assessed and the luminance matches proved to be consistent across observers (DE00 < 3.5) and repeatable (DE00 < 2.2). Based on the individual observer judgements, the display opto-electronic transfer function (OETF) was estimated by using either a 3rd order polynomial regression or linear interpolation for each colour channel. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by predicting the CIE tristimulus values of a set of coloured patches (using the observer-based OETFs) and comparing them to the expected CIE tristimulus values (using the OETF obtained from spectro-radiometric luminance measurements). The resulting colour differences range from 2 to 4.6 DE00. We conclude that this observer-based method of visual gamma correction is useful to estimate the OETF for LCD displays. Its major advantage is that no particular functional relationship between digital inputs and luminance outputs has to be assumed.

Abstract: IF= 2.61
IF=2.61 (2010)
In this paper we introduce a novel supervised manifold learning technique called Supervised Laplacian Eigenmaps (S-LE), which makes use of class label information to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction by adopting the large margin concept. The graph Laplacian is split into two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data. Our approach has two important characteristics: (i) it adaptively estimates the local neighborhood surrounding each sample based on data density and similarity and (ii) the objective function simultaneously maximizes the local margin between heterogeneous samples and pushes the homogeneous samples closer to each other.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques, demonstrating its superiority. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variations in their appearance (such as hand or body pose, for instance.

Abstract: This work aims at the automatic polyp detection by using a model of polyp appearance in the context of the analysis of colonoscopy videos. Our method consists of three stages: region segmentation, region description and region classification. The performance of our region segmentation method guarantees that if a polyp is present in the image, it will be exclusively and totally contained in a single region. The output of the algorithm also defines which regions can be considered as non-informative. We define as our region descriptor the novel Sector Accumulation-Depth of Valleys Accumulation (SA-DOVA), which provides a necessary but not sufficient condition for the polyp presence. Finally, we classify our segmented regions according to the maximal values of the SA-DOVA descriptor. Our preliminary classification results are promising, especially when classifying those parts of the image that do not contain a polyp inside.

Abstract: We propose an automatic surveillance system for user identification and object recognition based on multi-modal RGB-Depth data analysis. We model a RGBD environment learning a pixel-based background Gaussian distribution. Then, user and object candidate regions are detected and recognized using robust statistical approaches. The system robustly recognizes users and updates the system in an online way, identifying and detecting new actors in the scene. Moreover, segmented objects are described, matched, recognized, and updated online using view-point 3D descriptions, being robust to partial occlusions and local 3D viewpoint rotations. Finally, the system saves the historic of user–object assignments, being specially useful for surveillance scenarios. The system has been evaluated on a novel data set containing different indoor/outdoor scenarios, objects, and users, showing accurate recognition and better performance than standard state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an On-line Appearance-Based Tracker (OABT) for simultaneous tracking of 3D head pose, lips, eyebrows, eyelids and irises in monocular video sequences. In contrast to previously proposed tracking approaches, which deal with face and gaze tracking separately, our OABT can also be used for eyelid and iris tracking, as well as 3D head pose, lips and eyebrows facial actions tracking. Furthermore, our approach applies an on-line learning of changes in the appearance of the tracked target. Hence, the prior training of appearance models, which usually requires a large amount of labeled facial images, is avoided. Moreover, the proposed method is built upon a hierarchical combination of three OABTs, which are optimized using a Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm (LMA) enhanced with line-search procedures. This, in turn, makes the proposed method robust to changes in lighting conditions, occlusions and translucent textures, as evidenced by our experiments. Finally, the proposed method achieves head and facial actions tracking in real-time.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique in graphical documents. Graphs are used to represent the documents and a (sub)graph matching technique is used to detect the symbols in them. We propose a graph serialization to reduce the usual computational complexity of graph matching. Serialization of graphs is performed by computing acyclic graph paths between each pair of connected nodes. Graph paths are one-dimensional structures of graphs which are less expensive in terms of computation. At the same time they enable robust localization even in the presence of noise and distortion. Indexing in large graph databases involves a computational burden as well. We propose a graph factorization approach to tackle this problem. Factorization is intended to create a unified indexed structure over the database of graphical documents. Once graph paths are extracted, the entire database of graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by 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. We have performed detailed experiments with various datasets of line drawings and compared our method with the state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our technique.