Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2012). Improving Color Constancy by Photometric Edge Weighting. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(5), 918–929.
Abstract: : Edge-based color constancy methods make use of image derivatives to estimate the illuminant. However, different edge types exist in real-world images such as material, shadow and highlight edges. These different edge types may have a distinctive influence on the performance of the illuminant estimation. Therefore, in this paper, an extensive analysis is provided of different edge types on the performance of edge-based color constancy methods. First, an edge-based taxonomy is presented classifying edge types based on their photometric properties (e.g. material, shadow-geometry and highlights). Then, a performance evaluation of edge-based color constancy is provided using these different edge types. From this performance evaluation it is derived that specular and shadow edge types are more valuable than material edges for the estimation of the illuminant. To this end, the (iterative) weighted Grey-Edge algorithm is proposed in which these edge types are more emphasized for the estimation of the illuminant. Images that are recorded under controlled circumstances demonstrate that the proposed iterative weighted Grey-Edge algorithm based on highlights reduces the median angular error with approximately $25\%$. In an uncontrolled environment, improvements in angular error up to $11\%$ are obtained with respect to regular edge-based color constancy.
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R. Valenti, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Combining Head Pose and Eye Location Information for Gaze Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 802–815.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/12?: 3.32
Head pose and eye location for gaze estimation have been separately studied in numerous works in the literature. Previous research shows that satisfactory accuracy in head pose and eye location estimation can be achieved in constrained settings. However, in the presence of nonfrontal faces, eye locators are not adequate to accurately locate the center of the eyes. On the other hand, head pose estimation techniques are able to deal with these conditions; hence, they may be suited to enhance the accuracy of eye localization. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to combine head pose and eye location information to obtain enhanced gaze estimation. To this end, the transformation matrix obtained from the head pose is used to normalize the eye regions, and in turn, the transformation matrix generated by the found eye location is used to correct the pose estimation procedure. The scheme is designed to enhance the accuracy of eye location estimations, particularly in low-resolution videos, to extend the operative range of the eye locators, and to improve the accuracy of the head pose tracker. These enhanced estimations are then combined to obtain a novel visual gaze estimation system, which uses both eye location and head information to refine the gaze estimates. From the experimental results, it can be derived that the proposed unified scheme improves the accuracy of eye estimations by 16% to 23%. Furthermore, it considerably extends its operating range by more than 15° by overcoming the problems introduced by extreme head poses. Moreover, the accuracy of the head pose tracker is improved by 12% to 24%. Finally, the experimentation on the proposed combined gaze estimation system shows that it is accurate (with a mean error between 2° and 5°) and that it can be used in cases where classic approaches would fail without imposing restraints on the position of the head.
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Arjan Gijsenij, R. Lu, Theo Gevers, & De Xu. (2012). Color Constancy for Multiple Light Source. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 697–707.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/2012?: 3.32
Color constancy algorithms are generally based on the simplifying assumption that the spectral distribution of a light source is uniform across scenes. However, in reality, this assumption is often violated due to the presence of multiple light sources. In this paper, we will address more realistic scenarios where the uniform light-source assumption is too restrictive. First, a methodology is proposed to extend existing algorithms by applying color constancy locally to image patches, rather than globally to the entire image. After local (patch-based) illuminant estimation, these estimates are combined into more robust estimations, and a local correction is applied based on a modified diagonal model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on spectral and real images show that the proposed methodology reduces the influence of two light sources simultaneously present in one scene. If the chromatic difference between these two illuminants is more than 1° , the proposed framework outperforms algorithms based on the uniform light-source assumption (with error-reduction up to approximately 30%). Otherwise, when the chromatic difference is less than 1° and the scene can be considered to contain one (approximately) uniform light source, the performance of the proposed method framework is similar to global color constancy methods.
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Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Albert Ali Salah, & Theo Gevers. (2012). A Statistical Method for 2D Facial Landmarking. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 844–858.
Abstract: IF = 3.32
Many facial-analysis approaches rely on robust and accurate automatic facial landmarking to correctly function. In this paper, we describe a statistical method for automatic facial-landmark localization. Our landmarking relies on a parsimonious mixture model of Gabor wavelet features, computed in coarse-to-fine fashion and complemented with a shape prior. We assess the accuracy and the robustness of the proposed approach in extensive cross-database conditions conducted on four face data sets (Face Recognition Grand Challenge, Cohn-Kanade, Bosphorus, and BioID). Our method has 99.33% accuracy on the Bosphorus database and 97.62% accuracy on the BioID database on the average, which improves the state of the art. We show that the method is not significantly affected by low-resolution images, small rotations, facial expressions, and natural occlusions such as beard and mustache. We further test the goodness of the landmarks in a facial expression recognition application and report landmarking-induced improvement over baseline on two separate databases for video-based expression recognition (Cohn-Kanade and BU-4DFE).
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Francesc Tanarro Marquez, Pau Gratacos Marti, F. Javier Sanchez, Joan Ramon Jimenez Minguell, Coen Antens, & Enric Sala i Esteva. (2012). A device for monitoring condition of a railway supply. European Patent Office.
Abstract: of a railway supply line when the supply line is in contact with a head of a pantograph of a vehicle in order to power said vehicle . The device includes a camera ( for monitoring parameters indicative of operating capability of said supply line.
The device is intended to monitor condition
tive of operating capability of said supply line. The device includes a reflective element. comprising a pattern , intended to be arranged onto the pantograph head . The camera is intended to be arranged on the vehicle (10) so as to register the pattern position regarding a vertical direction.
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David Roche, Debora Gil, & Jesus Giraldo. (2012). Assessing agonist efficacy in an uncertain Em world. In A. Christopoulus and M. Bouvier (Ed.), 40th Keystone Symposia on mollecular and celular biology (79). Keystone Symposia.
Abstract: The operational model of agonism has been widely used for the analysis of agonist action since its formulation in 1983. The model includes the Em parameter, which is defined as the maximum response of the system. The methods for Em estimation provide Em values not significantly higher than the maximum responses achieved by full agonists. However, it has been found that that some classes of compounds as, for instance, superagonists and positive allosteric modulators can increase the full agonist maximum response, implying upper limits for Em and thereby posing doubts on the validity of Em estimates. Because of the correlation between Em and operational efficacy, τ, wrong Em estimates will yield wrong τ estimates.
In this presentation, the operational model of agonism and various methods for the simulation of allosteric modulation will be analyzed. Alternatives for curve fitting will be presented and discussed.
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Alberto Hidalgo, Ferran Poveda, Enric Marti, Debora Gil, Albert Andaluz, Francesc Carreras, et al. (2012). Evidence of continuous helical structure of the cardiac ventricular anatomy assessed by diffusion tensor imaging magnetic resonance multiresolution tractography. ECR - European Radiology, 3(1), 361–362.
Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and func- tion of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Diffusion tensor MRI provides a discrete measurement of the 3D arrangement of myocardial fibres by the observation of local anisotropic
diffusion of water molecules in biological tissues. In this work, we present a multi- scale visualisation technique based on DT-MRI streamlining capable of uncovering additional properties of the architectural organisation of the heart. Methods and Materials: We selected the John Hopkins University (JHU) Canine Heart Dataset, where the long axis cardiac plane is aligned with the scanner’s Z- axis. Their equipment included a 4-element passed array coil emitting a 1.5 T. For DTI acquisition, a 3D-FSE sequence is apply. We used 200 seeds for full-scale tractography, while we applied a MIP mapping technique for simplified tractographic reconstruction. In this case, we reduced each DTI 3D volume dimensions by order- two magnitude before streamlining.
Our simplified tractographic reconstruction method keeps the main geometric features of fibres, allowing for an easier identification of their global morphological disposition, including the ventricular basal ring. Moreover, we noticed a clearly visible helical disposition of the myocardial fibres, in line with the helical myocardial band ventricular structure described by Torrent-Guasp. Finally, our simplified visualisation with single tracts identifies the main segments of the helical ventricular architecture.
DT-MRI makes possible the identification of a continuous helical architecture of the myocardial fibres, which validates Torrent-Guasp’s helical myocardial band ventricular anatomical model.
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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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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Modulating Shape Features by Color Attention for Object Recognition. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1), 49–64.
Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.
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Jose Carlos Rubio, Joan Serrat, Antonio Lopez, & Daniel Ponsa. (2012). Multiple target tracking for intelligent headlights control. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 13(2), 594–605.
Abstract: Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.
Keywords: Intelligent Headlights
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). A Supervised Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Approach for Manifold Learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(6), 2432–2444.
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.
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Sergio Escalera, Xavier Baro, Jordi Vitria, Petia Radeva, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2012). Social Network Extraction and Analysis Based on Multimodal Dyadic Interaction. SENS - Sensors, 12(2), 1702–1719.
Abstract: IF=1.77 (2010)
Social interactions are a very important component in peopleís lives. Social network analysis has become a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from multimodal dyadic interactions. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Timesí Blogging Heads opinion blog.
The Social Network is represented as an oriented graph, whose directed links are determined by the Influence Model. The linksí weights are a measure of the ìinfluenceî a person has over the other. The states of the Influence Model encode automatically extracted audio/visual features from our videos using state-of-the art algorithms. Our results are reported in terms of accuracy of audio/visual data fusion for speaker segmentation and centrality measures used to characterize the extracted social network.
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Fadi Dornaika, Alireza Bosaghzadeh, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2012). LSDA Solution Schemes for Modelless 3D Head Pose Estimation. In IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 393–398).
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Appearance-based Face Recognition Using A Supervised Manifold Learning Framework. In IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 465–470). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: Many natural image sets, depicting objects whose appearance is changing due to motion, pose or light variations, can be considered samples of a low-dimension nonlinear manifold embedded in the high-dimensional observation space (the space of all possible images). The main contribution of our work is represented by a Supervised Laplacian Eigemaps (S-LE) algorithm, which exploits the class label information for mapping the original data in the embedded space. Our proposed approach benefits from two important properties: i) it is discriminative, and ii) it adaptively selects the neighbors of a sample without using any predefined neighborhood size. Experiments were conducted on four face databases and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms many linear and non-linear embedding techniques. Although we've focused on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be extended to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Santiago Segui, Michal Drozdzal, Petia Radeva, & Jordi Vitria. (2012). An Integrated Approach to Contextual Face Detection. In 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (pp. 143–150). Springer.
Abstract: Face detection is, in general, based on content-based detectors. Nevertheless, the face is a non-rigid object with well defined relations with respect to the human body parts. In this paper, we propose to take benefit of the context information in order to improve content-based face detections. We propose a novel framework for integrating multiple content- and context-based detectors in a discriminative way. Moreover, we develop an integrated scoring procedure that measures the ’faceness’ of each hypothesis and is used to discriminate the detection results. Our approach detects a higher rate of faces while minimizing the number of false detections, giving an average increase of more than 10% in average precision when comparing it to state-of-the art face detectors
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