Abstract: The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modelling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness and orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images and a natural bacteria-centred coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimising an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modelling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at http://fluobactracker.inrialpes.fr.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel system for automatic sleep system recommendation using RGB, depth and pressure information. It consists of a validated clinical knowledge-based model that, along with a set of prescription variables extracted automatically, obtains a personalized bed design recommendation. The automatic process starts by performing multi-part human body RGB-D segmentation combining GrabCut, 3D Shape Context descriptor and Thin Plate Splines, to then extract a set of anthropometric landmark points by applying orthogonal plates to the segmented human body. The extracted variables are introduced to the computerized clinical model to calculate body circumferences, weight, morphotype and Body Mass Index categorization. Furthermore, pressure image analysis is performed to extract pressure values and at-risk points, which are also introduced to the model to eventually obtain the final prescription of mattress, topper, and pillow. We validate the complete system in a set of 200 subjects, showing accurate category classification and high correlation results with respect to manual measures.

Abstract: While wearable cameras are becoming increasingly popular, locating relevant information in large unstructured collections of egocentric images is still a tedious and time consuming processes. This paper addresses the problem of organizing egocentric photo streams acquired by a wearable camera into semantically meaningful segments. First, contextual and semantic information is extracted for each image by employing a Convolutional Neural Networks approach. Later, by integrating language processing, a vocabulary of concepts is defined in a semantic space. Finally, by exploiting the temporal coherence in photo streams, images which share contextual and semantic attributes are grouped together. The resulting temporal segmentation is particularly suited for further analysis, ranging from activity and event recognition to semantic indexing and summarization. Experiments over egocentric sets of nearly 17,000 images, show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.