Sergio Escalera, David Masip, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Online Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(3), 458–467.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.
|
Maria Salamo, & Sergio Escalera. (2011). Increasing Retrieval Quality in Conversational Recommenders. TKDE - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 99, 1.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 2.286 2009 24/103
JCR Impact Factor 2010: 1.851
A major task of research in conversational recommender systems is personalization. Critiquing is a common and powerful form of feedback, where a user can express her feature preferences by applying a series of directional critiques over the recommendations instead of providing specific preference values. Incremental Critiquing is a conversational recommender system that uses critiquing as a feedback to efficiently personalize products. The expectation is that in each cycle the system retrieves the products that best satisfy the user’s soft product preferences from a minimal information input. In this paper, we present a novel technique that increases retrieval quality based on a combination of compatibility and similarity scores. Under the hypothesis that a user learns Turing the recommendation process, we propose two novel exponential reinforcement learning approaches for compatibility that take into account both the instant at which the user makes a critique and the number of satisfied critiques. Moreover, we consider that the impact of features on the similarity differs according to the preferences manifested by the user. We propose a global weighting approach that uses a common weight for nearest cases in order to focus on groups of relevant products. We show that our methodology significantly improves recommendation efficiency in four data sets of different sizes in terms of session length in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our recommender shows higher robustness against noisy user data when compared to classical approaches
|
Jose Seabra, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, Petia Radeva, & Joao Sanchez. (2011). Rayleigh Mixture Model for Plaque Characterization in Intravascular Ultrasound. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(5), 1314–1324.
Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
|
Carme Julia, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2011). A Factorization-based Approach to Photometric Stereo. IJIST - International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, 21(1), 115–119.
Abstract: This article presents an adaptation of a factorization technique to tackle the photometric stereo problem. That is to recover the surface normals and reflectance of an object from a set of images obtained under different lighting conditions. The main contribution of the proposed approach is to consider pixels in shadow and saturated regions as missing data, in order to reduce their influence to the result. Concretely, an adapted Alternation technique is used to deal with missing data. Experimental results considering both synthetic and real images show the viability of the proposed factorization-based strategy. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 21, 115–119, 2011.
|
Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Rank Estimation in Missing Data Matrix Problems. JMIV - Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 39(2), 140–160.
Abstract: A novel technique for missing data matrix rank estimation is presented. It is focused on matrices of trajectories, where every element of the matrix corresponds to an image coordinate from a feature point of a rigid moving object at a given frame; missing data are represented as empty entries. The objective of the proposed approach is to estimate the rank of a missing data matrix in order to fill in empty entries with some matrix completion method, without using or assuming neither the number of objects contained in the scene nor the kind of their motion. The key point of the proposed technique consists in studying the frequency behaviour of the individual trajectories, which are seen as 1D signals. The main assumption is that due to the rigidity of the moving objects, the frequency content of the trajectories will be similar after filling in their missing entries. The proposed rank estimation approach can be used in different computer vision problems, where the rank of a missing data matrix needs to be estimated. Experimental results with synthetic and real data are provided in order to empirically show the good performance of the proposed approach.
|
Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrew Bagdanov, & Xavier Roca. (2011). Efficient Discriminative Multiresolution Cascade for Real-Time Human Detection Applications. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(13), 1581–1587.
Abstract: Human detection is fundamental in many machine vision applications, like video surveillance, driving assistance, action recognition and scene understanding. However in most of these applications real-time performance is necessary and this is not achieved yet by current detection methods.
This paper presents a new method for human detection based on a multiresolution cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that can highly reduce the computational cost of detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed of HOG features at different resolutions, from coarse at the first level to fine at the last one.
In contrast to previous methods, our approach uses a non-uniform stride of the sliding window that is defined by the feature resolution and allows the detection to be incrementally refined as going from coarse-to-fine resolution. In this way, the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the fewer number of features computed at the first levels of the cascade, but also to the reduced number of windows that need to be evaluated at the coarse resolution. Experimental results show that our method reaches a detection rate comparable with the state-of-the-art of detectors based on HOG features, while at the same time the detection search is up to 23 times faster.
|
Pierluigi Casale, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2012). Personalization and User Verification in Wearable Systems using Biometric Walking Patterns. PUC - Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(5), 563–580.
Abstract: In this article, a novel technique for user’s authentication and verification using gait as a biometric unobtrusive pattern is proposed. The method is based on a two stages pipeline. First, a general activity recognition classifier is personalized for an specific user using a small sample of her/his walking pattern. As a result, the system is much more selective with respect to the new walking pattern. A second stage verifies whether the user is an authorized one or not. This stage is defined as a one-class classification problem. In order to solve this problem, a four-layer architecture is built around the geometric concept of convex hull. This architecture allows to improve robustness to outliers, modeling non-convex shapes, and to take into account temporal coherence information. Two different scenarios are proposed as validation with two different wearable systems. First, a custom high-performance wearable system is built and used in a free environment. A second dataset is acquired from an Android-based commercial device in a ‘wild’ scenario with rough terrains, adversarial conditions, crowded places and obstacles. Results on both systems and datasets are very promising, reducing the verification error rates by an order of magnitude with respect to the state-of-the-art technologies.
|
Ferran Diego, Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Video Alignment for Change Detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(7), 1858–1869.
Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of aligning two video sequences. Such alignment refers to synchronization, i.e., the establishment of temporal correspondence between frames of the first and second video, followed by spatial registration of all the temporally corresponding frames. Video synchronization and alignment have been attempted before, but most often in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, restrictive assumptions have been applied, including linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of any solutions developed. We intend to solve the more general problem of aligning video sequences recorded by independently moving cameras that follow similar trajectories, based only on the fusion of image intensity and GPS information. The novelty of our approach is to pose the synchronization as a MAP inference problem on a Bayesian network including the observations from these two sensor types, which have been proved complementary. Alignment results are presented in the context of videos recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times, for different road types. In addition, we explore two applications of the proposed video alignment method, both based on change detection between aligned videos. One is the detection of vehicles, which could be of use in ADAS. The other is online difference spotting videos of surveillance rounds.
Keywords: video alignment
|
Fernando Vilariño, Panagiota Spyridonos, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, Fernando Azpiroz, & Juan Malagelada. (2009). Device, system and method for measurement and analysis of contractile activity.
Abstract: A method and system for determining intestinal dysfunction condition are provided by classifying and analyzing image frames captured in-vivo. The method and system also relate to the detection of contractile activity in intestinal tracts, to automatic detection of video image frames taken in the gastrointestinal tract including contractile activity, and more particularly to measurement and analysis of contractile activity of the GI tract based on image intensity of in vivo image data.
|
Gerard Lacey, & Fernando Vilariño. (2011). Endoscopy system with motion sensors.
Abstract: An endoscopy system (1) comprises an endoscope (2) with a camera (3) at its tip. The endoscope extends through an endoscope guide (4) for guiding movement of the endoscope and for measurement of its movement as it enters the body. The guide (4) comprises a generally conical body (5) having a through passage (105) through which the endoscope (2) extends. A motion sensor comprises an optical transmitter (7) and a detector (8) mounted alongside the passage (105) to measure the insertion-withdrawal linear motion and also rotation of the endoscope by the endoscopist's hand. The system (1) also comprises a flexure controller (10) having wheels operated by the endoscopist. The camera (3), the motion sensor (7/8), and the flexure controller (10) are all connected to a processor (11) which feeds a display.
|
Fernando Vilariño, Panagiota Spyridonos, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, Fernando Azpiroz, & Juan Malagelada. (2010). Method for automatic classification of in vivo images.
Abstract: A method for automatically detecting a post-duodenal boundary in an image stream of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The image stream is sampled to obtain a reduced set of images for processing. The reduced set of images is filtered to remove non-valid frames or non-valid portions of frames, thereby generating a filtered set of valid images. A polar representation of the valid images is generated. Textural features of the polar representation are processed to detect the post-duodenal boundary of the GI tract.
|
Panagiota Spyridonos, Fernando Vilariño, Jordi Vitria, Petia Radeva, Fernando Azpiroz, & Juan Malagelada. (2011). Device, system and method for automatic detection of contractile activity in an image frame.
Abstract: A device, system and method for automatic detection of contractile activity of a body lumen in an image frame is provided, wherein image frames during contractile activity are captured and/or image frames including contractile activity are automatically detected, such as through pattern recognition and/or feature extraction to trace image frames including contractions, e.g., with wrinkle patterns. A manual procedure of annotation of contractions, e.g. tonic contractions in capsule endoscopy, may consist of the visualization of the whole video by a specialist, and the labeling of the contraction frames. Embodiments of the present invention may be suitable for implementation in an in vivo imaging system.
|
Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, Fernando Vilariño, Panagiota Spyridonos, Fernando Azpiroz, Juan Malagelada, et al. (2009). Cascade analysis for intestinal contraction detection. US Patent Office.
Abstract: A method and system cascade analysisi for intestinal contraction detection is provided by extracting from image frames captured in-vivo. The method and system also relate to the detection of turbid liquids in intestinal tracts, to automatic detection of video image frames taken in the gastrointestinal tract including a field of view obstructed by turbid media, and more particulary, to extraction of image data obstructed by turbid media.
|
Jorge Bernal, F. Javier Sanchez, & Fernando Vilariño. (2011). Depth of Valleys Accumulation Algorithm for Object Detection. In 14th Congrès Català en Intel·ligencia Artificial (Vol. 1, pp. 71–80).
Abstract: This work aims at detecting in which regions the objects in the image are by using information about the intensity of valleys, which appear to surround ob- jects in images where the source of light is in the line of direction than the camera. We present our depth of valleys accumulation method, which consists of two stages: first, the definition of the depth of valleys image which combines the output of a ridges and valleys detector with the morphological gradient to measure how deep is a point inside a valley and second, an algorithm that denotes points of the image as interior to objects those which are inside complete or incomplete boundaries in the depth of valleys image. To evaluate the performance of our method we have tested it on several application domains. Our results on object region identification are promising, specially in the field of polyp detection in colonoscopy videos, and we also show its applicability in different areas.
Keywords: Object Recognition, Object Region Identification, Image Analysis, Image Processing
|
Jorge Bernal, F. Javier Sanchez, & Fernando Vilariño. (2011). Integration of Valley Orientation Distribution for Polyp Region Identification in Colonoscopy. In In MICCAI 2011 Workshop on Computational and Clinical Applications in Abdominal Imaging (Vol. 6668, pp. 76–83). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Link.
Abstract: This work presents a region descriptor based on the integration of the information that the depth of valleys image provides. The depth of valleys image is based on the presence of intensity valleys around polyps due to the image acquisition. Our proposed method consists of defining, for each point, a series of radial sectors around it and then accumulates the maxima of the depth of valleys image only if the orientation of the intensity valley coincides with the orientation of the sector above. We apply our descriptor to a prior segmentation of the images and we present promising results on polyp detection, outperforming other approaches that also integrate depth of valleys information.
|
