Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a device that allows the direct visualization of gastrointestinal tract with minimal discomfort for the patient, but at the price of a large amount of time for screening. In order to reduce this time, several works have proposed to automatically remove all the frames showing intestinal content. These methods label frames as {intestinal content – clear} without discriminating between types of content (with different physiological meaning) or the portion of image covered. In addition, since the presence of intestinal content has been identified as an indicator of intestinal motility, its accurate quantification can show a potential clinical relevance. In this paper, we present a method for the robust detection and segmentation of intestinal content in WCE images, together with its further discrimination between turbid liquid and bubbles. Our proposal is based on a twofold system. First, frames presenting intestinal content are detected by a support vector machine classifier using color and textural information. Second, intestinal content frames are segmented into {turbid, bubbles, and clear} regions. We show a detailed validation using a large dataset. Our system outperforms previous methods and, for the first time, discriminates between turbid from bubbles media.

Abstract: Video alignment is important in different areas of computer vision such as wide baseline matching, action recognition, change detection, video copy detection and frame dropping prevention. Current video alignment methods usually deal with a relatively simple case of fixed or rigidly attached cameras or simultaneous acquisition. Therefore, in this paper we propose a joint video alignment for bringing two video sequences into a spatio-temporal alignment. Specifically, the novelty of the paper is to formulate the video alignment to fold the spatial and temporal alignment into a single alignment framework. This simultaneously satisfies a frame-correspondence and frame-alignment similarity; exploiting the knowledge among neighbor frames by a standard pairwise Markov random field (MRF). This new formulation is able to handle the alignment of sequences recorded at different times by independent moving cameras that follows a similar trajectory, and also generalizes the particular cases that of fixed geometric transformation and/or linear temporal mapping. We conduct experiments on different scenarios such as sequences recorded simultaneously or by moving cameras to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The proposed method provides the highest video alignment accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods on sequences recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times.

Abstract: We present a novel technique for estimating initial 3D poses in the context of localization and Visual SLAM problems. The presented approach can deal with noise, outliers and a large amount of input data and still performs in real time in a standard CPU. Our method produces solutions with an accuracy comparable to those produced by RANSAC but can be much faster when the percentage of outliers is high or for large amounts of input data. On the current work we propose to formulate the pose estimation as an optimization problem on Lie groups, considering their manifold structure as well as their associated Lie algebras. This allows us to perform a fast and simple optimization at the same time that conserve all the constraints imposed by the Lie group SE(3). Additionally, we present several key design concepts related with the cost function and its Jacobian; aspects that are critical for the good performance of the algorithm.

Abstract: Moving cast shadows are a major concern in today’s performance from broad range of many vision-based surveillance applications because they highly difficult the object classification task. Several shadow detection methods have been reported in the literature during the last years. They are mainly divided into two domains. One usually works with static images, whereas the second one uses image sequences, namely video content. In spite of the fact that both cases can be analogously analyzed, there is a difference in the application field. The first case, shadow detection methods can be exploited in order to obtain additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object (‘shape from shadows’) as well as the localization of the light source. While in the second one, the main purpose is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance (usually in a background subtraction context). Shadows can in fact modify in a negative way the shape and color of the target object and therefore affect the performance of scene analysis and interpretation in many applications. This chapter wills mainly reviews shadow detection methods as well as their taxonomies related with the second case, thus aiming at those shadows which are associated with moving objects (moving shadows).

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: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is commonly used in gesture recognition tasks in order to tackle the temporal length variability of gestures. In the DTW framework, a set of gesture patterns are compared one by one to a maybe infinite test sequence, and a query gesture category is recognized if a warping cost below a certain threshold is found within the test sequence. Nevertheless, either taking one single sample per gesture category or a set of isolated samples may not encode the variability of such gesture category. In this paper, a probability-based DTW for gesture recognition is proposed. Different samples of the same gesture pattern obtained from RGB-Depth data are used to build a Gaussian-based probabilistic model of the gesture. Finally, the cost of DTW has been adapted accordingly to the new model. The proposed approach is tested in a challenging scenario, showing better performance of the probability-based DTW in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches for gesture recognition on RGB-D data.

Abstract: We present a Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words (BoVDW) model for gesture recognition, an extension of the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model, that benefits from the multimodal fusion of visual and depth features. State-of-the-art RGB and depth features, including a new proposed depth descriptor, are analysed and combined in a late fusion fashion. The method is integrated in a continuous gesture recognition pipeline, where Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm is used to perform prior segmentation of gestures. Results of the method in public data sets, within our gesture recognition pipeline, show better performance in comparison to a standard BoVW model.

Abstract: This paper explores the utilization of product graph for spotting symbols on graphical documents. Product graph is intended to find the candidate subgraphs or components in the input graph containing the paths similar to the query graph. The acute angle between two edges and their length ratio are considered as the node labels. In a second step, each of the candidate subgraphs in the input graph is assigned with a distance measure computed by a random walk kernel. Actually it is the minimum of the distances of the component to all the components of the model graph. This distance measure is then used to eliminate dissimilar components. The remaining neighboring components are grouped and the grouped zone is considered as a retrieval zone of a symbol similar to the queried one. The entire method works online, i.e., it doesn't need any preprocessing step. The present paper reports the initial results of the method, which are very encouraging.