Angel Sappa, & Mohammad Rouhani. (2009). Efficient Distance Estimation for Fitting Implicit Quadric Surfaces. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (3521–3524).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the shortest Euclidean distance from a given point to the corresponding implicit quadric fitting surface. It first estimates the orthogonal orientation to the surface from the given point; then the shortest distance is directly estimated by intersecting the implicit surface with a line passing through the given point according to the estimated orthogonal orientation. The proposed orthogonal distance estimation is easily obtained without increasing computational complexity; hence it can be used in error minimization surface fitting frameworks. Comparisons of the proposed metric with previous approaches are provided to show both improvements in CPU time as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results. Surfaces fitted by using the proposed geometric distance estimation and state of the art metrics are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.
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Gemma Roig, Xavier Boix, & Fernando De la Torre. (2009). Optimal Feature Selection for Subspace Image Matching. In 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Subspace Methods in conjunction.
Abstract: Image matching has been a central research topic in computer vision over the last decades. Typical approaches to correspondence involve matching feature points between images. In this paper, we present a novel problem for establishing correspondences between a sparse set of image features and a previously learned subspace model. We formulate the matching task as an energy minimization, and jointly optimize over all possible feature assignments and parameters of the subspace model. This problem is in general NP-hard. We propose a convex relaxation approximation, and develop two optimization strategies: naïve gradient-descent and quadratic programming. Alternatively, we reformulate the optimization criterion as a sparse eigenvalue problem, and solve it using a recently proposed backward greedy algorithm. Experimental results on facial feature detection show that the quadratic programming solution provides better selection mechanism for relevant features.
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Ariel Amato, Angel Sappa, Alicia Fornes, Felipe Lumbreras, & Josep Llados. (2013). Divide and Conquer: Atomizing and Parallelizing A Task in A Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform. In 2nd International ACM Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Multimedia (pp. 21–22).
Abstract: In this paper we present some conclusions about the advantages of having an efficient task formulation when a crowdsourcing platform is used. In particular we show how the task atomization and distribution can help to obtain results in an efficient way. Our proposal is based on a recursive splitting of the original task into a set of smaller and simpler tasks. As a result both more accurate and faster solutions are obtained. Our evaluation is performed on a set of ancient documents that need to be digitized.
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Angel Sappa, Niki Aifanti, Sotiris Malassiotis, & Michael G. Strintzis. (2009). Prior Knowledge Based Motion Model Representation. In Horst Bunke, JuanJose Villanueva, & Gemma Sanchez (Eds.), Progress in Computer Vision and Image Analysis (Vol. 16).
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Carme Julia, Angel Sappa, Felipe Lumbreras, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2009). Predicting Missing Ratings in Recommender Systems: Adapted Factorization Approach. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 14(1), 89–108.
Abstract: The paper presents a factorization-based approach to make predictions in recommender systems. These systems are widely used in electronic commerce to help customers find products according to their preferences. Taking into account the customer's ratings of some products available in the system, the recommender system tries to predict the ratings the customer would give to other products in the system. The proposed factorization-based approach uses all the information provided to compute the predicted ratings, in the same way as approaches based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The main advantage of this technique versus SVD-based approaches is that it can deal with missing data. It also has a smaller computational cost. Experimental results with public data sets are provided to show that the proposed adapted factorization approach gives better predicted ratings than a widely used SVD-based approach.
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Partha Pratim Roy, Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal. (2009). A Complete System for Detection and Recognition of Text in Graphical Documents using Background Information. In 5th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications.
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2009). Seal detection and recognition: An approach for document indexing. In 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (101–105).
Abstract: Reliable indexing of documents having seal instances can be achieved by recognizing seal information. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting and classifying such multi-oriented seals in these documents. First, Hough Transform based methods are applied to extract the seal regions in documents. Next, isolated text characters within these regions are detected. Rotation and size invariant features and a support vector machine based classifier have been used to recognize these detected text characters. Next, for each pair of character, we encode their relative spatial organization using their distance and angular position with respect to the centre of the seal, and enter this code into a hash table. Given an input seal, we recognize the individual text characters and compute the code for pair-wise character based on the relative spatial organization. The code obtained from the input seal helps to retrieve model hypothesis from the hash table. The seal model to which we get maximum hypothesis is selected for the recognition of the input seal. The methodology is tested to index seal in rotation and size invariant environment and we obtained encouraging results.
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, Josep Llados, & Mathieu Nicolas Delalandre. (2009). Multi-Oriented and Multi-Sized Touching Character Segmentation using Dynamic Programming. In 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (11–15).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region at the background portion. Using Convex Hull information, we use these background information to find some initial points to segment a touching string into possible primitive segments (a primitive segment consists of a single character or a part of a character). Next these primitive segments are merged to get optimum segmentation and dynamic programming is applied using total likelihood of characters as the objective function. SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Circular ring and convex hull ring based approach has been used along with angular information of the contour pixels of the character to make the feature rotation invariant. From the experiment, we obtained encouraging results.
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Carlo Gatta, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Bilateral Enhancers. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 3161–3165).
Abstract: Ten years ago the concept of bilateral filtering (BF) became popular in the image processing community. The core of the idea is to blend the effect of a spatial filter, as e.g. the Gaussian filter, with the effect of a filter that acts on image values. The two filters acts on orthogonal domains of a picture: the 2D lattice of the image support and the intensity (or color) domain. The BF approach is an intuitive way to blend these two filters giving rise to algorithms that perform difficult tasks requiring a relatively simple design. In this paper we extend the concept of BF, proposing the bilateral enhancers (BE). We show how to design proper functions to obtain an edge-preserving smoothing and a selective sharpening. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm can perform edge-preserving smoothing and selective sharpening simultaneously in a single filtering.
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Dena Bazazian. (2018). Fully Convolutional Networks for Text Understanding in Scene Images (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Andrew Bagdanov, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.
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Arnau Ramisa, Adriana Tapus, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Robust Vision-Based Localization using Combinations of Local Feature Regions Detectors. AR - Autonomous Robots, 27(4), 373–385.
Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.
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David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, Arnau Ramisa, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Efficient Object Pixel-Level Categorization using Bag of Features: Advances in Visual Computing. In 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 5875, 44–55). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we present a pixel-level object categorization method suitable to be applied under real-time constraints. Since pixels are categorized using a bag of features scheme, the major bottleneck of such an approach would be the feature pooling in local histograms of visual words. Therefore, we propose to bypass this time-consuming step and directly obtain the score from a linear Support Vector Machine classifier. This is achieved by creating an integral image of the components of the SVM which can readily obtain the classification score for any image sub-window with only 10 additions and 2 products, regardless of its size. Besides, we evaluated the performance of two efficient feature quantization methods: the Hierarchical K-Means and the Extremely Randomized Forest. All experiments have been done in the Graz02 database, showing comparable, or even better results to related work with a lower computational cost.
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David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, Arnau Ramisa, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Visual Registration Method For A Low Cost Robot: Computer Vision Systems. In 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (Vol. 5815, 204–214). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: An autonomous mobile robot must face the correspondence or data association problem in order to carry out tasks like place recognition or unknown environment mapping. In order to put into correspondence two maps, most methods estimate the transformation relating the maps from matches established between low level feature extracted from sensor data. However, finding explicit matches between features is a challenging and computationally expensive task. In this paper, we propose a new method to align obstacle maps without searching explicit matches between features. The maps are obtained from a stereo pair. Then, we use a vocabulary tree approach to identify putative corresponding maps followed by the Newton minimization algorithm to find the transformation that relates both maps. The proposed method is evaluated in a typical office environment showing good performance.
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Arnau Ramisa, Shrihari Vasudevan, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Evaluation of the SIFT Object Recognition Method in Mobile Robots: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. In 12th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 202, pp. 9–18).
Abstract: General object recognition in mobile robots is of primary importance in order to enhance the representation of the environment that robots will use for their reasoning processes. Therefore, we contribute reduce this gap by evaluating the SIFT Object Recognition method in a challenging dataset, focusing on issues relevant to mobile robotics. Resistance of the method to the robotics working conditions was found, but it was limited mainly to well-textured objects.
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Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, O. Rodriguez-Leor, J. M. Ferre, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Fast Rigid Registration of Vascular Structures in IVUS Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 13(6), 106–1011.
Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) technology permits visualization of high-resolution images of internal vascular structures. IVUS is a unique image-guiding tool to display longitudinal view of the vessels, and estimate the length and size of vascular structures with the goal of accurate diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to pulsatile contraction and expansion of the heart, the captured images are affected by different motion artifacts that make visual inspection difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that aligns vascular structures and strongly reduces the saw-shaped oscillation, simplifying the inspection of longitudinal cuts; it reduces the motion artifacts caused by the displacement of the catheter in the short-axis plane and the catheter rotation due to vessel tortuosity. The algorithm prototype aligns 3.16 frames/s and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with similar computational cost. The speed of the algorithm is crucial since it allows to inspect the corrected sequence during patient intervention. Moreover, we improved an indirect methodology for IVUS rigid registration algorithm evaluation.
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