Abstract: Searching for text objects in real scene images is an open problem and a very active computer vision research area. A large number of methods have been proposed tackling the text search as extension of the ones from the document analysis field or inspired by general purpose object detection methods. However the general problem of object search in real scene images remains an extremely challenging problem due to the huge variability in object appearance. This thesis builds on top of the most recent findings in the visual attention literature presenting a novel computational model of eye guidance aiming to better describe text object search in real scene images.
First are presented the relevant state-of-the-art results from the visual attention literature regarding eye movements and visual search. Relevant models of attention are discussed and integrated with recent observations on the role of top-down constraints and the emerging need for a layered model of attention in which saliency is not the only factor guiding attention. Visual attention is then explained by the interaction of several modulating factors, such as objects, value, plans and saliency. Then we introduce our probabilistic formulation of attention deployment in real scene. The model is based on the rationale that oculomotor control depends on two interacting but distinct processes: an attentional process that assigns value to the sources of information and motor process that flexibly links information with action.
In such framework, the choice of where to look next is task-dependent and oriented to classes of objects embedded within pictures of complex scenes. The dependence on task is taken into account by exploiting the value and the reward of gazing at certain image patches or proto-objects that provide a sparse representation of the scene objects.
In the experimental section the model is tested in laboratory condition, comparing model simulations with data from eye tracking experiments. The comparison is qualitative in terms of observable scan paths and quantitative in terms of statistical similarity of gaze shift amplitude. Experiments are performed using eye tracking data from both a publicly available dataset of face and text and from newly performed eye-tracking experiments on a dataset of street view pictures containing text. The last part of this thesis is dedicated to study the extent to which the proposed model can account for human eye movements in a low constrained setting. We used a mobile eye tracking device and an ad-hoc developed methodology to compare model simulated eye data with the human eye data from mobile eye tracking recordings. Such setting allow to test the model in an incomplete visual information condition, reproducing a close to real-life search task.

Abstract: There are countless collections of historical documents in archives and libraries that contain plenty of valuable information for historians and researchers. The extraction of this information has become a central task among the Document Analysis researches and practitioners.
There is an increasing interest to digital preserve and provide access to these kind of documents. But only the digitalization is not enough for the researchers. The extraction and/or indexation of information of this documents has had an increased interest among researchers. In many cases, and in particular in historical manuscripts, the full transcription of these documents is extremely dicult due the inherent deciencies: poor physical preservation, dierent writing styles, obsolete languages, etc. Word spotting has become a popular an ecient alternative to full transcription. It inherently involves a high level of degradation in the images. The search of words is holistically
formulated as a visual search of a given query shape in a larger image, instead of recognising the input text and searching the query word with an ascii string comparison. But the performance of classical word spotting approaches depend on the degradation level of the images being unacceptable in many cases . In this thesis we have proposed a novel paradigm called contextual word spotting method that uses the contextual/semantic information to achieve acceptable results whereas classical word spotting does not reach. The contextual word spotting framework proposed in this thesis is a segmentation-based word spotting approach, so an ecient word segmentation is needed. Historical handwritten
documents present some common diculties that can increase the diculties the extraction of the words. We have proposed a line segmentation approach that formulates the problem as nding the central part path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A path nding algorithm is used to nd the optimal path in a graph, previously computed, between the text lines. Once the text lines are extracted, words are localized inside the text lines using a word segmentation technique from the state of the
art. Classical word spotting approaches can be improved using the contextual information of the documents. We have introduced a new framework, oriented to handwritten documents that present a highly structure, to extract information making use of context. The framework is an ecient tool for semi-automatic transcription that uses the contextual information to achieve better results than classical word spotting approaches. The contextual information is
automatically discovered by recognizing repetitive structures and categorizing all the words according to semantic classes. The most frequent words in each semantic cluster are extracted and the same text is used to transcribe all them. The experimental results achieved in this thesis outperform classical word spotting approaches demonstrating the suitability of the proposed ensemble architecture for spotting words in historical handwritten documents using contextual information.

Abstract: Recent advances in endoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures. Among all endoscopic modalities, bronchoscopy is one of the most frequent with around 261 millions of procedures per year. Although the use of bronchoscopy is spread among clinical facilities it presents some drawbacks, being the visual inspection for the assessment of anatomical measurements the most prevalent of them. In
particular, inaccuracies in the estimation of the degree of stenosis (the percentage of obstructed airway) decreases its diagnostic yield and might lead to erroneous treatments. An objective computation of tracheal stenosis in bronchoscopy videos would constitute a breakthrough for this non-invasive technique and a reduction in treatment cost.
This thesis settles the first steps towards on-line reliable extraction of anatomical information from videobronchoscopy for computation of objective measures. In particular, we focus on the computation of the degree of stenosis, which is obtained by comparing the area delimited by a healthy tracheal ring and the stenosed lumen. Reliable extraction of airway structures in interventional videobronchoscopy is a challenging task. This is mainly due to the large variety of acquisition conditions (positions and illumination), devices (different digitalizations) and in videos acquired at the operating room the unpredicted presence of surgical devices (such as probe ends). This thesis contributes to on-line stenosis assessment in several ways. We
propose a parametric strategy for the extraction of lumen and tracheal rings regions based on the characterization of their geometry and appearance that guide a deformable model. The geometric and appearance characterization is based on a physical model describing the way bronchoscopy images are obtained and includes local and global descriptions. In order to ensure a systematic applicability we present a statistical framework to select the optimal
parameters of our method. Experiments perform on the first public annotated database, show that the performance of our method is comparable to the one provided by clinicians and its computation time allows for a on-line implementation in the operating room.

Abstract: In this work, we develop a generic framework that is able to handle the document retrieval problem in various scenarios such as searching for full page matches or retrieving the counterparts for specific document areas, focusing on their structural similarity or letting their visual resemblance to play a dominant role. Based on the spatial indexing technique, we propose to search for matches of local key-region pairs carrying both structural and visual information from the collection while a scheme allowing to adjust the relative contribution of structural and visual similarity is presented.
Based on the fact that the structure of documents is tightly linked with the distance among their elements, we firstly introduce an efficient detector named Distance Transform based Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (DTMSER). We illustrate that this detector is able to efficiently extract the structure of a document image as a dendrogram (hierarchical tree) of multi-scale key-regions that roughly correspond to letters, words and paragraphs. We demonstrate that, without benefiting from the structure information, the key-regions extracted by the DTMSER algorithm achieve better results comparing with state-of-the-art methods while much less amount of key-regions are employed.
We subsequently propose a pair-wise Bag of Words (BoW) framework to efficiently embed the explicit structure extracted by the DTMSER algorithm. We represent each document as a list of key-region pairs that correspond to the edges in the dendrogram where inclusion relationship is encoded. By employing those structural key-region pairs as the pooling elements for generating the histogram of features, the proposed method is able to encode the explicit inclusion relations into a BoW representation. The experimental results illustrate that the pair-wise BoW, powered by the embedded structural information, achieves remarkable improvement over the conventional BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW methods.
To handle various retrieval scenarios in one framework, we propose to directly query a series of key-region pairs, carrying both structure and visual information, from the collection. We introduce the spatial indexing techniques to the document retrieval community to speed up the structural relationship computation for key-region pairs. We firstly test the proposed framework in a full page retrieval scenario where structurally similar matches are expected. In this case, the pair-wise querying method achieves notable improvement over the BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW frameworks. Furthermore, we illustrate that the proposed method is also able to handle focused retrieval situations where the queries are defined as a specific interesting partial areas of the images. We examine our method on two types of focused queries: structure-focused and exact queries. The experimental results show that, the proposed generic framework obtains nearly perfect precision on both types of focused queries while it is the first framework able to tackle structure-focused queries, setting a new state of the art in the field.
Besides, we introduce a line verification method to check the spatial consistency among the matched key-region pairs. We propose a computationally efficient version of line verification through a two step implementation. We first compute tentative localizations of the query and subsequently employ them to divide the matched key-region pairs into several groups, then line verification is performed within each group while more precise bounding boxes are computed. We demonstrate that, comparing with the standard approach (based on RANSAC), the line verification proposed generally achieves much higher recall with slight loss on precision on specific queries.

Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.

Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.

Abstract: Describing textures is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The classification problem involves assigning a category label to the texture class it belongs to. Several factors such as variations in scale, illumination and viewpoint make the problem of texture description extremely challenging. A variety of histogram based texture representations exists in literature.
However, combining multiple texture descriptors and assessing their complementarity is still an open research problem. In this paper, we first show that combining multiple local texture descriptors significantly improves the recognition performance compared to using a single best method alone. This
gain in performance is achieved at the cost of high-dimensional final image representation. To counter this problem, we propose to use an information-theoretic compression technique to obtain a compact texture description without any significant loss in accuracy. In addition, we perform a comprehensive
evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object recognition, for the problem of texture classification. Experiments are performed on four challenging texture datasets namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10. The experiments clearly demonstrate that our proposed compact multi-texture approach outperforms the single best texture method alone. In all cases, discriminative color names outperforms other color features for texture classification. Finally, we show that combining discriminative color names with compact texture representation outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7:8%, 4:3% and 5:0% on KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b and Texture-10 datasets respectively.