Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2014). Anatomical parameterization for volumetric meshing of the liver. In SPIE – Medical Imaging (Vol. 9036).
Abstract: A coordinate system describing the interior of organs is a powerful tool for a systematic localization of injured tissue. If the same coordinate values are assigned to specific anatomical landmarks, the coordinate system allows integration of data across different medical image modalities. Harmonic mappings have been used to produce parametric coordinate systems over the surface of anatomical shapes, given their flexibility to set values
at specific locations through boundary conditions. However, most of the existing implementations in medical imaging restrict to either anatomical surfaces, or the depth coordinate with boundary conditions is given at sites
of limited geometric diversity. In this paper we present a method for anatomical volumetric parameterization that extends current harmonic parameterizations to the interior anatomy using information provided by the
volume medial surface. We have applied the methodology to define a common reference system for the liver shape and functional anatomy. This reference system sets a solid base for creating anatomical models of the patient’s liver, and allows comparing livers from several patients in a common framework of reference.
Keywords: Coordinate System; Anatomy Modeling; Parameterization
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Enric Marti, Antoni Gurgui, Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Jaume Rocarias, & Ferran Poveda. (2014). ABP on line: Seguimiento, estregas y evaluación en aprendizaje basado en proyectos.
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Carles Sanchez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Patricia Marquez, Enric Marti, Jaume Rocarias, & Debora Gil. (2014). Evaluación automática de prácticas en Moodle para el aprendizaje autónomo en Ingenierías.
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
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David Fernandez, Pau Riba, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2014). On the Influence of Key Point Encoding for Handwritten Word Spotting. In 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 476–481).
Abstract: In this paper we evaluate the influence of the selection of key points and the associated features in the performance of word spotting processes. In general, features can be extracted from a number of characteristic points like corners, contours, skeletons, maxima, minima, crossings, etc. A number of descriptors exist in the literature using different interest point detectors. But the intrinsic variability of handwriting vary strongly on the performance if the interest points are not stable enough. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different descriptors for local interest points. As benchmarking dataset we have used the Barcelona Marriage Database that contains handwritten records of marriages over five centuries.
Keywords: Local descriptors; Interest points; Handwritten documents; Word spotting; Historical document analysis
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David Fernandez, Jon Almazan, Nuria Cirera, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2014). BH2M: the Barcelona Historical Handwritten Marriages database. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 256–261).
Abstract: This paper presents an image database of historical handwritten marriages records stored in the archives of Barcelona cathedral, and the corresponding meta-data addressed to evaluate the performance of document analysis algorithms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a complete ground truth which covers the whole pipeline of handwriting
recognition research, from layout analysis to recognition and understanding. Second, it is the first dataset in the emerging area of genealogical document analysis, where documents are manuscripts pseudo-structured with specific lexicons and the interest is beyond pure transcriptions but context dependent.
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David Fernandez, R.Manmatha, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). Sequential Word Spotting in Historical Handwritten Documents. In 11th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (pp. 101–105).
Abstract: In this work we present a handwritten word spotting approach that takes advantage of the a priori known order of appearance of the query words. Given an ordered sequence of query word instances, the proposed approach performs a
sequence alignment with the words in the target collection. Although the alignment is quite sparse, i.e. the number of words in the database is higher than the query set, the improvement in the overall performance is sensitively higher than isolated word spotting. As application dataset, we use a collection of handwritten marriage licenses taking advantage of the ordered
index pages of family names.
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Pau Riba, Jon Almazan, Alicia Fornes, David Fernandez, Ernest Valveny, & Josep Llados. (2014). e-Crowds: a mobile platform for browsing and searching in historical demographyrelated manuscripts. In 14th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 228–233).
Abstract: This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: query-by-example, and query-by-string.
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Monica Piñol. (2014). Reinforcement Learning of Visual Descriptors for Object Recognition (Ricardo Toledo, & Angel Sappa, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.
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Anjan Dutta. (2014). Inexact Subgraph Matching Applied to Symbol Spotting in Graphical Documents (Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: There is a resurgence in the use of structural approaches in the usual object recognition and retrieval problem. Graph theory, in particular, graph matching plays a relevant role in that. Specifically, the detection of an object (or a part of that) in an image in terms of structural features can be formulated as a subgraph matching. Subgraph matching is a challenging task. Specially due to the presence of outliers most of the graph matching algorithms do not perform well in subgraph matching scenario. Also exact subgraph isomorphism has proven to be an NP-complete problem. So naturally, in graph matching community, there are lot of efforts addressing the problem of subgraph matching within suboptimal bound. Most of them work with approximate algorithms that try to get an inexact solution in estimated way. In addition, usual recognition must cope with distortion. Inexact graph matching consists in finding the best isomorphism under a similarity measure. Theoretically this thesis proposes algorithms for solving subgraph matching in an approximate and inexact way.
We consider the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents or line drawings from application point of view. This is a well known problem in the graphics recognition community. It can be further applied for indexing and classification of documents based on their contents. The structural nature of this kind of documents easily motivates one for giving a graph based representation. So the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents can be considered as a subgraph matching problem. The main challenges in this application domain is the noise and distortions that might come during the usage, digitalization and raster to vector conversion of those documents. Apart from that computer vision nowadays is not any more confined within a limited number of images. So dealing a huge number of images with graph based method is a further challenge.
In this thesis, on one hand, we have worked on efficient and robust graph representation to cope with the noise and distortions coming from documents. On the other hand, we have worked on different graph based methods and framework to solve the subgraph matching problem in a better approximated way, which can also deal with considerable number of images. Firstly, we propose a symbol spotting method by hashing serialized subgraphs. Graph serialization allows to create factorized substructures such as graph paths, which can be organized in hash tables depending on the structural similarities of the serialized subgraphs. The involvement of hashing techniques helps to reduce the search space substantially and speeds up the spotting procedure. Secondly, we introduce contextual similarities based on the walk based propagation on tensor product graph. These contextual similarities involve higher order information and more reliable than pairwise similarities. We use these higher order similarities to formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in the tensor product graph. Thirdly, we propose near convex grouping to form near convex region adjacency graph which eliminates the limitations of traditional region adjacency graph representation for graphic recognition. Fourthly, we propose a hierarchical graph representation by simplifying/correcting the structural errors to create a hierarchical graph of the base graph. Later these hierarchical graph structures are matched with some graph matching methods. Apart from that, in this thesis we have provided an overall experimental comparison of all the methods and some of the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some dataset models have also been proposed.
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Carlo Gatta, & Francesco Ciompi. (2014). Stacked Sequential Scale-Space Taylor Context. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(8), 1694–1700.
Abstract: We analyze sequential image labeling methods that sample the posterior label field in order to gather contextual information. We propose an effective method that extracts local Taylor coefficients from the posterior at different scales. Results show that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MSRC-21, CAMVID, eTRIMS8 and KAIST2 data sets.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Context-aware features and robust image representations. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 25(2), 339–348.
Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.
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Simeon Petkov, Xavier Carrillo, Petia Radeva, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Diaphragm border detection in coronary X-ray angiographies: New method and applications. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(4), 296–305.
Abstract: X-ray angiography is widely used in cardiac disease diagnosis during or prior to intravascular interventions. The diaphragm motion and the heart beating induce gray-level changes, which are one of the main obstacles in quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion. In this paper we focus on detecting the diaphragm border in both single images or whole X-ray angiography sequences. We show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art approaches. We extend a previous publicly available data set, adding new ground truth data. We also compose another set of more challenging images, thus having two separate data sets of increasing difficulty. Finally, we show three applications of our method: (1) a strategy to reduce false positives in vessel enhanced images; (2) a digital diaphragm removal algorithm; (3) an improvement in Myocardial Blush Grade semi-automatic estimation.
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Pierluigi Casale, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2014). Approximate polytope ensemble for one-class classification. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(2), 854–864.
Abstract: In this work, a new one-class classification ensemble strategy called approximate polytope ensemble is presented. The main contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the geometrical concept of convex hull is used to define the boundary of the target class defining the problem. Expansions and contractions of this geometrical structure are introduced in order to avoid over-fitting. Second, the decision whether a point belongs to the convex hull model in high dimensional spaces is approximated by means of random projections and an ensemble decision process. Finally, a tiling strategy is proposed in order to model non-convex structures. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy is significantly better than state of the art one-class classification methods on over 200 datasets.
Keywords: One-class classification; Convex hull; High-dimensionality; Random projections; Ensemble learning
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2014). ECOC-DRF: Discriminative random fields based on error correcting output codes. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(6), 2193–2204.
Abstract: We present ECOC-DRF, a framework where potential functions for Discriminative Random Fields are formulated as an ensemble of classifiers. We introduce the label trick, a technique to express transitions in the pairwise potential as meta-classes. This allows to independently learn any possible transition between labels without assuming any pre-defined model. The Error Correcting Output Codes matrix is used as ensemble framework for the combination of margin classifiers. We apply ECOC-DRF to a large set of classification problems, covering synthetic, natural and medical images for binary and multi-class cases, outperforming state-of-the art in almost all the experiments.
Keywords: Discriminative random fields; Error-correcting output codes; Multi-class classification; Graphical models
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