Fernando Barrera, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2013). Multispectral Piecewise Planar Stereo using Manhattan-World Assumption. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 34(1), 52–61.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for extracting dense disparity maps from a multispectral stereo rig. The system is constructed with an infrared and a color camera. It is intended to explore novel multispectral stereo matching approaches that will allow further extraction of semantic information. The proposed framework consists of three stages. Firstly, an initial sparse disparity map is generated by using a cost function based on feature matching in a multiresolution scheme. Then, by looking at the color image, a set of planar hypotheses is defined to describe the surfaces on the scene. Finally, the previous stages are combined by reformulating the disparity computation as a global minimization problem. The paper has two main contributions. The first contribution combines mutual information with a shape descriptor based on gradient in a multiresolution scheme. The second contribution, which is based on the Manhattan-world assumption, extracts a dense disparity representation using the graph cut algorithm. Experimental results in outdoor scenarios are provided showing the validity of the proposed framework.
Keywords: Multispectral stereo rig; Dense disparity maps from multispectral stereo; Color and infrared images
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Marcelo D. Pistarelli, Angel Sappa, & Ricardo Toledo. (2013). Multispectral Stereo Image Correspondence. In 15th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (Vol. 8048, pp. 217–224). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel multispectral stereo image correspondence approach. It is evaluated using a stereo rig constructed with a visible spectrum camera and a long wave infrared spectrum camera. The novelty of the proposed approach lies on the usage of Hough space as a correspondence search domain. In this way it avoids searching for correspondence in the original multispectral image domains, where information is low correlated, and a common domain is used. The proposed approach is intended to be used in outdoor urban scenarios, where images contain large amount of edges. These edges are used as distinctive characteristics for the matching in the Hough space. Experimental results are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.
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Anjan Dutta, Josep Llados, Horst Bunke, & Umapada Pal. (2013). Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph and Approximate Neighborhood String Matching for Symbol Spotting in Graphical Documents. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1078–1082).
Abstract: This paper deals with a subgraph matching problem in Region Adjacency Graph (RAG) applied to symbol spotting in graphical documents. RAG is a very important, efficient and natural way of representing graphical information with a graph but this is limited to cases where the information is well defined with perfectly delineated regions. What if the information we are interested in is not confined within well defined regions? This paper addresses this particular problem and solves it by defining near convex grouping of oriented line segments which results in near convex regions. Pure convexity imposes hard constraints and can not handle all the cases efficiently. Hence to solve this problem we have defined a new type of convexity of regions, which allows convex regions to have concavity to some extend. We call this kind of regions Near Convex Regions (NCRs). These NCRs are then used to create the Near Convex Region Adjacency Graph (NCRAG) and with this representation we have formulated the problem of symbol spotting in graphical documents as a subgraph matching problem. For subgraph matching we have used the Approximate Edit Distance Algorithm (AEDA) on the neighborhood string, which starts working after finding a key node in the input or target graph and iteratively identifies similar nodes of the query graph in the neighborhood of the key node. The experiments are performed on artificial, real and distorted datasets.
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Thanh Ha Do, Salvatore Tabbone, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2013). New Approach for Symbol Recognition Combining Shape Context of Interest Points with Sparse Representation. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 265–269).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach for symbol description. Our method is built based on the combination of shape context of interest points descriptor and sparse representation. More specifically, we first learn a dictionary describing shape context of interest point descriptors. Then, based on information retrieval techniques, we build a vector model for each symbol based on its sparse representation in a visual vocabulary whose visual words are columns in the learneddictionary. The retrieval task is performed by ranking symbols based on similarity between vector models. Evaluation of our method, using benchmark datasets, demonstrates the validity of our approach and shows that it outperforms related state-of-theart methods.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Joan Mas, Gemma Sanchez, & Ernest Valveny. (2013). Notation-invariant patch-based wall detector in architectural floor plans. In Graphics Recognition. New Trends and Challenges (Vol. 7423, pp. 79–88). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Architectural floor plans exhibit a large variability in notation. Therefore, segmenting and identifying the elements of any kind of plan becomes a challenging task for approaches based on grouping structural primitives obtained by vectorization. Recently, a patch-based segmentation method working at pixel level and relying on the construction of a visual vocabulary has been proposed in [1], showing its adaptability to different notations by automatically learning the visual appearance of the elements in each different notation. This paper presents an evolution of that previous work, after analyzing and testing several alternatives for each of the different steps of the method: Firstly, an automatic plan-size normalization process is done. Secondly we evaluate different features to obtain the description of every patch. Thirdly, we train an SVM classifier to obtain the category of every patch instead of constructing a visual vocabulary. These variations of the method have been tested for wall detection on two datasets of architectural floor plans with different notations. After studying in deep each of the steps in the process pipeline, we are able to find the best system configuration, which highly outperforms the results on wall segmentation obtained by the original paper.
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Andrew Nolan, Daniel Serrano, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Daniel Ponsa, & Antonio Lopez. (2013). Obstacle mapping module for quadrotors on outdoor Search and Rescue operations. In International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition.
Abstract: Obstacle avoidance remains a challenging task for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV), due to their limited payload capacity to carry advanced sensors. Unlike larger vehicles, MAV can only carry light weight sensors, for instance a camera, which is our main assumption in this work. We explore passive monocular depth estimation and propose a novel method Position Aided Depth Estimation
(PADE). We analyse PADE performance and compare it against the extensively used Time To Collision (TTC). We evaluate the accuracy, robustness to noise and speed of three Optical Flow (OF) techniques, combined with both depth estimation methods. Our results show PADE is more accurate than TTC at depths between 0-12 meters and is less sensitive to noise. Our findings highlight the potential application of PADE for MAV to perform safe autonomous navigation in
unknown and unstructured environments.
Keywords: UAV
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Carles Sanchez, Jorge Bernal, Debora Gil, & F. Javier Sanchez. (2013). On-line lumen centre detection in gastrointestinal and respiratory endoscopy. In Klaus Miguel Angel and Drechsler Stefan and González Ballester Raj and Wesarg Cristina and Shekhar Marius George and Oyarzun Laura M. and L. Erdt (Ed.), Second International Workshop Clinical Image-Based Procedures (Vol. 8361, pp. 31–38). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: We present in this paper a novel lumen centre detection for gastrointestinal and respiratory endoscopic images. The proposed method is based on the appearance and geometry of the lumen, which we defined as the darkest image region which centre is a hub of image gradients. Experimental results validated on the first public annotated gastro-respiratory database prove the reliability of the method for a wide range of images (with precision over 95 %).
Keywords: Lumen centre detection; Bronchoscopy; Colonoscopy
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Isabel Guitart, Jordi Conesa, Luis Villarejo, Agata Lapedriza, David Masip, Antoni Perez, et al. (2013). Opinion Mining on Educational Resources at the Open University of Catalonia. In 3rd International Workshop on Adaptive Learning via Interactive, Collaborative and Emotional approaches. In conjunction with CISIS 2013: The 7th International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems (pp. 385–390).
Abstract: In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) would be extremely helpful, as the university's students often post comments on their learning experiences in them. Exploiting the content of such forums is not a simple undertaking. The volume of data involved is very large, and performing the task manually would require a great deal of effort from lecturers. As a first step to solve this problem, we propose a tool to automatically analyze the posts in forums of communities of UOC students and teachers, with a view to systematically mining the opinions they contain. This article defines the architecture of such tool and explains how lexical-semantic and language technology resources can be used to that end. For pilot testing purposes, the tool has been used to identify students' opinions on the UOC's Business Intelligence master's degree course during the last two years. The paper discusses the results of such test. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates the feasibility of using natural language parsing techniques to help teachers to make decisions. Secondly, it introduces a simple tool that can be refined and adapted to a virtual environment for the purpose in question.
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Naveen Onkarappa. (2013). Optical Flow in Driver Assistance Systems (Angel Sappa, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Motion perception is one of the most important attributes of the human brain. Visual motion perception consists in inferring speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual inputs. Analogously, computer vision is assisted by motion cues in the scene. Motion detection in computer vision is useful in solving problems such as segmentation, depth from motion, structure from motion, compression, navigation and many others. These problems are common in several applications, for instance, video surveillance, robot navigation and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the most widely used techniques for motion detection is the optical flow estimation. The work in this thesis attempts to make optical flow suitable for the requirements and conditions of driving scenarios. In this context, a novel space-variant representation called reverse log-polar representation is proposed that is shown to be better than the traditional log-polar space-variant representation for ADAS. The space-variant representations reduce the amount of data to be processed. Another major contribution in this research is related to the analysis of the influence of specific characteristics from driving scenarios on the optical flow accuracy. Characteristics such as vehicle speed and
road texture are considered in the aforementioned analysis. From this study, it is inferred that the regularization weight has to be adapted according to the required error measure and for different speeds and road textures. It is also shown that polar represented optical flow suits driving scenarios where predominant motion is translation. Due to the requirements of such a study and by the lack of needed datasets a new synthetic dataset is presented; it contains: i) sequences of different speeds and road textures in an urban scenario; ii) sequences with complex motion of an on-board camera; and iii) sequences with additional moving vehicles in the scene. The ground-truth optical flow is generated by the ray-tracing technique. Further, few applications of optical flow in ADAS are shown. Firstly, a robust RANSAC based technique to estimate horizon line is proposed. Then, an egomotion estimation is presented to compare the proposed space-variant representation with the classical one. As a final contribution, a modification in the regularization term is proposed that notably improves the results
in the ADAS applications. This adaptation is evaluated using a state of the art optical flow technique. The experiments on a public dataset (KITTI) validate the advantages of using the proposed modification.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2013). Out-of-Sample Embedding for Manifold Learning Applied to Face Recognition. In IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (pp. 862–868).
Abstract: Manifold learning techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data---the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed schemes were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only reached for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that sparse coding theory not only serves for automatic graph reconstruction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on four public face databases. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.
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Francisco Alvaro, Francisco Cruz, Joan Andreu Sanchez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Jose Miguel Bemedi. (2013). Page Segmentation of Structured Documents Using 2D Stochastic Context-Free Grammars. In 6th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 7887, pp. 133–140). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we define a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for page segmentation of structured documents. Two sets of text classification features are used to perform an initial classification of each zone of the page. Then, the page segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a grammar. This approach is compared to Conditional Random Fields and results show significant improvements in several cases. Furthermore, grammars provide a detailed segmentation that allowed a semantic evaluation which also validates this model.
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Javier Marin. (2013). Pedestrian Detection Based on Local Experts (Antonio Lopez, & Jaume Amores, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: During the last decade vision-based human detection systems have started to play a key rolein multiple applications linked to driver assistance, surveillance, robot sensing and home automation.
Detecting humans is by far one of the most challenging tasks in Computer Vision.
This is mainly due to the high degree of variability in the human appearanceassociated to
the clothing, pose, shape and size. Besides, other factors such as cluttered scenarios, partial occlusions, or environmental conditions can make the detection task even harder.
Most promising methods of the state-of-the-art rely on discriminative learning paradigms which are fed with positive and negative examples. The training data is one of the most
relevant elements in order to build a robust detector as it has to cope the large variability of the target. In order to create this dataset human supervision is required. The drawback at this point is the arduous effort of annotating as well as looking for such claimed variability.
In this PhD thesis we address two recurrent problems in the literature. In the first stage,we aim to reduce the consuming task of annotating, namely, by using computer graphics.
More concretely, we develop a virtual urban scenario for later generating a pedestrian dataset.
Then, we train a detector using this dataset, and finally we assess if this detector can be successfully applied in a real scenario.
In the second stage, we focus on increasing the robustness of our pedestrian detectors
under partial occlusions. In particular, we present a novel occlusion handling approach to increase the performance of block-based holistic methods under partial occlusions. For this purpose, we make use of local experts via a RandomSubspaceMethod (RSM) to handle these cases. If the method infers a possible partial occlusion, then the RSM, based on performance statistics obtained from partially occluded data, is applied. The last objective of this thesis
is to propose a robust pedestrian detector based on an ensemble of local experts. To achieve this goal, we use the random forest paradigm, where the trees act as ensembles an their nodesare the local experts. In particular, each expert focus on performing a robust classification ofa pedestrian body patch. This approach offers computational efficiency and far less design complexity when compared to other state-of-the-artmethods, while reaching better accuracy
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Xavier Baro, David Masip, Elena Planas, & Julia Minguillon. (2013). PeLP: Plataforma para el Aprendizaje de Lenguajes de Programación.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, David Fernandez, Alicia Fornes, Ernest Valveny, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2013). Perceptual retrieval of architectural floor plans. In 10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.
Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a percetual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query,
similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Preliminary results show the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.
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Klaus Broelemann, Anjan Dutta, Xiaoyi Jiang, & Josep Llados. (2013). Plausibility-Graphs for Symbol Spotting in Graphical Documents. In 10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition.
Abstract: Graph representation of graphical documents often suffers from noise viz. spurious nodes and spurios edges of graph and their discontinuity etc. In general these errors occur during the low-level image processing viz. binarization, skeletonization, vectorization etc. Hierarchical graph representation is a nice and efficient way to solve this kind of problem by hierarchically merging node-node and node-edge depending on the distance.
But the creation of hierarchical graph representing the graphical information often uses hard thresholds on the distance to create the hierarchical nodes (next state) of the lower nodes (or states) of a graph. As a result the representation often loses useful information. This paper introduces plausibilities to the nodes of hierarchical graph as a function of distance and proposes a modified algorithm for matching subgraphs of the hierarchical
graphs. The plausibility-annotated nodes help to improve the performance of the matching algorithm on two hierarchical structures. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.
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