Abstract: This study introduces a novel, hand-drawn language designed to foster human-robot collaboration in wood stereotomy, central to carpentry and joinery professions. Based on skilled carpenters’ line and symbol etchings on timber, this language signifies the location, geometry of woodworking joints, and timber placement within a framework. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed, integrating object detectors, keypoint regression, and traditional computer vision techniques to interpret this language and enable an extensive repertoire of actions. Empirical data attests to the language’s efficacy, with the successful identification of a specific set of symbols on various wood species’ sawn surfaces, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) exceeding 90%. Concurrently, the system can accurately pinpoint critical positions that facilitate robotic comprehension of carpenter-indicated woodworking joint geometry. The positioning error, approximately 3 pixels, meets industry standards.

Abstract: In this paper we present a methodology for the automatic detection of media-adventitia border (MAb) in Intravascular Ultrasound. A robust computation of the MAb is achieved through a holistic approach where the position of the MAb with respect to other tissues of the vessel is used. A learned quality measure assures that the resulting MAb is optimal with respect to all other tissues. The mean distance error computed through a set of 140 images is 0.2164 (±0.1326) mm.

Abstract: The automatic processing of handwritten historical documents is considered a hard problem in pattern recognition. In addition to the challenges given by modern handwritten data, a lack of training data as well as effects caused by the degradation of documents can be observed. In this scenario, keyword spotting arises to be a viable solution to make documents amenable for searching and browsing. For this task we propose the adaptation of shape descriptors used in symbol recognition. By treating each word image as a shape, it can be represented using the Blurred Shape Model and the De-formable Blurred Shape Model. Experiments on the George Washington database demonstrate that this approach is able to outperform the commonly used Dynamic Time Warping approach.

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of human action recognition in reconstructed 3-D data acquired by multi-camera systems. We contribute to this field by introducing a novel 3-D action recognition approach based on detection of 4-D (3-D space $+$ time) spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) and local description of 3-D motion features. STIPs are detected in multi-view images and extended to 4-D using 3-D reconstructions of the actors and pixel-to-vertex correspondences of the multi-camera setup. Local 3-D motion descriptors, histogram of optical 3-D flow (HOF3D), are extracted from estimated 3-D optical flow in the neighborhood of each 4-D STIP and made view-invariant. The local HOF3D descriptors are divided using 3-D spatial pyramids to capture and improve the discrimination between arm- and leg-based actions. Based on these pyramids of HOF3D descriptors we build a bag-of-words (BoW) vocabulary of human actions, which is compressed and classified using agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) and support vector machines (SVMs), respectively. Experiments on the publicly available i3DPost and IXMAS datasets show promising state-of-the-art results and validate the performance and view-invariance of the approach.