Abstract: The aim of this work is to explain how to apply perceptual concepts to define a perceptual pre-quantizer and to improve JPEG2000 compressor. The approach consists in quantizing wavelet transform coefficients using some of the human visual system behavior properties. Noise is fatal to image compression performance, because it can be both annoying for the observer and consumes excessive bandwidth when the imagery is transmitted. Perceptual pre-quantization reduces unperceivable details and thus improve both visual impression and transmission properties. The comparison between JPEG2000 without and with perceptual pre-quantization shows that the latter is not favorable in PSNR, but the recovered image is more compressed at the same or even better visual quality measured with a weighted PSNR. Perceptual criteria were taken from the CIWaM (Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model).

Abstract: Over the last few years, the number of consumer computer vision applications has increased dramatically. Today, computer vision solutions can be found in video game consoles, smartphone applications, driving assistance – just to name a few. Ideally, we require the performance of those applications, particularly those that are safety critical to remain constant under any external environment factors, such as changes in illumination or weather conditions. However, this is not always possible or very difficult to obtain by only using visible imagery, due to the inherent limitations of the images from that spectral band. For that reason, the use of images from different or multiple spectral bands is becoming more appealing.
The aforementioned possible advantages of using images from multiples spectral bands on various vision applications make multi-spectral image processing a relevant topic for research and development. Like in visible image processing, multi-spectral image processing needs tools and algorithms to handle information from various spectral bands. Furthermore, traditional tools such as local feature detection, which is the basis of many vision tasks such as visual odometry, image registration, or structure from motion, must be adjusted or reformulated to operate under new conditions. Traditional feature detection, description, and matching methods tend to underperform in multi-spectral settings, in comparison to mono-spectral settings, due to the natural differences between each spectral band.
The work in this thesis is focused on the local feature description problem when cross-spectral images are considered. In this context, this dissertation has three main contributions. Firstly, the work starts by proposing the usage of a combination of frequency and spatial information, in a multi-scale scheme, as feature description. Evaluations of this proposal, based on classical hand-made feature descriptors, and comparisons with state of the art cross-spectral approaches help to find and understand limitations of such strategy. Secondly, different convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures are evaluated when used to describe cross-spectral image patches. Results showed that CNN-based methods, designed to work with visible monocular images, could be successfully applied to the description of images from two different spectral bands, with just minor modifications. In this framework, a novel CNN-based network model, specifically intended to describe image patches from two different spectral bands, is proposed. This network, referred to as Q-Net, outperforms state of the art in the cross-spectral domain, including both previous hand-made solutions as well as L2 CNN-based architectures. The third contribution of this dissertation is in the cross-spectral feature description application domain. The multispectral odometry problem is tackled showing a real application of cross-spectral descriptors
In addition to the three main contributions mentioned above, in this dissertation, two different multi-spectral datasets are generated and shared with the community to be used as benchmarks for further studies.

Abstract: Digital libraries store images which can be highly degraded and to index this kind of images we resort to word spotting as our information retrieval system. Information retrieval for handwritten document images is more challenging due to the difficulties in complex layout analysis, large variations of writing styles, and degradation or low quality of historical manuscripts. This paper presents a simple innovative learning-free method for word spotting from large scale historical documents combining Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and spatial sampling. This method offers three advantages: firstly, it operates in completely learning free paradigm which is very different from unsupervised learning methods, secondly, the computational time is significantly low because of the LBP features, which are very fast to compute, and thirdly, the method can be used in scenarios where annotations are not available. Finally, we compare the results of our proposed retrieval method with other methods in the literature and we obtain the best results in the learning free paradigm.

Abstract: Optical Flow (OF) techniques facing the complexity of real sequences have been developed in the last years. Even using the most appropriate technique for our specific problem, at some points the output flow might fail to achieve the minimum error required for the system. Confidence measures computed from either input data or OF output should discard those points where OF is not accurate enough for its further use. It follows that evaluating the capabilities of a confidence measure for bounding OF error is as important as the definition
itself. In this paper we analyze different confidence measures and point out their advantages and limitations for their use in real world settings. We also explore the agreement with current tools for their evaluation of confidence measures performance.

Abstract: This paper describes the multimodal Neural Machine Translation systems developed by LIUM and CVC for WMT18 Shared Task on Multimodal Translation. This year we propose several modifications to our previou multimodal attention architecture in order to better integrate convolutional features and refine them using encoder-side information. Our final constrained submissions
ranked first for English→French and second for English→German language pairs among the constrained submissions according to the automatic evaluation metric METEOR.