Abstract: In this chapter we describe an application for efficient error-free labeling of medical images. In this scenario, the compilation of a complete training set for building a realistic model of a given class of samples is not an easy task, making the process tedious and time consuming. For this reason, there is a need for interactive labeling applications that minimize the effort of the user while providing error-free labeling. We propose a new algorithm that is based on data similarity in feature space. This method actively explores data in order to find the best label-aligned clustering and exploits it to reduce the labeler effort, that is measured by the number of “clicks. Moreover, error-free labeling is guaranteed by the fact that all data and their labels proposals are visually revised by en expert.

Abstract: We present different techniques to adapt a pedestrian classifier trained with synthetic images and the corresponding automatically generated annotations to operate with far infrared (FIR) images. The information contained in this kind of images allow us to develop a robust pedestrian detector invariant to extreme illumination changes.

Abstract: The Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) technology allows the visualization of the whole small intestine tract. Since the capsule is freely moving, mainly by the means of peristalsis, the data acquired during the study gives a lot of information about the intestinal motility. However, due to: (1) huge amount of frames, (2) complex intestinal scene appearance and (3) intestinal dynamics that make difficult the visualization of the small intestine physiological phenomena, the analysis of the WCE data requires computer-aided systems to speed up the analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for building a novel representation of the WCE video data, optimal for motility analysis and inspection. The algorithm transforms the 3D video data into 2D longitudinal view by choosing the most informative, from the intestinal motility point of view, part of each frame. This step maximizes the lumen visibility in its longitudinal extension. The task of finding “the best longitudinal view” has been defined as a cost function optimization problem which global minimum is obtained by using Dynamic Programming. Validation on both synthetic data and WCE data shows that the adaptive longitudinal view is a good alternative to the traditional motility analysis done by video analysis. The proposed novel data representation a new, holistic insight into the small intestine motility, allowing to easily define and analyze motility events that are difficult to spot by analyzing WCE video. Moreover, the visual inspection of small intestine motility is 4 times faster then by means of video skimming of the WCE.

Abstract: Every day, lifelogging devices, available for recording different aspects of our daily life, increase in number, quality and functions, just like the multiple applications that we give to them. Applying wearable devices to analyse the nutritional habits of people is a challenging application based on acquiring and analyzing life records in long periods of time. However, to extract the information of interest related to the eating patterns of people, we need automatic methods to process large amount of life-logging data (e.g. recognition of food-related objects). Creating a rich set of manually labeled samples to train the algorithms is slow, tedious and subjective. To address this problem, we propose a novel method in the framework of Active Labeling for construct- ing a training set of thousands of images. Inspired by the hierarchical sampling method for active learning [6], we propose an Active forest that organizes hierarchically the data for easy and fast labeling. Moreover, introducing a classifier into the hierarchical structures, as well as transforming the feature space for better data clustering, additionally im- prove the algorithm. Our method is successfully tested to label 89.700 food-related objects and achieves significant reduction in expert time labelling.
Active labeling application applied to food-related object recognition ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/262252017Activelabelingapplicationappliedtofood-relatedobjectrecognition [accessed Jul 14, 2015].

Abstract: Confident use of medial surfaces in medical decision support systems requires evaluating their quality for detecting pathological deformations and describing anatomical volumes. Validation in the medical imaging field is a challenging task mainly due to the difficulties for getting consensual ground truth. In this paper we propose a validation benchmark for assessing medial surfaces in the context of medical applications. Our benchmark includes a home-made database of synthetic medial surfaces and volumes and specific scores for evaluating surface accuracy, its stability against volume deformations and its capabilities for accurate reconstruction of anatomical volumes.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a symbol spotting technique in graphical documents. Graphs are used to represent the documents and a (sub)graph matching technique is used to detect the symbols in them. We propose a graph serialization to reduce the usual computational complexity of graph matching. Serialization of graphs is performed by computing acyclic graph paths between each pair of connected nodes. Graph paths are one-dimensional structures of graphs which are less expensive in terms of computation. At the same time they enable robust localization even in the presence of noise and distortion. Indexing in large graph databases involves a computational burden as well. We propose a graph factorization approach to tackle this problem. Factorization is intended to create a unified indexed structure over the database of graphical documents. Once graph paths are extracted, the entire database of graphical documents is indexed in hash tables by locality sensitive hashing (LSH) of shape descriptors of the paths. The hashing data structure aims to execute an approximate k-NN search in a sub-linear time. We have performed detailed experiments with various datasets of line drawings and compared our method with the state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our technique.

Abstract: Traditionally, in machine vision images are represented using cartesian coordinates with uniform sampling along the axes. On the contrary, biological vision systems represent images using polar coordinates with non-uniform sampling. For various advantages provided by space-variant representations many researchers are interested in space-variant computer vision. In this direction the current work proposes a novel and simple space variant representation of images. The proposed representation is compared with the classical log-polar mapping. The log-polar representation is motivated by biological vision having the characteristic of higher resolution at the fovea and reduced resolution at the periphery. On the contrary to the log-polar, the proposed new representation has higher resolution at the periphery and lower resolution at the fovea. Our proposal is proved to be a better representation in navigational scenarios such as driver assistance systems and robotics. The experimental results involve analysis of optical flow fields computed on both proposed and log-polar representations. Additionally, an egomotion estimation application is also shown as an illustrative example. The experimental analysis comprises results from synthetic as well as real sequences.