Abstract: In real-life logistics and distribution activities it is usual to face situations in which the distribution of goods has to be made from multiple warehouses or depots to the nal customers. This problem is known as the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP), and it typically includes two sequential and correlated stages: (a) the assignment map of customers to depots, and (b) the corresponding design of the distribution routes. Most of the existing work in the literature has focused on minimizing distance-based distribution costs while satisfying a number of capacity constraints. However, no attention has been given so far to potential variations in demands due to the tness of the customerdepot mapping in the case of heterogeneous depots. In this paper, we consider this realistic version of the problem in which the depots are heterogeneous in terms of their commercial oer and customers show dierent willingness to consume depending on how well the assigned depot ts their preferences. Thus, we assume that dierent customer-depot assignment maps will lead to dierent customer-expenditure levels. As a consequence, market-segmentation strategiesneed to be considered in order to increase sales and total income while accounting for the distribution costs. To solve this extension of the MDVRP, we propose a hybrid approach that combines statistical learning techniques with a metaheuristic framework. First, a set of predictive models is generated from historical data. These statistical models allow estimating the demand of any customer depending on the assigned depot. Then, the estimated expenditure of each customer is included as part of an enriched objective function as a way to better guide the stochastic local search inside the metaheuristic framework. A set of computational experiments contribute to illustrate our approach and how the extended MDVRP considered here diers in terms of the proposed solutions from the traditional one.

Abstract: Depth can complement RGB with useful cues about object volumes and scene layout. However, RGB-D image datasets are still too small for directly training deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in contrast to the massive monomodal RGB datasets. Previous works in RGB-D recognition typically combine two separate networks for RGB and depth data, pretrained with a large RGB dataset and then fine tuned to the respective target RGB and depth datasets. These approaches have several limitations: 1) only use low-level filters learned from RGB data, thus not being able to exploit properly depth-specific patterns, and 2) RGB and depth features are only combined at high-levels but rarely at lower-levels. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages both knowledge acquired from large RGB datasets together with depth-specific cues learned from the limited depth data, obtaining more effective multi-source and multi-modal representations. We propose a multi-modal combination method that selects discriminative combinations of layers from the different source models and target modalities, capturing both high-level properties of the task and intrinsic low-level properties of both modalities.

Abstract: Automatic analysis of visual art, such as paintings, is a challenging inter-disciplinary research problem. Conventional approaches only rely on global scene characteristics by encoding holistic information for computational painting categorization.We argue that such approaches are sub-optimal and that discriminative common visual structures provide complementary information for painting classification. We present an approach that encodes both the global scene layout and discriminative latent common structures for computational painting categorization. The region of interests are automatically extracted, without any manual part labeling, by training class-specific deformable part-based models. Both holistic and region-of-interests are then described using multi-scale dense convolutional features. These features are pooled separately using Fisher vector encoding and concatenated afterwards in a single image representation. Experiments are performed on a challenging dataset with 91 different painters and 13 diverse painting styles. Our approach outperforms the standard method, which only employs the global scene characteristics. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming a recent multi-scale deep features based approach [11] by 6.4% and 3.8% respectively on artist and style classification.

Abstract: The assessment of arterial luminal area, performed by IVUS analysis, is a clinical index used to evaluate the degree of coronary artery disease. In this paper we propose a novel approach to automatically segment the vessel lumen, which combines model-based temporal information extracted from successive frames of the sequence, with spatial classification using the Growcut algorithm. The performance of the method is evaluated by an in vivo experiment on 300 IVUS frames. The automatic and manual segmentation performances in general vessel and stent frames are comparable. The average segmentation error in vessel, stent and bifurcation frames are 0.17±0.08 mm, 0.18±0.07 mm and 0.31±0.12 mm respectively.

Abstract: Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.