Abstract: This paper presents a new method for person-specific face shape estimation under varying head pose of a previously unseen person from a single image. We describe a featureless approach based on a deformable 3D model and a learned face subspace. The proposed approach is based on maximizing a likelihood measure associated with a learned face subspace, which is carried out by a stochastic and genetic optimizer. We conducted the experiments on a subset of Honda Video Database showing the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach. For this reason, our approach could lend itself nicely to complex frameworks involving 3D face tracking and face gesture recognition in monocular videos.

Abstract: The classication of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the Machine Learning eld. In literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classiers. In this scope, the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for the combination of classiers. However, most of the state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a minimal design of ECOC in terms of the number of classiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classiers and looking for the best Minimal ECOC code conguration. The results over several public UCI data sets and a challenging multi-class Computer Vision problem show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable and even better results than state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.

Abstract: From Nano to Macro
A correct modelling of tissue morphology is determinant for the identification of vulnerable plaques. This paper aims at describing the plaque composition by means of a Rayleigh Mixture Model applied to ultrasonic data. The effectiveness of using a mixture of distributions is established through synthetic and real ultrasonic data samples. Furthermore, the proposed mixture model is used in a plaque classification problem in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) images of coronary plaques. A classifier tested on a set of 67 in-vitro plaques, yields an overall accuracy of 86% and sensitivity of 92%, 94% and 82%, for fibrotic, calcified and lipidic tissues, respectively. These results strongly suggest that different plaques types can be distinguished by means of the coefficients and Rayleigh parameters of the mixture distribution.

Abstract: In recent years several works have aimed at exploiting color information in order to improve the bag-of-words based image representation. There are two stages in which color information can be applied in the bag-of-words framework. Firstly, feature detection can be improved by choosing highly informative color-based regions. Secondly, feature description, typically focusing on shape, can be improved with a color description of the local patches. Although both approaches have been shown to improve results the combined merits have not yet been analyzed. Therefore, in this paper we investigate the combined contribution of color to both the feature detection and extraction stages. Experiments performed on two challenging data sets, namely Flower and Pascal VOC 2009; clearly demonstrate that incorporating color in both feature detection and extraction significantly improves the overall performance.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an object segmentation framework, based on the popular bag of features (BoF), which can process several images per second while achieving a good segmentation accuracy assigning an object category to every pixel of the image. We propose an efficient color descriptor to complement the information obtained by a typical gradient-based local descriptor. Results show that color proves to be a useful cue to increase the segmentation accuracy, specially in large homogeneous regions. Then, we extend the Hierarchical K-Means codebook using the recently proposed Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors method. Finally, we show that the BoF method can be easily parallelized since it is applied locally, thus the time necessary to process an image is further reduced. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in the standard PASCAL 2007 Segmentation Challenge object segmentation dataset.

Abstract: Staff removal is an important preprocessing step of the Optical Music Recognition (OMR). The process aims to remove the stafflines from a musical document and retain only the musical symbols, later these symbols are used effectively to identify the music information. This paper proposes a simple but robust method to remove stafflines from printed musical scores. In the proposed methodology we have considered a staffline segment as a horizontal linkage of vertical black runs with uniform height. We have used the neighbouring properties of a staffline segment to validate it as a true segment. We have considered the dataset along with the deformations described in for evaluation purpose. From experimentation we have got encouraging results.

Abstract: TA7.4
Intelligent vehicle lighting systems aim at automatically regulating the headlights' beam to illuminate as much of the road ahead as possible while avoiding dazzling other drivers. A key component of such a system is computer vision software that is able to distinguish blobs due to vehicles' headlights and rear lights from those due to road lamps and reflective elements such as poles and traffic signs. In a previous work, we have devised a set of specialized supervised classifiers to make such decisions based on blob features related to its intensity and shape. Despite the overall good performance, there remain challenging that have yet to be solved: notably, faint and tiny blobs corresponding to quite distant vehicles. In fact, for such distant blobs, classification decisions can be taken after observing them during a few frames. Hence, incorporating tracking could improve the overall lighting system performance by enforcing the temporal consistency of the classifier decision. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the problem of constructing blob tracks, which is actually one of multiple-target tracking (MTT), but under two special conditions: We have to deal with frequent occlusions, as well as blob splits and merges. We approach it in a novel way by formulating the problem as a maximum a posteriori inference on a Markov random field. The qualitative (in video form) and quantitative evaluation of our new MTT method shows good tracking results. In addition, we will also see that the classification performance of the problematic blobs improves due to the proposed MTT algorithm.