Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a device that allows the direct visualization of gastrointestinal tract with minimal discomfort for the patient, but at the price of a large amount of time for screening. In order to reduce this time, several works have proposed to automatically remove all the frames showing intestinal content. These methods label frames as {intestinal content – clear} without discriminating between types of content (with different physiological meaning) or the portion of image covered. In addition, since the presence of intestinal content has been identified as an indicator of intestinal motility, its accurate quantification can show a potential clinical relevance. In this paper, we present a method for the robust detection and segmentation of intestinal content in WCE images, together with its further discrimination between turbid liquid and bubbles. Our proposal is based on a twofold system. First, frames presenting intestinal content are detected by a support vector machine classifier using color and textural information. Second, intestinal content frames are segmented into {turbid, bubbles, and clear} regions. We show a detailed validation using a large dataset. Our system outperforms previous methods and, for the first time, discriminates between turbid from bubbles media.

Abstract: Video alignment is important in different areas of computer vision such as wide baseline matching, action recognition, change detection, video copy detection and frame dropping prevention. Current video alignment methods usually deal with a relatively simple case of fixed or rigidly attached cameras or simultaneous acquisition. Therefore, in this paper we propose a joint video alignment for bringing two video sequences into a spatio-temporal alignment. Specifically, the novelty of the paper is to formulate the video alignment to fold the spatial and temporal alignment into a single alignment framework. This simultaneously satisfies a frame-correspondence and frame-alignment similarity; exploiting the knowledge among neighbor frames by a standard pairwise Markov random field (MRF). This new formulation is able to handle the alignment of sequences recorded at different times by independent moving cameras that follows a similar trajectory, and also generalizes the particular cases that of fixed geometric transformation and/or linear temporal mapping. We conduct experiments on different scenarios such as sequences recorded simultaneously or by moving cameras to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. The proposed method provides the highest video alignment accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods on sequences recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an On-line Appearance-Based Tracker (OABT) for simultaneous tracking of 3D head pose, lips, eyebrows, eyelids and irises in monocular video sequences. In contrast to previously proposed tracking approaches, which deal with face and gaze tracking separately, our OABT can also be used for eyelid and iris tracking, as well as 3D head pose, lips and eyebrows facial actions tracking. Furthermore, our approach applies an on-line learning of changes in the appearance of the tracked target. Hence, the prior training of appearance models, which usually requires a large amount of labeled facial images, is avoided. Moreover, the proposed method is built upon a hierarchical combination of three OABTs, which are optimized using a Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm (LMA) enhanced with line-search procedures. This, in turn, makes the proposed method robust to changes in lighting conditions, occlusions and translucent textures, as evidenced by our experiments. Finally, the proposed method achieves head and facial actions tracking in real-time.

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: 0,405JCR
The analysis of music scores has been an active research field in the last decades. However, there are no publicly available databases of handwritten music scores for the research community. In this paper we present the CVC-MUSCIMA database and ground-truth of handwritten music score images. The dataset consists of 1,000 music sheets written by 50 different musicians. It has been especially designed for writer identification and staff removal tasks. In addition to the description of the dataset, ground-truth, partitioning and evaluation metrics, we also provide some base-line results for easing the comparison between different approaches.

Abstract: 2,292 JCR
The touching character segmentation problem becomes complex when touching strings are multi-oriented. Moreover in graphical documents sometimes characters in a single-touching string have different orientations. Segmentation of such complex touching is more challenging. In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region in the background portion. Based on the convex hull information, at first, we use this background information to find some initial points for segmentation of a touching string into possible primitives (a primitive consists of a single character or part of a character). Next, the primitives are merged to get optimum segmentation. A dynamic programming algorithm is applied for this purpose using the total likelihood of characters as the objective function. A SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experiments were performed in different databases of real and synthetic touching characters and the results show that the method is efficient in segmenting touching characters of arbitrary orientations and sizes.

Abstract: Segmentation of coronary arteries in X-Ray angiography is a fundamental tool to evaluate arterial diseases and choose proper coronary treatment. The accurate segmentation of coronary arteries has become an important topic for the registration of different modalities which allows physicians rapid access to different medical imaging information from Computed Tomography (CT) scans or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose an accurate fully automatic algorithm based on Graph-cuts for vessel centerline extraction, caliber estimation, and catheter detection. Vesselness, geodesic paths, and a new multi-scale edgeness map are combined to customize the Graph-cuts approach to the segmentation of tubular structures, by means of a global optimization of the Graph-cuts energy function. Moreover, a novel supervised learning methodology that integrates local and contextual information is proposed for automatic catheter detection. We evaluate the method performance on three datasets coming from different imaging systems. The method performs as good as the expert observer w.r.t. centerline detection and caliber estimation. Moreover, the method discriminates between arteries and catheter with an accuracy of 96.5%, sensitivity of 72%, and precision of 97.4%.

Abstract: This article presents a new approach for gait-based gender recognition using depth cameras, that can run in real time. The main contribution of this study is a new fast feature extraction strategy that uses the 3D point cloud obtained from the frames in a gait cycle. For each frame, these points are aligned according to their centroid and grouped. After that, they are projected into their PCA plane, obtaining a representation of the cycle particularly robust against view changes. Then, final discriminative features are computed by first making a histogram of the projected points and then using linear discriminant analysis. To test the method we have used the DGait database, which is currently the only publicly available database for gait analysis that includes depth information. We have performed experiments on manually labeled cycles and over whole video sequences, and the results show that our method improves the accuracy significantly, compared with state-of-the-art systems which do not use depth information. Furthermore, our approach is insensitive to illumination changes, given that it discards the RGB information. That makes the method especially suitable for real applications, as illustrated in the last part of the experiments section.