Abstract: The vignette effect (radial fall-off) is commonly encountered in images obtained through certain image acquisition setups and can seriously hinder automatic analysis processes. In this paper we present a fast and efficient method for dealing with vignetting in the context of object segmentation in an existing industrial inspection setup. The vignette effect is modelled here as a circular, non-linear gradient. The method estimates the gradient parameters and employs them to perform segmentation. Segmentation results on a variety of images indicate that the presented method is able to successfully tackle the vignette effect.

Abstract: Hand-drawn symbols can take many different and distorted shapes from their ideal representation. Then, very flexible methods are needed to be able to handle unconstrained drawings. We propose here to extend our previous work in hand-drawn symbol recognition based on a Bayesian framework and deformable template matching. This approach gets flexibility enough to fit distorted shapes in the drawing while keeping fidelity to the ideal shape of the symbol. In this work, we define the similarity measure between an image and a symbol based on the distance from every pixel in the image to the lines in the symbol. Matching is carried out using an implementation of the EM algorithm. Thus, we can improve recognition rates and computation time with respect to our previous formulation based on a simulated annealing algorithm.

Abstract: Building a visual summary from an egocentric photostream captured by a lifelogging wearable camera is of high interest for different applications (e.g. memory reinforcement). In this paper, we propose a new summarization method based on keyframes selection that uses visual features extracted bymeans of a convolutional neural network. Our method applies an unsupervised clustering for dividing the photostreams into events, and finally extracts the most relevant keyframe for each event. We assess the results by applying a blind-taste test on a group of 20 people who assessed the quality of the
summaries.

Abstract: In this work we present an effective and computationally simple algorithm for image compression based on Hilbert Scanning of Embedded quadTrees (Hi-SET). It allows to represent an image as an embedded bitstream along a fractal function. Embedding is an important feature of modern image compression algorithms, in this way Salomon in [1, pg. 614] cite that another feature and perhaps a unique one is the fact of achieving the best quality for the number of bits input by the decoder at any point during the decoding. Hi-SET possesses also this latter feature. Furthermore, the coder is based on a quadtree partition strategy, that applied to image transformation structures such as discrete cosine or wavelet transform allows to obtain an energy clustering both in frequency and space. The coding algorithm is composed of three general steps, using just a list of significant pixels. The implementation of the proposed coder is developed for gray-scale and color image compression. Hi-SET compressed images are, on average, 6.20dB better than the ones obtained by other compression techniques based on the Hilbert scanning. Moreover, Hi-SET improves the image quality in 1.39dB and 1.00dB in gray-scale and color compression, respectively, when compared with JPEG2000 coder.

Abstract: This paper proposes a stacked conditional Generative Adversarial Network-based method for Near InfraRed (NIR) imagery colorization. We propose a variant architecture of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that uses multiple
loss functions over a conditional probabilistic generative model. We show that this new architecture/loss-function yields better generalization and representation of the generated colored IR images. The proposed approach is evaluated on a large test dataset and compared to recent state of the art methods using standard metrics.

Abstract: We propose a novel representation for dense pixel-wise estimation tasks using CNNs that boosts accuracy and reduces training time, by explicitly exploiting joint coarse-and-fine reasoning. The coarse reasoning is performed over a discrete classification space to obtain a general rough solution, while the fine details of the solution are obtained over a continuous regression space. In our approach both components are jointly estimated, which proved to be beneficial for improving estimation accuracy. Additionally, we propose a new network architecture, which combines coarse and fine components by treating the fine estimation as a refinement built on top of the coarse solution, and therefore adding details to the general prediction. We apply our approach to the challenging problem of optical flow estimation and empirically validate it against state-of-the-art CNN-based solutions trained from scratch and tested on large optical flow datasets.

Abstract: We propose a method to acquire multispectral data with handheld devices with front-mounted RGB cameras. We propose to use the display of the device as an illuminant while the camera captures images illuminated by the red, green and
blue primaries of the display. Three illuminants and three response functions of the camera lead to nine response values which are used for reflectance estimation. Results are promising and show that the accuracy of the spectral reconstruction improves in the range from 30-40% over the spectral
reconstruction based on a single illuminant. Furthermore, we propose to compute sensor-illuminant aware linear basis by discarding the part of the reflectances that falls in the sensorilluminant null-space. We show experimentally that optimizing reflectance estimation on these new basis functions decreases
the RMSE significantly over basis functions that are independent to sensor-illuminant. We conclude that, multispectral data acquisition is potentially possible with consumer hand-held devices such as tablets, mobiles, and laptops, opening up applications which are currently considered to be unrealistic.