Abstract: Workshop STACOM, dins del MICCAI
X-ray angiography is the most common imaging modality employed in the diagnosis of coronary diseases prior to or during a catheter-based intervention. The analysis of the patient X-Ray sequence can provide useful information about the degree of arterial stenosis, the myocardial perfusion and other clinical parameters. If the sequence has been acquired to evaluate the perfusion grade, the opacity due to the diaphragm could potentially hinder any kind of visual inspection and make more difficult a computer aided measurements. In this paper we propose an accurate and robust method to automatically identify the diaphragm border in each frame. Quantitative evaluation on a set of 11 sequences shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods.

Abstract: In order to improve the results of automatically recognized handwritten text, information about the language is commonly included in the recognition process. A common approach is to represent a text line as a sequence. It is processed in one direction and the language information via n-grams is directly included in the decoding. This approach, however, only uses context on one side to estimate a word’s probability. Therefore, we propose a bidirectional recognition in this paper, using distinct forward and a backward language models. By combining decoding hypotheses from both directions, we achieve a significant increase in recognition accuracy for the off-line writer independent handwriting recognition task. Both language models are of the same type and can be estimated on the same corpus. Hence, the increase in recognition accuracy comes without any additional need for training data or language modeling complexity.

Abstract: Symbol spotting can be defined as locating given query symbol in a large collection of graphical documents. In this paper we present a hierarchical graph representation for symbols. This representation allows graph matching methods to deal with low-level vectorization errors and, thus, to perform a robust symbol spotting. To show the potential of this approach, we conduct an experiment with the SESYD dataset.

Abstract: Graphs are the most powerful, expressive and convenient data structures but there is a lack of efficient computational tools and algorithms for processing them. The embedding of graphs into numeric vector spaces permits them to access the state-of-the-art computational efficient statistical models and tools. In this paper we take forward our work on explicit graph embedding and present an improvement to our earlier proposed method, named “fuzzy multilevel graph embedding – FMGE”, through feature selection technique. FMGE achieves the embedding of attributed graphs into low dimensional vector spaces by performing a multilevel analysis of graphs and extracting a set of global, structural and elementary level features. Feature selection permits FMGE to select the subset of most discriminating features and to discard the confusing ones for underlying graph dataset. Experimental results for graph classification experimentation on IAM letter, GREC and fingerprint graph databases, show improvement in the performance of FMGE.

Abstract: Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand–designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process.
Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state–of–the–art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.

Abstract: Facial trait judgments are an important information cue for people. Recent works in the Psychology field have stated the basis of face evaluation, defining a set of traits that we evaluate from faces (e.g. dominance, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, attractiveness, threatening or intelligence among others). We rapidly infer information from others faces, usually after a short period of time (< 1000ms) we perceive a certain degree of dominance or trustworthiness of another person from the face. Although these perceptions are not necessarily accurate, they influence many important social outcomes (such as the results of the elections or the court decisions). This topic has also attracted the attention of Computer Vision scientists, and recently a computational model to automatically predict trait evaluations from faces has been proposed. These systems try to mimic the human perception by means of applying machine learning classifiers to a set of labeled data. In this paper we perform an experimental study on the specific facial features that trigger the social inferences. Using previous results from the literature, we propose to use simple similarity maps to evaluate which regions of the face influence the most the trait inferences. The correlation analysis is performed using only appearance, and the results from the experiments suggest that each trait is correlated with specific facial characteristics.

Abstract: Road scene segmentation is important in computer vision for different applications such as autonomous driving and pedestrian detection. Recovering the 3D structure of road scenes provides relevant contextual information to improve their understanding.
In this paper, we use a convolutional neural network based algorithm to learn features from noisy labels to recover the 3D scene layout of a road image. The novelty of the algorithm relies on generating training labels by applying an algorithm trained on a general image dataset to classify on–board images. Further, we propose a novel texture descriptor based on a learned color plane fusion to obtain maximal uniformity in road areas. Finally, acquired (off–line) and current (on–line) information are combined to detect road areas in single images.
From quantitative and qualitative experiments, conducted on publicly available datasets, it is concluded that convolutional neural networks are suitable for learning 3D scene layout from noisy labels and provides a relative improvement of 7% compared to the baseline. Furthermore, combining color planes provides a statistical description of road areas that exhibits maximal uniformity and provides a relative improvement of 8% compared to the baseline. Finally, the improvement is even bigger when acquired and current information from a single image are combined