G.Blasco, Simone Balocco, J.Puig, J.Sanchez-Gonzalez, W.Ricart, J.Daunis-I-Estadella, et al. (2015). Carotid pulse wave velocity by magnetic resonance imaging is increased in middle-aged subjects with the metabolic syndrome. ICJI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 31(3), 603–612.
Abstract: Arterial pulse wave velocity (PWV), an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease, physiologically increases with age; however, growing evidence suggests metabolic syndrome (MetS) accelerates this increase. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables reliable noninvasive assessment of arterial stiffness by measuring arterial PWV in specific vascular segments. We investigated the association between the presence of MetS and its components with carotid PWV (cPWV) in asymptomatic subjects without diabetes. We assessed cPWV by MRI in 61 individuals (mean age, 55.3 ± 14.1 years; median age, 55 years): 30 with MetS and 31 controls with similar age, sex, body mass index, and LDL-cholesterol levels. The study population was dichotomized by the median age. To remove the physiological association between PWV and age, unpaired t tests and multiple regression analyses were performed using the residuals of the regression between PWV and age. cPWV was higher in middle-aged subjects with MetS than in those without (p = 0.001), but no differences were found in elder subjects (p = 0.313). cPWV was associated with diastolic blood pressure (r = 0.276, p = 0.033) and waist circumference (r = 0.268, p = 0.038). The presence of MetS was associated with increased cPWV regardless of age, sex, blood pressure, and waist (p = 0.007). The MetS components contributing independently to an increased cPWV were hypertension (p = 0.018) and hypertriglyceridemia (p = 0.002). The presence of MetS is associated with an increased cPWV in middle-aged subjects. In particular, hypertension and hypertriglyceridemia may contribute to early progression of carotid stiffness.
Keywords: Metabolic syndrome; Arterial stiffness; Pulse wave velocity; Carotid artery; Magnetic resonance
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Arnau Ramisa, Adriana Tapus, David Aldavert, Ricardo Toledo, & Ramon Lopez de Mantaras. (2009). Robust Vision-Based Localization using Combinations of Local Feature Regions Detectors. AR - Autonomous Robots, 27(4), 373–385.
Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.
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Jaume Amores. (2015). MILDE: multiple instance learning by discriminative embedding. KAIS - Knowledge and Information Systems, 42(2), 381–407.
Abstract: While the objective of the standard supervised learning problem is to classify feature vectors, in the multiple instance learning problem, the objective is to classify bags, where each bag contains multiple feature vectors. This represents a generalization of the standard problem, and this generalization becomes necessary in many real applications such as drug activity prediction, content-based image retrieval, and others. While the existing paradigms are based on learning the discriminant information either at the instance level or at the bag level, we propose to incorporate both levels of information. This is done by defining a discriminative embedding of the original space based on the responses of cluster-adapted instance classifiers. Results clearly show the advantage of the proposed method over the state of the art, where we tested the performance through a variety of well-known databases that come from real problems, and we also included an analysis of the performance using synthetically generated data.
Keywords: Multi-instance learning; Codebook; Bag of words
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Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Qigang Gao, & Sergio Escalera. (2015). Combining Local and Global Learners in the Pairwise Multiclass Classification. PAA - Pattern Analysis and Applications, 18(4), 845–860.
Abstract: Pairwise classification is a well-known class binarization technique that converts a multiclass problem into a number of two-class problems, one problem for each pair of classes. However, in the pairwise technique, nuisance votes of many irrelevant classifiers may result in a wrong class prediction. To overcome this problem, a simple, but efficient method is proposed and evaluated in this paper. The proposed method is based on excluding some classes and focusing on the most probable classes in the neighborhood space, named Local Crossing Off (LCO). This procedure is performed by employing a modified version of standard K-nearest neighbor and large margin nearest neighbor algorithms. The LCO method takes advantage of nearest neighbor classification algorithm because of its local learning behavior as well as the global behavior of powerful binary classifiers to discriminate between two classes. Combining these two properties in the proposed LCO technique will avoid the weaknesses of each method and will increase the efficiency of the whole classification system. On several benchmark datasets of varying size and difficulty, we found that the LCO approach leads to significant improvements using different base learners. The experimental results show that the proposed technique not only achieves better classification accuracy in comparison to other standard approaches, but also is computationally more efficient for tackling classification problems which have a relatively large number of target classes.
Keywords: Multiclass classification; Pairwise approach; One-versus-one
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Marçal Rusiñol, Josep Llados, & Gemma Sanchez. (2010). Symbol Spotting in Vectorized Technical Drawings Through a Lookup Table of Region Strings. PAA - Pattern Analysis and Applications, 13(3), 321–331.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of symbol spotting in technical document images applied to scanned and vectorized line drawings. Like any information spotting architecture, our approach has two components. First, symbols are decomposed in primitives which are compactly represented and second a primitive indexing structure aims to efficiently retrieve similar primitives. Primitives are encoded in terms of attributed strings representing closed regions. Similar strings are clustered in a lookup table so that the set median strings act as indexing keys. A voting scheme formulates hypothesis in certain locations of the line drawing image where there is a high presence of regions similar to the queried ones, and therefore, a high probability to find the queried graphical symbol. The proposed approach is illustrated in a framework consisting in spotting furniture symbols in architectural drawings. It has been proved to work even in the presence of noise and distortion introduced by the scanning and raster-to-vector processes.
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David Aldavert, Marçal Rusiñol, Ricardo Toledo, & Josep Llados. (2015). A Study of Bag-of-Visual-Words Representations for Handwritten Keyword Spotting. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 18(3), 223–234.
Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.
Keywords: Bag-of-Visual-Words; Keyword spotting; Handwritten documents; Performance evaluation
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Christophe Rigaud, Clement Guerin, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Jean-Christophe Burie, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2015). Knowledge-driven understanding of images in comic books. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 18(3), 199–221.
Abstract: Document analysis is an active field of research, which can attain a complete understanding of the semantics of a given document. One example of the document understanding process is enabling a computer to identify the key elements of a comic book story and arrange them according to a predefined domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a knowledge-driven system that can interact with bottom-up and top-down information to progressively understand the content of a document. We model the comic book’s and the image processing domains knowledge for information consistency analysis. In addition, different image processing methods are improved or developed to extract panels, balloons, tails, texts, comic characters and their semantic relations in an unsupervised way.
Keywords: Document Understanding; comics analysis; expert system
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Sergi Robles, & Gemma Sanchez. (2015). CVC-FP and SGT: a new database for structural floor plan analysis and its groundtruthing tool. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 18(1), 15–30.
Abstract: Recent results on structured learning methods have shown the impact of structural information in a wide range of pattern recognition tasks. In the field of document image analysis, there is a long experience on structural methods for the analysis and information extraction of multiple types of documents. Yet, the lack of conveniently annotated and free access databases has not benefited the progress in some areas such as technical drawing understanding. In this paper, we present a floor plan database, named CVC-FP, that is annotated for the architectural objects and their structural relations. To construct this database, we have implemented a groundtruthing tool, the SGT tool, that allows to make specific this sort of information in a natural manner. This tool has been made for general purpose groundtruthing: It allows to define own object classes and properties, multiple labeling options are possible, grants the cooperative work, and provides user and version control. We finally have collected some of the recent work on floor plan interpretation and present a quantitative benchmark for this database. Both CVC-FP database and the SGT tool are freely released to the research community to ease comparisons between methods and boost reproducible research.
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Marçal Rusiñol, Volkmar Frinken, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Andrew Bagdanov, & Josep Llados. (2014). Multimodal page classification in administrative document image streams. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(4), 331–341.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a page classification application in a banking workflow. The proposed architecture represents administrative document images by merging visual and textual descriptions. The visual description is based on a hierarchical representation of the pixel intensity distribution. The textual description uses latent semantic analysis to represent document content as a mixture of topics. Several off-the-shelf classifiers and different strategies for combining visual and textual cues have been evaluated. A final step uses an n-gram model of the page stream allowing a finer-grained classification of pages. The proposed method has been tested in a real large-scale environment and we report results on a dataset of 70,000 pages.
Keywords: Digital mail room; Multimodal page classification; Visual and textual document description
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, Ahmed Sheraz, Marcus Liwicki, Ernest Valveny, & Gemma Sanchez. (2014). Statistical Segmentation and Structural Recognition for Floor Plan Interpretation. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 221–237.
Abstract: A generic method for floor plan analysis and interpretation is presented in this article. The method, which is mainly inspired by the way engineers draw and interpret floor plans, applies two recognition steps in a bottom-up manner. First, basic building blocks, i.e., walls, doors, and windows are detected using a statistical patch-based segmentation approach. Second, a graph is generated, and structural pattern recognition techniques are applied to further locate the main entities, i.e., rooms of the building. The proposed approach is able to analyze any type of floor plan regardless of the notation used. We have evaluated our method on different publicly available datasets of real architectural floor plans with different notations. The overall detection and recognition accuracy is about 95 %, which is significantly better than any other state-of-the-art method. Our approach is generic enough such that it could be easily adopted to the recognition and interpretation of any other printed machine-generated structured documents.
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Alicia Fornes, Anjan Dutta, Albert Gordo, & Josep Llados. (2012). CVC-MUSCIMA: A Ground-Truth of Handwritten Music Score Images for Writer Identification and Staff Removal. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 15(3), 243–251.
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.
Keywords: Music scores; Handwritten documents; Writer identification; Staff removal; Performance evaluation; Graphics recognition; Ground truths
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2012). Text line extraction in graphical documents using background and foreground. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 15(3), 227–241.
Abstract: 0,405 JCR
In graphical documents (e.g., maps, engineering drawings), artistic documents etc., the text lines are annotated in multiple orientations or curvilinear way to illustrate different locations or symbols. For the optical character recognition of such documents, individual text lines from the documents need to be extracted. In this paper, we propose a novel method to segment such text lines and the method is based on the foreground and background information of the text components. To effectively utilize the background information, a water reservoir concept is used here. In the proposed scheme, at first, individual components are detected and grouped into character clusters in a hierarchical way using size and positional information. Next, the clusters are extended in two extreme sides to determine potential candidate regions. Finally, with the help of these candidate regions,
individual lines are extracted. The experimental results are presented on different datasets of graphical documents, camera-based warped documents, noisy images containing seals, etc. The results demonstrate that our approach is robust and invariant to size and orientation of the text lines present in
the document.
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M. Visani, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2011). A Protocol to Characterize the Descriptive Power and the Complementarity of Shape Descriptors. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 14(1), 87–100.
Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.
Keywords: Document analysis; Shape descriptors; Symbol description; Performance characterization; Complementarity analysis
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gemma Sanchez, Xavier Otazu, & Horst Bunke. (2010). A Combination of Features for Symbol-Independent Writer Identification in Old Music Scores. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 13(4), 243–259.
Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.
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