Abstract: Domain adaptation addresses the problem of accuracy drop that a classifier may suffer when the training data (source domain) and the testing data (target domain) are drawn from different distributions. In this work, we focus on domain adaptation for structured SVM (SSVM). We propose a cost-sensitive domain adaptation method for SSVM, namely COSS-SSVM. In particular, during the re-training of an adapted classifier based on target and source data, the idea that we explore consists in introducing a non-zero cost even for correctly classified source domain samples. Eventually, we aim to learn a more targetoriented classifier by not rewarding (zero loss) properly classified source-domain training samples. We assess the effectiveness of COSS-SSVM on multi-category object recognition.

Abstract: We present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of text in natural scenes that goes beyond the fulldetection approaches in terms of time performance optimization.
A state-of-the-art scene text detection module based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) is used to detect text asynchronously, while on a separate thread detected text objects are tracked by MSER propagation. The cooperation of these two modules yields real time video processing at high frame rates even on low-resource devices.

Abstract: This paper presents an image database of historical handwritten marriages records stored in the archives of Barcelona cathedral, and the corresponding meta-data addressed to evaluate the performance of document analysis algorithms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a complete ground truth which covers the whole pipeline of handwriting
recognition research, from layout analysis to recognition and understanding. Second, it is the first dataset in the emerging area of genealogical document analysis, where documents are manuscripts pseudo-structured with specific lexicons and the interest is beyond pure transcriptions but context dependent.

Abstract: Recognizing human actions in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision due to significant amount of scale, illumination and pose variation. Given the bounding box of a person both at training and test time, the task is to classify the action associated with each bounding box in an image.
Most state-of-the-art methods use the bag-of-words paradigm for action recognition. The bag-of-words framework employing a dense multi-scale grid sampling strategy is the de facto standard for feature detection. This results in a scale invariant image representation where all the features at multiple-scales are binned in a single histogram. We argue that such a scale invariant
strategy is sub-optimal since it ignores the multi-scale information
available with each bounding box of a person.
This paper investigates alternative approaches to scale coding for action recognition in still images. We encode multi-scale information explicitly in three different histograms for small, medium and large scale visual-words. Our first approach exploits multi-scale information with respect to the image size. In our second approach, we encode multi-scale information relative to the size of the bounding box of a person instance. In each approach, the multi-scale histograms are then concatenated into a single representation for action classification. We validate our approaches on the Willow dataset which contains seven action categories: interacting with computer, photography, playing music,
riding bike, riding horse, running and walking. Our results clearly suggest that the proposed scale coding approaches outperform the conventional scale invariant technique. Moreover, we show that our approach obtains promising results compared to more complex state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Multiple classifier systems, also known as classifier ensembles, have received great attention in recent years because of their improved classification accuracy in different applications. In this paper, we propose a new general approach to ensemble classification, named generic subclass ensemble, in which each base classifier is trained with data belonging to a subset of classes, and thus discriminates among a subset of target categories. The ensemble classifiers are then fused using a combination rule. The proposed approach differs from existing methods that manipulate the target attribute, since in our approach individual classification problems are not restricted to two-class problems. We perform a series of experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the generic subclass approach on a set of benchmark datasets. Experimental results with multilayer perceptrons show that the proposed approach presents a viable alternative to the most commonly used ensemble classification approaches.