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Mireia Sole, Joan Blanco, Debora Gil, G. Fonseka, Richard Frodsham, Francesca Vidal, et al. (2017). Noves perspectives en l estudi de la territorialitat cromosomica de cel·lules germinals masculines: estudis tridimensionals. JBR - Biologia de la Reproduccio, 73–78.
Abstract: In somatic cells, chromosomes occupy specific nuclear regions called chromosome territories which are involved in the
maintenance and regulation of the genome. Preliminary data in male germ cells also suggest the importance of chromosome
territoriality in cell functionality. Nevertheless, the specific characteristics of testicular tissue (presence of different
cell types with different morphological characteristics, in different stages of development and with different ploidy)
makes difficult to achieve conclusive results. In this study we have developed a methodology to approach the threedimensional
study of all chromosome territories in male germ cells from C57BL/6J mice (Mus musculus). The method
includes the following steps: i) Optimized cell fixation to obtain an optimal preservation of the three-dimensionality cell
morphology, ii) Chromosome identification by FISH (Chromoprobe Multiprobe® OctoChrome™ Murine System; Cytocell)
and confocal microscopy (TCS-SP5, Leica Microsystems), iii) Cell type identification by immunofluorescence
iv) Image analysis using Matlab scripts, v) Numerical data extraction related to chromosome features, chromosome
radial position and chromosome relative position. This methodology allows the unequivocally identification and the
analysis of the chromosome territories of all spermatogenic stages. Results will provide information about the features
that determine chromosomal position, preferred associations between chromosomes, and the relationship between chromosome
positioning and genome regulation.
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Quentin Angermann, Jorge Bernal, Cristina Sanchez Montes, Maroua Hammami, Gloria Fernandez Esparrach, Xavier Dray, et al. (2017). Clinical Usability Quantification Of a Real-Time Polyp Detection Method In Videocolonoscopy. In 25th United European Gastroenterology Week.
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Cristina Sanchez Montes, F. Javier Sanchez, Cristina Rodriguez de Miguel, Henry Cordova, Jorge Bernal, Maria Lopez Ceron, et al. (2017). Histological Prediction Of Colonic Polyps By Computer Vision. Preliminary Results. In 25th United European Gastroenterology Week.
Abstract: during colonoscopy, clinicians perform visual inspection of the polyps to predict histology. Kudo’s pit pattern classification is one of the most commonly used for optical diagnosis. These surface patterns present a contrast with respect to their neighboring regions and they can be considered as bright regions in the image that can attract the attention of computational methods.
Keywords: polyps; histology; computer vision
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Alexey Dosovitskiy, German Ros, Felipe Codevilla, Antonio Lopez, & Vladlen Koltun. (2017). CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator. In 1st Annual Conference on Robot Learning. Proceedings of Machine Learning (Vol. 78, pp. 1–16).
Abstract: We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an endto-end
model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via
reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of
increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform’s utility for autonomous driving research.
Keywords: Autonomous driving; sensorimotor control; simulation
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Arash Akbarinia, Raquel Gil Rodriguez, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2017). Colour Constancy: Biologically-inspired Contrast Variant Pooling Mechanism. In 28th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Pooling is a ubiquitous operation in image processing algorithms that allows for higher-level processes to collect relevant low-level features from a region of interest. Currently, max-pooling is one of the most commonly used operators in the computational literature. However, it can lack robustness to outliers due to the fact that it relies merely on the peak of a function. Pooling mechanisms are also present in the primate visual cortex where neurons of higher cortical areas pool signals from lower ones. The receptive fields of these neurons have been shown to vary according to the contrast by aggregating signals over a larger region in the presence of low contrast stimuli. We hypothesise that this contrast-variant-pooling mechanism can address some of the shortcomings of maxpooling. We modelled this contrast variation through a histogram clipping in which the percentage of pooled signal is inversely proportional to the local contrast of an image. We tested our hypothesis by applying it to the phenomenon of colour constancy where a number of popular algorithms utilise a max-pooling step (e.g. White-Patch, Grey-Edge and Double-Opponency). For each of these methods, we investigated the consequences of replacing their original max-pooling by the proposed contrast-variant-pooling. Our experiments on three colour constancy benchmark datasets suggest that previous results can significantly improve by adopting a contrast-variant-pooling mechanism.
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Arash Akbarinia, C. Alejandro Parraga, Marta Exposito, Bogdan Raducanu, & Xavier Otazu. (2017). Can biological solutions help computers detect symmetry? In 40th European Conference on Visual Perception.
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Sergio Escalera, Vassilis Athitsos, & Isabelle Guyon. (2017). Challenges in Multi-modal Gesture Recognition. (pp. 1–60).
Abstract: This paper surveys the state of the art on multimodal gesture recognition and introduces the JMLR special topic on gesture recognition 2011–2015. We began right at the start of the Kinect TMTM revolution when inexpensive infrared cameras providing image depth recordings became available. We published papers using this technology and other more conventional methods, including regular video cameras, to record data, thus providing a good overview of uses of machine learning and computer vision using multimodal data in this area of application. Notably, we organized a series of challenges and made available several datasets we recorded for that purpose, including tens of thousands of videos, which are available to conduct further research. We also overview recent state of the art works on gesture recognition based on a proposed taxonomy for gesture recognition, discussing challenges and future lines of research.
Keywords: Gesture recognition; Time series analysis; Multimodal data analysis; Computer vision; Pattern recognition; Wearable sensors; Infrared cameras; Kinect TMTM
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Meysam Madadi. (2017). Human Segmentation, Pose Estimation and Applications (Sergio Escalera, & Jordi Gonzalez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Automatic analyzing humans in photographs or videos has great potential applications in computer vision, including medical diagnosis, sports, entertainment, movie editing and surveillance, just to name a few. Body, face and hand are the most studied components of humans. Body has many variabilities in shape and clothing along with high degrees of freedom in pose. Face has many muscles causing many visible deformity, beside variable shape and hair style. Hand is a small object, moving fast and has high degrees of freedom. Adding human characteristics to all aforementioned variabilities makes human analysis quite a challenging task.
In this thesis, we developed human segmentation in different modalities. In a first scenario, we segmented human body and hand in depth images using example-based shape warping. We developed a shape descriptor based on shape context and class probabilities of shape regions to extract nearest neighbors. We then considered rigid affine alignment vs. nonrigid iterative shape warping. In a second scenario, we segmented face in RGB images using convolutional neural networks (CNN). We modeled conditional random field with recurrent neural networks. In our model pair-wise kernels are not fixed and learned during training. We trained the network end-to-end using adversarial networks which improved hair segmentation by a high margin.
We also worked on 3D hand pose estimation in depth images. In a generative approach, we fitted a finger model separately for each finger based on our example-based rigid hand segmentation. We minimized an energy function based on overlapping area, depth discrepancy and finger collisions. We also applied linear models in joint trajectory space to refine occluded joints based on visible joints error and invisible joints trajectory smoothness. In a CNN-based approach, we developed a tree-structure network to train specific features for each finger and fused them for global pose consistency. We also formulated physical and appearance constraints as loss functions.
Finally, we developed a number of applications consisting of human soft biometrics measurement and garment retexturing. We also generated some datasets in this thesis consisting of human segmentation, synthetic hand pose, garment retexturing and Italian gestures.
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Onur Ferhat. (2017). Analysis of Head-Pose Invariant, Natural Light Gaze Estimation Methods (Fernando Vilariño, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Eye tracker devices have traditionally been only used inside laboratories, requiring trained professionals and elaborate setup mechanisms. However, in the recent years the scientific work on easier–to–use eye trackers which require no special hardware—other than the omnipresent front facing cameras in computers, tablets, and mobiles—is aiming at making this technology common–place. These types of trackers have several extra challenges that make the problem harder, such as low resolution images provided by a regular webcam, the changing ambient lighting conditions, personal appearance differences, changes in head pose, and so on. Recent research in the field has focused on all these challenges in order to provide better gaze estimation performances in a real world setup.
In this work, we aim at tackling the gaze tracking problem in a single camera setup. We first analyze all the previous work in the field, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each tried idea. We start our work on the gaze tracker with an appearance–based gaze estimation method, which is the simplest idea that creates a direct mapping between a rectangular image patch extracted around the eye in a camera image, and the gaze point (or gaze direction). Here, we do an extensive analysis of the factors that affect the performance of this tracker in several experimental setups, in order to address these problems in future works. In the second part of our work, we propose a feature–based gaze estimation method, which encodes the eye region image into a compact representation. We argue that this type of representation is better suited to dealing with head pose and lighting condition changes, as it both reduces the dimensionality of the input (i.e. eye image) and breaks the direct connection between image pixel intensities and the gaze estimation. Lastly, we use a face alignment algorithm to have robust face pose estimation, using a 3D model customized to the subject using the tracker. We combine this with a convolutional neural network trained on a large dataset of images to build a face pose invariant gaze tracker.
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Arash Akbarinia. (2017). Computational Model of Visual Perception: From Colour to Form (C. Alejandro Parraga, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: The original idea of this project was to study the role of colour in the challenging task of object recognition. We started by extending previous research on colour naming showing that it is feasible to capture colour terms through parsimonious ellipsoids. Although, the results of our model exceeded state-of-the-art in two benchmark datasets, we realised that the two phenomena of metameric lights and colour constancy must be addressed prior to any further colour processing. Our investigation of metameric pairs reached the conclusion that they are infrequent in real world scenarios. Contrary to that, the illumination of a scene often changes dramatically. We addressed this issue by proposing a colour constancy model inspired by the dynamical centre-surround adaptation of neurons in the visual cortex. This was implemented through two overlapping asymmetric Gaussians whose variances and heights are adjusted according to the local contrast of pixels. We complemented this model with a generic contrast-variant pooling mechanism that inversely connect the percentage of pooled signal to the local contrast of a region. The results of our experiments on four benchmark datasets were indeed promising: the proposed model, although simple, outperformed even learning-based approaches in many cases. Encouraged by the success of our contrast-variant surround modulation, we extended this approach to detect boundaries of objects. We proposed an edge detection model based on the first derivative of the Gaussian kernel. We incorporated four types of surround: full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation. Furthermore, we accounted for the pooling mechanism at higher cortical areas and the shape feedback sent to lower areas. Our results in three benchmark datasets showed significant improvement over non-learning algorithms.
To summarise, we demonstrated that biologically-inspired models offer promising solutions to computer vision problems, such as, colour naming, colour constancy and edge detection. We believe that the greatest contribution of this Ph.D dissertation is modelling the concept of dynamic surround modulation that shows the significance of contrast-variant surround integration. The models proposed here are grounded on only a portion of what we know about the human visual system. Therefore, it is only natural to complement them accordingly in future works.
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Cristhian Aguilera. (2017). Local feature description in cross-spectral imagery (Angel Sappa, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Over the last few years, the number of consumer computer vision applications has increased dramatically. Today, computer vision solutions can be found in video game consoles, smartphone applications, driving assistance – just to name a few. Ideally, we require the performance of those applications, particularly those that are safety critical to remain constant under any external environment factors, such as changes in illumination or weather conditions. However, this is not always possible or very difficult to obtain by only using visible imagery, due to the inherent limitations of the images from that spectral band. For that reason, the use of images from different or multiple spectral bands is becoming more appealing.
The aforementioned possible advantages of using images from multiples spectral bands on various vision applications make multi-spectral image processing a relevant topic for research and development. Like in visible image processing, multi-spectral image processing needs tools and algorithms to handle information from various spectral bands. Furthermore, traditional tools such as local feature detection, which is the basis of many vision tasks such as visual odometry, image registration, or structure from motion, must be adjusted or reformulated to operate under new conditions. Traditional feature detection, description, and matching methods tend to underperform in multi-spectral settings, in comparison to mono-spectral settings, due to the natural differences between each spectral band.
The work in this thesis is focused on the local feature description problem when cross-spectral images are considered. In this context, this dissertation has three main contributions. Firstly, the work starts by proposing the usage of a combination of frequency and spatial information, in a multi-scale scheme, as feature description. Evaluations of this proposal, based on classical hand-made feature descriptors, and comparisons with state of the art cross-spectral approaches help to find and understand limitations of such strategy. Secondly, different convolutional neural network (CNN) based architectures are evaluated when used to describe cross-spectral image patches. Results showed that CNN-based methods, designed to work with visible monocular images, could be successfully applied to the description of images from two different spectral bands, with just minor modifications. In this framework, a novel CNN-based network model, specifically intended to describe image patches from two different spectral bands, is proposed. This network, referred to as Q-Net, outperforms state of the art in the cross-spectral domain, including both previous hand-made solutions as well as L2 CNN-based architectures. The third contribution of this dissertation is in the cross-spectral feature description application domain. The multispectral odometry problem is tackled showing a real application of cross-spectral descriptors
In addition to the three main contributions mentioned above, in this dissertation, two different multi-spectral datasets are generated and shared with the community to be used as benchmarks for further studies.
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Laura Igual, & Santiago Segui. (2017). Introduction to Data Science – A Python Approach to Concepts, Techniques and Applications. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. 978-3-319-50016-4.
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Fernando Vilariño, & Dan Norton. (2017). Using mutimedia tools to spread poetry collections. In Internet librarian International Conference.
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Fernando Vilariño. (2017). Citizen experience as a powerful communication tool: Open Innovation and the role of Living Labs in EU. In European Conference of Science Journalists.
Abstract: The Open Innovation 2.0 model spearheaded by the European Commission introduces conceptual changes in how innovation processes should be developed. The notion of an innovation ecosystem, and the active participation of the citizens (and all the different actors of the quadruple helix) in innovation processes, opens up new channels for scientific communication, where the citizens (and all actors) can be naturally reached and facilitate the spread of the scientific message in their communities. Unleashing the power of such mechanisms, while maintaining control over the scientific communication done through such channels presents an opportunity and a challenge at the same time.
This workshop will look into key concepts that the Open Innovation 2.0 EU model introduces, and what new opportunities for communication they bring about. Specifically, we will focus on Living Labs, as a key instrument for implementing this innovation model at the regional level, and their potential in creating scientific dissemination spaces.
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Fernando Vilariño. (2017). Bringing and keeping all the stakeholders together: creating a catalog of models of governance for innovation.
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