Abstract: Three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) allows to visualize and obtain volumetric measurements of coronary lesions through an exploration of the cross sections and longitudinal views of arteries. However, the visualization and subsequent morpho-geometric measurements in IVUS longitudinal cuts are subject to distortion caused by periodic image/vessel motion around the IVUS catheter. Usually, to overcome the image motion artifact ECG-gating and image-gated approaches are proposed, leading to slowing the pullback acquisition or disregarding part of IVUS data. In this paper, we argue that the image motion is due to 3-D vessel geometry as well as cardiac dynamics, and propose a dynamic model based on the tracking of an elliptical vessel approximation to recover the rigid transformation and align IVUS images without loosing any IVUS data. We report an extensive validation with synthetic simulated data and in vivo IVUS sequences of 30 patients achieving an average reduction of the image artifact of 97% in synthetic data and 79% in real-data. Our study shows that IVUS alignment improves longitudinal analysis of the IVUS data and is a necessary step towards accurate reconstruction and volumetric measurements of 3-D IVUS.

Abstract: Issues such as content identification, document and image security, audience measurement, ownership and copyright among others can be settled by the use of digital watermarking. Many recent video watermarking methods show drops in visual quality of the sequences. The present work addresses the aforementioned issue by introducing a robust and imperceptible non-blind color video frame watermarking algorithm. The method divides frames into moving and non-moving parts. The non-moving part of each color channel is processed separately using a block-based watermarking scheme. Blocks with an entropy lower than the average entropy of all blocks are subject to a further process for embedding the watermark image. Finally a watermarked frame is generated by adding moving parts to it. Several signal processing attacks are applied to each watermarked frame in order to perform experiments and are compared with some recent algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust against common signal processing attacks.

Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.

Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.

Abstract: Advanced segmentation techniques in the surveillance domain deal with shadows to avoid distortions when detecting moving objects. Most approaches for shadow detection are still typically restricted to penumbra shadows and cannot cope well with umbra shadows. Consequently, umbra shadow regions are usually detected as part of moving objects, thus aecting the performance of the nal detection. In this paper we address the detection of both penumbra and umbra shadow regions. First, a novel bottom-up approach is presented based on gradient and colour models, which successfully discriminates between chromatic moving cast shadow regions and those regions detected as moving objects. In essence, those regions corresponding to potential shadows are detected based on edge partitioning and colour statistics. Subsequently (i) temporal similarities between textures and (ii) spatial similarities between chrominance angle and brightness distortions are analysed for each potential shadow region for detecting the umbra shadow regions. Our second contribution renes even further the segmentation results: a tracking-based top-down approach increases the performance of our bottom-up chromatic shadow detection algorithm by properly correcting non-detected shadows.
To do so, a combination of motion lters in a data association framework exploits the temporal consistency between objects and shadows to increase
the shadow detection rate. Experimental results exceed current state-of-the-
art in shadow accuracy for multiple well-known surveillance image databases which contain dierent shadowed materials and illumination conditions.

Abstract: Most of the techniques proposed for tackling the Structure from Motion problem (SFM) cannot deal with high percentages of missing data in the matrix of trajectories. Furthermore, an additional problem should be faced up when working with multiple object scenes: the rank of the matrix of trajectories should be estimated. This paper presents an iterative multiresolution scheme for SFM with missing data to be used in both the single and multiple object cases. The proposed scheme aims at recovering missing entries in the original input matrix. The objective is to improve the results by applying a factorization technique to the partially or totally filled in matrix instead of to the original input one. Experimental results obtained with synthetic and real data sequences, containing single and multiple objects, are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: An efficient snake formulation should conform to the idea of picking the smoothest curve among all the shapes approximating an object of interest. In current geodesic snakes, the regularizing curvature also affects the convergence stage, hindering the latter at concave regions. In the present work, we make use of characteristic functions to define a novel geodesic formulation that decouples regularity and convergence. This term decoupling endows the snake with higher adaptability to non-convex shapes. Convergence is ensured by splitting the definition of the external force into an attractive vector field and a repulsive one. In our paper, we propose to use likelihood maps as approximation of characteristic functions of object appearance. The better efficiency and accuracy of our decoupled scheme are illustrated in the particular case of feature space-based segmentation.