Abstract: In this paper we propose a segmentation-free approach to word spotting. Word images are first encoded into feature vectors using Fisher Vector. Then, these feature vectors are used together with pyramidal histogram of characters labels (PHOC) to learn SVM-based attribute models. Documents are represented by these PHOC based word attributes. To efficiently compute the word attributes over a sliding window, we propose to use an integral image representation of the document using a simplified version of the attribute model. Finally we re-rank the top word candidates using the more discriminative full version of the word attributes. We show state-of-the-art results for segmentation-free query-by-example word spotting in single-writer and multi-writer standard datasets.

Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.

Abstract: Pedestrian classifiers decide which image windows contain a pedestrian. In practice, such classifiers provide a relatively high response at neighbor windows overlapping a pedestrian, while the responses around potential false positives are expected to be lower. An analogous reasoning applies for image sequences. If there is a pedestrian located within a frame, the same pedestrian is expected to appear close to the same location in neighbor frames. Therefore, such a location has chances of receiving high classification scores during several frames, while false positives are expected to be more spurious. In this paper we propose to exploit such correlations for improving the accuracy of base pedestrian classifiers. In particular, we propose to use two-stage classifiers which not only rely on the image descriptors required by the base classifiers but also on the response of such base classifiers in a given spatiotemporal neighborhood. More specifically, we train pedestrian classifiers using a stacked sequential learning (SSL) paradigm. We use a new pedestrian dataset we have acquired from a car to evaluate our proposal at different frame rates. We also test on a well known dataset: Caltech. The obtained results show that our SSL proposal boosts detection accuracy significantly with a minimal impact on the computational cost. Interestingly, SSL improves more the accuracy at the most dangerous situations, i.e. when a pedestrian is close to the camera.

Abstract: Procrustes Analysis (PA) has been a popular technique to align and build 2-D statistical models of shapes. Given a set of 2-D shapes PA is applied to remove rigid transformations. Then, a non-rigid 2-D model is computed by modeling (e.g., PCA) the residual. Although PA has been widely used, it has several limitations for modeling 2-D shapes: occluded landmarks and missing data can result in local minima solutions, and there is no guarantee that the 2-D shapes provide a uniform sampling of the 3-D space of rotations for the object. To address previous issues, this paper proposes Subspace PA (SPA). Given several instances of a 3-D object, SPA computes the mean and a 2-D subspace that can simultaneously model all rigid and non-rigid deformations of the 3-D object. We propose a discrete (DSPA) and continuous (CSPA) formulation for SPA, assuming that 3-D samples of an object are provided. DSPA extends the traditional PA, and produces unbiased 2-D models by uniformly sampling dierent views of the 3-D object. CSPA provides a continuous approach to uniformly sample the space of 3-D rotations, being more ecient in space and time. Experiments using SPA to learn 2-D models of bodies from motion capture data illustrate the benets of our approach.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.

Abstract: We explore the potential of the use of blood vessels as anatomical landmarks for developing image registration methods in colonoscopy images. An unequivocal representation of blood vessels could be used to guide follow-up methods to track lesions over different interventions. We propose a graph-based representation to characterize network structures, such as blood vessels, based on the use of intersections and endpoints. We present a study consisting of the assessment of the minimal performance a keypoint detector should achieve so that the structure can still be recognized. Experimental results prove that, even by achieving a loss of 35% of the keypoints, the descriptive power of the associated graphs to the vessel pattern is still high enough to recognize blood vessels.

Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems. Current evaluation metrics provide an average score that does not consider performance variability across the query set. In this manner, conclusions lack of any statistical significance, yielding poor inference to cases outside the query set and possibly unfair comparisons. We propose to apply statistical methods in order to obtain a more informative measure for problems in which different query classes can be identified. In this context, we assess the performance variability on two levels: overall variability across the whole query set and specific query class-related variability. To this end, we estimate confidence bands for precision-recall curves, and we apply ANOVA in order to assess the significance of the performance across different query classes.