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Author Antonio Esteban Lansaque; Carles Sanchez; Agnes Borras; Marta Diez-Ferrer; Antoni Rosell; Debora Gil
Title Stable Anatomical Structure Tracking for video-bronchoscopy Navigation Type Conference Article
Year 2016 Publication 19th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Workshops Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords Lung cancer diagnosis; video-bronchoscopy; airway lumen detection; region tracking
Abstract Bronchoscopy allows to examine the patient airways for detection of lesions and sampling of tissues without surgery. A main drawback in lung cancer diagnosis is the diculty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path to the nodule that has to be biopsied. The most extended guidance uses uoroscopy which implies repeated radiation of clinical sta and patients. Alternatives such as virtual bronchoscopy or electromagnetic navigation are very expensive and not completely robust to blood, mocus or deformations as to be extensively used. We propose a method that extracts and tracks stable lumen regions at di erent levels of the bronchial tree. The tracked regions are stored in a tree that encodes the anatomical structure of the scene which can be useful to retrieve the path to the lesion that the clinician should follow to do the biopsy. We present a multi-expert validation of our anatomical landmark extraction in 3 intra-operative ultrathin explorations.
Address Athens; Greece; October 2016
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference MICCAIW
Notes IAM; 600.075 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ LSB2016b Serial 2857
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Author German Ros
Title Visual Scene Understanding for Autonomous Vehicles: Understanding Where and What Type Book Whole
Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Making Ground Autonomous Vehicles (GAVs) a reality as a service for the society is one of the major scientific and technological challenges of this century. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles include reducing accidents, improving traffic congestion and better usage of road infrastructures, among others. These vehicles must operate in our cities, towns and highways, dealing with many different types of situations while respecting traffic rules and protecting human lives. GAVs are expected to deal with all types of scenarios and situations, coping with an uncertain and chaotic world.
Therefore, in order to fulfill these demanding requirements GAVs need to be endowed with the capability of understanding their surrounding at many different levels, by means of affordable sensors and artificial intelligence. This capacity to understand the surroundings and the current situation that the vehicle is involved in is called scene understanding. In this work we investigate novel techniques to bring scene understanding to autonomous vehicles by combining the use of cameras as the main source of information—due to their versatility and affordability—and algorithms based on computer vision and machine learning. We investigate different degrees of understanding of the scene, starting from basic geometric knowledge about where is the vehicle within the scene. A robust and efficient estimation of the vehicle location and pose with respect to a map is one of the most fundamental steps towards autonomous driving. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness and computational efficiency, proposing key insights to improve current solutions. Then we advance to higher levels of abstraction to discover what is in the scene, by recognizing and parsing all the elements present on a driving scene, such as roads, sidewalks, pedestrians, etc. We investigate this problem known as semantic segmentation, proposing new approaches to improve recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. We cover these points by focusing on key aspects such as: (i) how to leverage computation moving semantics to an offline process, (ii) how to train compact architectures based on deconvolutional networks to achieve their maximum potential, (iii) how to use virtual worlds in combination with domain adaptation to produce accurate models in a cost-effective fashion, and (iv) how to use transfer learning techniques to prepare models to new situations. We finally extend the previous level of knowledge enabling systems to reasoning about what has change in a scene with respect to a previous visit, which in return allows for efficient and cost-effective map updating.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Angel Sappa;Julio Guerrero;Antonio Lopez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-1-8 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ros2016 Serial 2860
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Author Francisco Cruz
Title Probabilistic Graphical Models for Document Analysis Type Book Whole
Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Latest advances in digitization techniques have fostered the interest in creating digital copies of collections of documents. Digitized documents permit an easy maintenance, loss-less storage, and efficient ways for transmission and to perform information retrieval processes. This situation has opened a new market niche to develop systems able to automatically extract and analyze information contained in these collections, specially in the ambit of the business activity.

Due to the great variety of types of documents this is not a trivial task. For instance, the automatic extraction of numerical data from invoices differs substantially from a task of text recognition in historical documents. However, in order to extract the information of interest, is always necessary to identify the area of the document where it is located. In the area of Document Analysis we refer to this process as layout analysis, which aims at identifying and categorizing the different entities that compose the document, such as text regions, pictures, text lines, or tables, among others. To perform this task it is usually necessary to incorporate a prior knowledge about the task into the analysis process, which can be modeled by defining a set of contextual relations between the different entities of the document. The use of context has proven to be useful to reinforce the recognition process and improve the results on many computer vision tasks. It presents two fundamental questions: What kind of contextual information is appropriate for a given task, and how to incorporate this information into the models.

In this thesis we study several ways to incorporate contextual information to the task of document layout analysis, and to the particular case of handwritten text line segmentation. We focus on the study of Probabilistic Graphical Models and other mechanisms for this purpose, and propose several solutions to these problems. First, we present a method for layout analysis based on Conditional Random Fields. With this model we encode local contextual relations between variables, such as pair-wise constraints. Besides, we encode a set of structural relations between different classes of regions at feature level. Second, we present a method based on 2D-Probabilistic Context-free Grammars to encode structural and hierarchical relations. We perform a comparative study between Probabilistic Graphical Models and this syntactic approach. Third, we propose a method for structured documents based on Bayesian Networks to represent the document structure, and an algorithm based in the Expectation-Maximization to find the best configuration of the page. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed methods on two particular collections of documents: a historical collection composed of ancient structured documents, and a collection of contemporary documents. In addition, we present a general method for the task of handwritten text line segmentation. We define a probabilistic framework where we combine the EM algorithm with variational approaches for computing inference and parameter learning on a Markov Random Field. We evaluate our method on several collections of documents, including a general dataset of annotated administrative documents. Results demonstrate the applicability of our method to real problems, and the contribution of the use of contextual information to this kind of problems.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Oriol Ramos Terrades
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-945373-2-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Cru2016 Serial 2861
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Author Aura Hernandez-Sabate; Lluis Albarracin; Daniel Calvo; Nuria Gorgorio
Title EyeMath: Identifying Mathematics Problem Solving Processes in a RTS Video Game Type Conference Article
Year 2016 Publication 5th International Conference Games and Learning Alliance Abbreviated Journal
Volume 10056 Issue Pages 50-59
Keywords Simulation environment; Automated Driving; Driver-Vehicle interaction
Abstract Photorealistic virtual environments are crucial for developing and testing automated driving systems in a safe way during trials. As commercially available simulators are expensive and bulky, this paper presents a low-cost, extendable, and easy-to-use (LEE) virtual environment with the aim to highlight its utility for level 3 driving automation. In particular, an experiment is performed using the presented simulator to explore the influence of different variables regarding control transfer of the car after the system was driving autonomously in a highway scenario. The results show that the speed of the car at the time when the system needs to transfer the control to the human driver is critical.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference GALA
Notes ADAS;IAM; Approved no
Call Number HAC2016 Serial 2864
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Author Saad Minhas; Aura Hernandez-Sabate; Shoaib Ehsan; Katerine Diaz; Ales Leonardis; Antonio Lopez; Klaus McDonald Maier
Title LEE: A photorealistic Virtual Environment for Assessing Driver-Vehicle Interactions in Self-Driving Mode Type Conference Article
Year 2016 Publication 14th European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops Abbreviated Journal
Volume 9915 Issue Pages 894-900
Keywords Simulation environment; Automated Driving; Driver-Vehicle interaction
Abstract Photorealistic virtual environments are crucial for developing and testing automated driving systems in a safe way during trials. As commercially available simulators are expensive and bulky, this paper presents a low-cost, extendable, and easy-to-use (LEE) virtual environment with the aim to highlight its utility for level 3 driving automation. In particular, an experiment is performed using the presented simulator to explore the influence of different variables regarding control transfer of the car after the system was driving autonomously in a highway scenario. The results show that the speed of the car at the time when the system needs to transfer the control to the human driver is critical.
Address Amsterdam; The Netherlands; October 2016
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference ECCVW
Notes ADAS;IAM; 600.085; 600.076 Approved no
Call Number MHE2016 Serial 2865
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Author Arash Akbarinia; C. Alejandro Parraga
Title Biologically plausible boundary detection Type Conference Article
Year 2016 Publication 27th British Machine Vision Conference Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Edges are key components of any visual scene to the extent that we can recognise objects merely by their silhouettes. The human visual system captures edge information through neurons in the visual cortex that are sensitive to both intensity discontinuities and particular orientations. The “classical approach” assumes that these cells are only responsive to the stimulus present within their receptive fields, however, recent studies demonstrate that surrounding regions and inter-areal feedback connections influence their responses significantly. In this work we propose a biologically-inspired edge detection model in which orientation selective neurons are represented through the first derivative of a Gaussian function resembling double-opponent cells in the primary visual cortex (V1). In our model we account for four kinds of surround, i.e. full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation, whose contributions are contrast-dependant. The output signal from V1 is pooled in its perpendicular direction by larger V2 neurons employing a contrast-variant centre-surround kernel. We further introduce a feedback connection from higher-level visual areas to the lower ones. The results of our model on two benchmark datasets show a big improvement compared to the current non-learning and biologically-inspired state-of-the-art algorithms while being competitive to the learning-based methods.
Address York; UK; September 2016
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference BMVC
Notes NEUROBIT; 600.068; 600.072 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ AkP2016a Serial 2867
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Author Azadeh S. Mozafari; David Vazquez; Mansour Jamzad; Antonio Lopez
Title Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt:Model-Transfer Domain Adaptation for Random Forest Type Miscellaneous
Year 2016 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian detection; Random Forest
Abstract Random Forest (RF) is a successful paradigm for learning classifiers due to its ability to learn from large feature spaces and seamlessly integrate multi-class classification, as well as the achieved accuracy and processing efficiency. However, as many other classifiers, RF requires domain adaptation (DA) provided that there is a mismatch between the training (source) and testing (target) domains which provokes classification degradation. Consequently, different RF-DA methods have been proposed, which not only require target-domain samples but revisiting the source-domain ones, too. As novelty, we propose three inherently different methods (Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt) that only require the learned source-domain RF and a relatively few target-domain samples for DA, i.e. source-domain samples do not need to be available. To assess the performance of our proposals we focus on image-based object detection, using the pedestrian detection problem as challenging proof-of-concept. Moreover, we use the RF with expert nodes because it is a competitive patch-based pedestrian model. We test our Node-, Path- and Tree-Adapt methods in standard benchmarks, showing that DA is largely achieved.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS Approved no
Call Number ADAS @ adas @ MVJ2016 Serial 2868
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Author Veronica Romero; Alicia Fornes; Enrique Vidal; Joan Andreu Sanchez
Title Information Extraction in Handwritten Marriage Licenses Books Using the MGGI Methodology Type Conference Article
Year 2017 Publication 8th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Abbreviated Journal
Volume 10255 Issue Pages 287-294
Keywords Handwritten Text Recognition; Information extraction; Language modeling; MGGI; Categories-based language model
Abstract Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demographic and genealogical research. For example, marriage license books have been used for centuries by ecclesiastical and secular institutions to register marriages. These books follow a simple structure of the text in the records with a evolutionary vocabulary, mainly composed of proper names that change along the time. This distinct vocabulary makes automatic transcription and semantic information extraction difficult tasks. In previous works we studied the use of category-based language models and how a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI could improve the accuracy of these tasks. In this work we analyze the main causes of the semantic errors observed in previous results and apply a better implementation of the MGGI technique to solve these problems. Using the resulting language model, transcription and information extraction experiments have been carried out, and the results support our proposed approach.
Address Faro; Portugal; June 2017
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor L.A. Alexandre; J.Salvador Sanchez; Joao M. F. Rodriguez
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-3-319-58837-7 Medium
Area Expedition Conference IbPRIA
Notes DAG; 602.006; 600.097; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ RFV2017 Serial 2952
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Author Ariel Amato
Title Moving cast shadow detection Type Journal Article
Year 2014 Publication Electronic letters on computer vision and image analysis Abbreviated Journal ELCVIA
Volume 13 Issue 2 Pages 70-71
Keywords
Abstract Motion perception is an amazing innate ability of the creatures on the planet. This adroitness entails a functional advantage that enables species to compete better in the wild. The motion perception ability is usually employed at different levels, allowing from the simplest interaction with the ’physis’ up to the most transcendental survival tasks. Among the five classical perception system , vision is the most widely used in the motion perception field. Millions years of evolution have led to a highly specialized visual system in humans, which is characterized by a tremendous accuracy as well as an extraordinary robustness. Although humans and an immense diversity of species can distinguish moving object with a seeming simplicity, it has proven to be a difficult and non trivial problem from a computational perspective. In the field of Computer Vision, the detection of moving objects is a challenging and fundamental research area. This can be referred to as the ’origin’ of vast and numerous vision-based research sub-areas. Nevertheless, from the bottom to the top of this hierarchical analysis, the foundations still relies on when and where motion has occurred in an image. Pixels corresponding to moving objects in image sequences can be identified by measuring changes in their values. However, a pixel’s value (representing a combination of color and brightness) could also vary due to other factors such as: variation in scene illumination, camera noise and nonlinear sensor responses among others. The challenge lies in detecting if the changes in pixels’ value are caused by a genuine object movement or not. An additional challenging aspect in motion detection is represented by moving cast shadows. The paradox arises because a moving object and its cast shadow share similar motion patterns. However, a moving cast shadow is not a moving object. In fact, a shadow represents a photometric illumination effect caused by the relative position of the object with respect to the light sources. Shadow detection methods are mainly divided in two domains depending on the application field. One normally consists of static images where shadows are casted by static objects, whereas the second one is referred to image sequences where shadows are casted by moving objects. For the first case, shadows can provide additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object as well as the localization of the light source. Although the previous information can be extracted from static images as well as video sequences, the main focus in the second area is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance. In this context, a shadow can severely affect with the analysis and interpretation of the scene. The work done in the thesis is focused on the second case, thus it addresses the problem of detection and removal of moving cast shadows in video sequences in order to enhance the detection of moving object.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ISE Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Ama2014 Serial 2870
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Author Antonio Lopez; Jiaolong Xu; Jose Luis Gomez; David Vazquez; German Ros
Title From Virtual to Real World Visual Perception using Domain Adaptation -- The DPM as Example Type Book Chapter
Year 2017 Publication Domain Adaptation in Computer Vision Applications Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue 13 Pages 243-258
Keywords Domain Adaptation
Abstract Supervised learning tends to produce more accurate classifiers than unsupervised learning in general. This implies that training data is preferred with annotations. When addressing visual perception challenges, such as localizing certain object classes within an image, the learning of the involved classifiers turns out to be a practical bottleneck. The reason is that, at least, we have to frame object examples with bounding boxes in thousands of images. A priori, the more complex the model is regarding its number of parameters, the more annotated examples are required. This annotation task is performed by human oracles, which ends up in inaccuracies and errors in the annotations (aka ground truth) since the task is inherently very cumbersome and sometimes ambiguous. As an alternative we have pioneered the use of virtual worlds for collecting such annotations automatically and with high precision. However, since the models learned with virtual data must operate in the real world, we still need to perform domain adaptation (DA). In this chapter we revisit the DA of a deformable part-based model (DPM) as an exemplifying case of virtual- to-real-world DA. As a use case, we address the challenge of vehicle detection for driver assistance, using different publicly available virtual-world data. While doing so, we investigate questions such as: how does the domain gap behave due to virtual-vs-real data with respect to dominant object appearance per domain, as well as the role of photo-realism in the virtual world.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer Place of Publication Editor Gabriela Csurka
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS; 600.085; 601.223; 600.076; 600.118 Approved no
Call Number ADAS @ adas @ LXG2017 Serial 2872
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Author Pau Riba; Alicia Fornes; Josep Llados
Title Towards the Alignment of Handwritten Music Scores Type Conference Article
Year 2015 Publication 11th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract It is very common to find different versions of the same music work in archives of Opera Theaters. These differences correspond to modifications and annotations from the musicians. From the musicologist point of view, these variations are very interesting and deserve study. This paper explores the alignment of music scores as a tool for automatically detecting the passages that contain such differences. Given the difficulties in the recognition of handwritten music scores, our goal is to align the music scores and at the same time, avoid the recognition of music elements as much as possible. After removing the staff lines, braces and ties, the bar lines are detected. Then, the bar units are described as a whole using the Blurred Shape Model. The bar units alignment is performed by using Dynamic Time Warping. The analysis of the alignment path is used to detect the variations in the music scores. The method has been evaluated on a subset of the CVC-MUSCIMA dataset, showing encouraging results.
Address Nancy; France; August 2015
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Springer International Publishing Place of Publication Editor Bart Lamiroy; Rafael Dueire Lins
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-3-319-52158-9 Medium
Area Expedition Conference GREC
Notes DAG Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Serial 2874
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Author Daniel Hernandez; Antonio Espinosa; David Vazquez; Antonio Lopez; Juan Carlos Moure
Title Embedded Real-time Stixel Computation Type Conference Article
Year 2017 Publication GPU Technology Conference Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords GPU; CUDA; Stixels; Autonomous Driving
Abstract
Address Silicon Valley; USA; May 2017
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference GTC
Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no
Call Number ADAS @ adas @ HEV2017a Serial 2879
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Author David Vazquez; Jorge Bernal; F. Javier Sanchez; Gloria Fernandez Esparrach; Antonio Lopez; Adriana Romero; Michal Drozdzal; Aaron Courville
Title A Benchmark for Endoluminal Scene Segmentation of Colonoscopy Images Type Conference Article
Year 2017 Publication 31st International Congress and Exhibition on Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords Deep Learning; Medical Imaging
Abstract Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third cause of cancer death worldwide. Currently, the standard approach to reduce CRC-related mortality is to perform regular screening in search for polyps and colonoscopy is the screening tool of choice. The main limitations of this screening procedure are polyp miss-rate and inability to perform visual assessment of polyp malignancy. These drawbacks can be reduced by designing Decision Support Systems (DSS) aiming to help clinicians in the different stages of the procedure by providing endoluminal scene segmentation. Thus, in this paper, we introduce an extended benchmark of colonoscopy image, with the hope of establishing a new strong benchmark for colonoscopy image analysis research. We provide new baselines on this dataset by training standard fully convolutional networks (FCN) for semantic segmentation and significantly outperforming, without any further post-processing, prior results in endoluminal scene segmentation.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference CARS
Notes ADAS; MV; 600.075; 600.085; 600.076; 601.281; 600.118 Approved no
Call Number ADAS @ adas @ VBS2017a Serial 2880
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Author Carles Sanchez; Debora Gil; Jorge Bernal; F. Javier Sanchez; Marta Diez-Ferrer; Antoni Rosell
Title Navigation Path Retrieval from Videobronchoscopy using Bronchial Branches Type Conference Article
Year 2016 Publication 19th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Workshops Abbreviated Journal
Volume 9401 Issue Pages 62-70
Keywords Bronchoscopy navigation; Lumen center; Brochial branches; Navigation path; Videobronchoscopy
Abstract Bronchoscopy biopsy can be used to diagnose lung cancer without risking complications of other interventions like transthoracic needle aspiration. During bronchoscopy, the clinician has to navigate through the bronchial tree to the target lesion. A main drawback is the difficulty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path. The usual guidance using fluoroscopy implies repeated radiation of the clinician, while alternative systems (like electromagnetic navigation) require specific equipment that increases intervention costs. We propose to compute the navigated path using anatomical landmarks extracted from the sole analysis of videobronchoscopy images. Such landmarks allow matching the current exploration to the path previously planned on a CT to indicate clinician whether the planning is being correctly followed or not. We present a feasibility study of our landmark based CT-video matching using bronchoscopic videos simulated on a virtual bronchoscopy interactive interface.
Address Quebec; Canada; September 2016
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title LNCS
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference MICCAIW
Notes IAM; MV; 600.060; 600.075 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ SGB2016 Serial 2885
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Author Lluis Gomez
Title Exploiting Similarity Hierarchies for Multi-script Scene Text Understanding Type Book Whole
Year 2016 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract This thesis addresses the problem of automatic scene text understanding in unconstrained conditions. In particular, we tackle the tasks of multi-language and arbitrary-oriented text detection, tracking, and script identification in natural scenes.
For this we have developed a set of generic methods that build on top of the basic observation that text has always certain key visual and structural characteristics that are independent of the language or script in which it is written. Text instances in any
language or script are always formed as groups of similar atomic parts, being them either individual characters, small stroke parts, or even whole words in the case of cursive text. This holistic (sumof-parts) and recursive perspective has lead us to explore different variants of the “segmentation and grouping” paradigm of computer vision.
Scene text detection methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priory knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organization through which
text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects.
In this thesis, we argue that the text detection problem must be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We address the problem of text detection in natural scenes from a hierarchical perspective, making explicit use of the recursive nature of text, aiming directly to the detection of region groupings corresponding to text within a hierarchy produced by an agglomerative similarity clustering process over individual regions. We propose an optimal way to construct such an hierarchy introducing a feature space designed to produce text group hypothese with high recall and a novel stopping rule combining a discriminative classifier and a probabilistic measure of group meaningfulness based in perceptual organization. Within this generic framework, we design a text-specific object proposals algorithm that, contrary to existing generic object proposals methods, aims directly to the detection of text regions groupings. For this, we abandon the rigid definition of “what is text” of traditional specialized text detectors, and move towards more fuzzy perspective of grouping-based object proposals methods.
Then, we present a hybrid algorithm for detection and tracking of scene text where the notion of region groupings plays also a central role. By leveraging the structural arrangement of text group components between consecutive frames we can improve
the overall tracking performance of the system.
Finally, since our generic detection framework is inherently designed for multi-language environments, we focus on the problem of script identification in order to build a multi-language end-toend reading system. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key
characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed size as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined networks to jointly learn discriminative stroke-parts representations and their relative importance in a patch-based classification scheme.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas
Language Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gom2016 Serial 2891
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