Abstract: Nowadays, digital images are used in many areas in everyday life, but they tend to be big. This increases amount of information leads us to the problem of image data storage. For example, it is common to have a representation a color pixel as a 24-bit number, where the channels red, green, and blue employ 8 bits each. In consequence, this kind of color pixel can specify one of 224 ¼ 16:78 million colors. Therefore, an image at a resolution of 512 £ 512 that allocates 24 bits per pixel, occupies 786,432 bytes. That is why image compression is important. An important feature of image compression is that it can be lossy or lossless. A compressed image is acceptable provided these losses of image information are not perceived by the eye. It is possible to assume that a portion of this information is redundant. Lossless Image Compression is defined as to mathematically decode the same image which was encoded. In Lossy Image Compression needs to identify two features inside the image: the redundancy and the irrelevancy of information. Thus, lossy compression modifies the image data in such a way when they are encoded and decoded, the recovered image is similar enough to the original one. How similar is the recovered image in comparison to the original image is defined prior to the compression process, and it depends on the implementation to be performed. In lossy compression, current image compression schemes remove information considered irrelevant by using mathematical criteria. One of the problems of these schemes is that although the numerical quality of the compressed image is low, it shows a high visual image quality, e.g. it does not show a lot of visible artifacts. It is because these mathematical criteria, used to remove information, do not take into account if the viewed information is perceived by the Human Visual System. Therefore, the aim of an image compression scheme designed to obtain images that do not show artifacts although their numerical quality can be low, is to eliminate the information that is not visible by the Human Visual System. Hence, this Ph.D. thesis proposes to exploit the visual redundancy existing in an image by reducing those features that can be unperceivable for the Human Visual System. First, we define an image quality assessment, which is highly correlated with the psychophysical experiments performed by human observers. The proposed CwPSNR metrics weights the well-known PSNR by using a particular perceptual low level model of the Human Visual System, e.g. the Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model (CIWaM). Second, we propose an image compression algorithm (called Hi-SET), which exploits the high correlation and self-similarity of pixels in a given area or neighborhood by means of a fractal function. Hi-SET possesses the main features that modern image compressors have, that is, it is an embedded coder, which allows a progressive transmission. Third, we propose a perceptual quantizer (½SQ), which is a modification of the uniform scalar quantizer. The ½SQ is applied to a pixel set in a certain Wavelet sub-band, that is, a global quantization. Unlike this, the proposed modification allows to perform a local pixel-by-pixel forward and inverse quantization, introducing into this process a perceptual distortion which depends on the surround spatial information of the pixel. Combining ½SQ method with the Hi-SET image compressor, we define a perceptual image compressor, called ©SET. Finally, a coding method for Region of Interest areas is presented, ½GBbBShift, which perceptually weights pixels into these areas and maintains only the more important perceivable features in the rest of the image. Results presented in this report show that CwPSNR is the best-ranked image quality method when it is applied to the most common image compression distortions such as JPEG and JPEG2000. CwPSNR shows the best correlation with the judgement of human observers, which is based on the results of psychophysical experiments obtained for relevant image quality databases such as TID2008, LIVE, CSIQ and IVC. Furthermore, Hi-SET coder obtains better results both for compression ratios and perceptual image quality than the JPEG2000 coder and other coders that use a Hilbert Fractal for image compression. Hence, when the proposed perceptual quantization is introduced to Hi-SET coder, our compressor improves its numerical and perceptual e±ciency. When ½GBbBShift method applied to Hi-SET is compared against MaxShift method applied to the JPEG2000 standard and Hi-SET, the images coded by our ROI method get the best results when the overall image quality is estimated. Both the proposed perceptual quantization and the ½GBbBShift method are generalized algorithms that can be applied to other Wavelet based image compression algorithms such as JPEG2000, SPIHT or SPECK.

Abstract: In this work, a new method for one-class classification based on the Convex Hull geometric structure is proposed. The new method creates a family of convex hulls able to fit the geometrical shape of the training points. The increased computational cost due to the creation of the convex hull in multiple dimensions is circumvented using random projections. This provides an approximation of the original structure with multiple bi-dimensional views. In the projection planes, a mechanism for noisy points rejection has also been elaborated and evaluated. Results show that the approach performs considerably well with respect to the state the art in one-class classification.

Abstract: Abstract. In this paper we propose biometric descriptors inspired by shape signatures traditionally used in graphics recognition approaches. In particular several methods based on line shape descriptors used to iden- tify newborns from the biometric information of the ears are developed. The process steps are the following: image acquisition, ear segmentation, ear normalization, feature extraction and identification. Several shape signatures are defined from contour images. These are formulated in terms of zoning and contour crossings descriptors. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the used techniques.

Abstract: In this paper, we will discuss the most common challenges in electoral document processing and study the different solutions from the document analysis community that can be applied in each case. We will cover Optical Mark Recognition techniques to detect voter selections in the Australian Ballot, handwritten number recognition for preferential elections and handwriting recognition for write-in areas. We will also propose some particular adjustments that can be made to those general techniques in the specific context of electoral documents.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel model to estimate human activities — a human activity is defined by a set of human actions. The proposed approach is based on the usage of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Bayesian inference through the continuous monitoring of human actions and its surrounding environment. In the current work human activities are inferred considering not only visual analysis but also additional resources; external sources of information, such as context information, are incorporated to contribute to the activity estimation. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the way the information is encoded, so that it can be later associated according to a predefined semantic structure. Hence, a pattern representing a given activity can be defined by a set of actions, plus contextual information or other kind of information that could be relevant to describe the activity. Experimental results with real data are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: In order to provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability for restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions.
This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoids degenerated medial axis segments. Second, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to syn- thetic shapes of known medial geometry. We also show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume.

Abstract: Rainfall is a problem in automated traffic surveillance. Rain streaks occlude the road users and degrade the overall visibility which in turn decrease object detection performance. One way of alleviating this is by artificially removing the rain from the images. This requires knowledge of corresponding rainy and rain-free images. Such images are often produced by overlaying synthetic rain on top of rain-free images. However, this method fails to incorporate the fact that rain fall in the entire three-dimensional volume of the scene. To overcome this, we introduce training data from the SYNTHIA virtual world that models rain streaks in the entirety of a scene. We train a conditional Generative Adversarial Network for rain removal and apply it on traffic surveillance images from SYNTHIA and the AAU RainSnow datasets. To measure the applicability of the rain-removed images in a traffic surveillance context, we run the YOLOv2 object detection algorithm on the original and rain-removed frames. The results on SYNTHIA show an 8% increase in detection accuracy compared to the original rain image. Interestingly, we find that high PSNR or SSIM scores do not imply good object detection performance.

Abstract: Image retrieval can be dealt by combining standard descriptors, such as those of MPEG-7, which are defined independently for each visual cue (e.g. SCD or CLD for Color, HTD for texture or EHD for edges).
A common problem is to combine similarities coming from descriptors representing different concepts in different spaces. In this paper we propose a color texture description that bypasses this problem from its inherent definition. It is based on a low dimensional space with 6 perceptual axes. Texture is described in a 3D space derived from a direct implementation of the original Julesz’s Texton theory and color is described in a 3D perceptual space. This early fusion through the blob concept in these two bounded spaces avoids the problem and allows us to derive a sparse color-texture descriptor that achieves similar performance compared to MPEG-7 in image retrieval. Moreover, our descriptor presents comprehensive qualities since it can also be applied either in segmentation or browsing: (a) a dense image representation is defined from the descriptor showing a reasonable performance in locating texture patterns included in complex images; and (b) a vocabulary of basic terms is derived to build an intermediate level descriptor in natural language improving browsing by bridging semantic gap