Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Boix, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Harmony Potentials for Joint Classification and Segmentation. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (3280–3287).
Abstract: Hierarchical conditional random fields have been successfully applied to object segmentation. One reason is their ability to incorporate contextual information at different scales. However, these models do not allow multiple labels to be assigned to a single node. At higher scales in the image, this yields an oversimplified model, since multiple classes can be reasonable expected to appear within one region. This simplified model especially limits the impact that observations at larger scales may have on the CRF model. Neglecting the information at larger scales is undesirable since class-label estimates based on these scales are more reliable than at smaller, noisier scales. To address this problem, we propose a new potential, called harmony potential, which can encode any possible combination of class labels. We propose an effective sampling strategy that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Results show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging datasets: Pascal VOC 2009 and MSRC-21.
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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Carlo Gatta, O. Rodriguez-Leor, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 26(7), 763–779.
Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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Antonio Hernandez, Stan Sclaroff, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Contextual rescoring for Human Pose Estimation. In 25th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: A contextual rescoring method is proposed for improving the detection of body joints of a pictorial structure model for human pose estimation. A set of mid-level parts is incorporated in the model, and their detections are used to extract spatial and score-related features relative to other body joint hypotheses. A technique is proposed for the automatic discovery of a compact subset of poselets that covers a set of validation images
while maximizing precision. A rescoring mechanism is defined as a set-based boosting classifier that computes a new score for body joint detections, given its relationship to detections of other body joints and mid-level parts in the image. This new score complements the unary potential of a discriminatively trained pictorial structure model. Experiments on two benchmarks show performance improvements when considering the proposed mid-level image representation and rescoring approach in comparison with other pictorial structure-based approaches.
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Incremental Domain Adaptation of Deformable Part-based Models. In Tony Andrew and Pridmore M. and F. Valstar (Ed.), 25th British Machine Vision Conference. BMVA Press.
Abstract: Nowadays, classifiers play a core role in many computer vision tasks. The underlying assumption for learning classifiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classifiers. However, in practice, there are different reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classifiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain)
is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this paper we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for object detection. In particular, we focus on a relatively unexplored scenario, i.e. incremental domain adaptation for object detection assuming weak-labeling. Therefore, our algorithm is ready to improve existing source-oriented DPM-based detectors as soon as a little amount of labeled target-domain training data is available, and keeps improving as more of such data arrives in a continuous fashion. For achieving this, we follow a multiple
instance learning (MIL) paradigm that operates in an incremental per-image basis. As proof of concept, we address the challenging scenario of adapting a DPM-based pedestrian detector trained with synthetic pedestrians to operate in real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that our incremental adaptive models obtain equally good accuracy results as the batch learned models, while being more flexible for handling continuously arriving target-domain data.
Keywords: Pedestrian Detection; Part-based models; Domain Adaptation
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Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & Cees G.M. Snoek. (2011). Empowering Visual Categorization with the GPU. TMM - IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 13(1), 60–70.
Abstract: Visual categorization is important to manage large collections of digital images and video, where textual meta-data is often incomplete or simply unavailable. The bag-of-words model has become the most powerful method for visual categorization of images and video. Despite its high accuracy, a severe drawback of this model is its high computational cost. As the trend to increase computational power in newer CPU and GPU architectures is to increase their level of parallelism, exploiting this parallelism becomes an important direction to handle the computational cost of the bag-of-words approach. When optimizing a system based on the bag-of-words approach, the goal is to minimize the time it takes to process batches of images. Additionally, we also consider power usage as an evaluation metric. In this paper, we analyze the bag-of-words model for visual categorization in terms of computational cost and identify two major bottlenecks: the quantization step and the classification step. We address these two bottlenecks by proposing two efficient algorithms for quantization and classification by exploiting the GPU hardware and the CUDA parallel programming model. The algorithms are designed to (1) keep categorization accuracy intact, (2) decompose the problem and (3) give the same numerical results. In the experiments on large scale datasets it is shown that, by using a parallel implementation on the Geforce GTX260 GPU, classifying unseen images is 4.8 times faster than a quad-core CPU version on the Core i7 920, while giving the exact same numerical results. In addition, we show how the algorithms can be generalized to other applications, such as text retrieval and video retrieval. Moreover, when the obtained speedup is used to process extra video frames in a video retrieval benchmark, the accuracy of visual categorization is improved by 29%.
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Volkmar Frinken, Andreas Fischer, Horst Bunke, & Alicia Fornes. (2011). Co-training for Handwritten Word Recognition. In 11th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 314–318).
Abstract: To cope with the tremendous variations of writing styles encountered between different individuals, unconstrained automatic handwriting recognition systems need to be trained on large sets of labeled data. Traditionally, the training data has to be labeled manually, which is a laborious and costly process. Semi-supervised learning techniques offer methods to utilize unlabeled data, which can be obtained cheaply in large amounts in order, to reduce the need for labeled data. In this paper, we propose the use of Co-Training for improving the recognition accuracy of two weakly trained handwriting recognition systems. The first one is based on Recurrent Neural Networks while the second one is based on Hidden Markov Models. On the IAM off-line handwriting database we demonstrate a significant increase of the recognition accuracy can be achieved with Co-Training for single word recognition.
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Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrew Bagdanov, & Xavier Roca. (2011). Efficient Discriminative Multiresolution Cascade for Real-Time Human Detection Applications. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(13), 1581–1587.
Abstract: Human detection is fundamental in many machine vision applications, like video surveillance, driving assistance, action recognition and scene understanding. However in most of these applications real-time performance is necessary and this is not achieved yet by current detection methods.
This paper presents a new method for human detection based on a multiresolution cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that can highly reduce the computational cost of detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed of HOG features at different resolutions, from coarse at the first level to fine at the last one.
In contrast to previous methods, our approach uses a non-uniform stride of the sliding window that is defined by the feature resolution and allows the detection to be incrementally refined as going from coarse-to-fine resolution. In this way, the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the fewer number of features computed at the first levels of the cascade, but also to the reduced number of windows that need to be evaluated at the coarse resolution. Experimental results show that our method reaches a detection rate comparable with the state-of-the-art of detectors based on HOG features, while at the same time the detection search is up to 23 times faster.
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, O. Pujol, Petia Radeva, Gemma Sanchez, & Josep Llados. (2009). Blurred Shape Model for Binary and Grey-level Symbol Recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(15), 1424–1433.
Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.
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Partha Pratim Roy, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2011). Document Seal Detection Using Ght and Character Proximity Graphs. PR - Pattern Recognition, 44(6), 1282–1295.
Abstract: This paper deals with automatic detection of seal (stamp) from documents with cluttered background. Seal detection involves a difficult challenge due to its multi-oriented nature, arbitrary shape, overlapping of its part with signature, noise, etc. Here, a seal object is characterized by scale and rotation invariant spatial feature descriptors computed from recognition result of individual connected components (characters). Scale and rotation invariant features are used in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to recognize multi-scale and multi-oriented text characters. The concept of generalized Hough transform (GHT) is used to detect the seal and a voting scheme is designed for finding possible location of the seal in a document based on the spatial feature descriptor of neighboring component pairs. The peak of votes in GHT accumulator validates the hypothesis to locate the seal in a document. Experiment is performed in an archive of historical documents of handwritten/printed English text. Experimental results show that the method is robust in locating seal instances of arbitrary shape and orientation in documents, and also efficient in indexing a collection of documents for retrieval purposes.
Keywords: Seal recognition; Graphical symbol spotting; Generalized Hough transform; Multi-oriented character recognition
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Daniel Ponsa, & Antonio Lopez. (2009). Variance reduction techniques in particle-based visual contour Tracking. PR - Pattern Recognition, 42(11), 2372–2391.
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of three different strategies to improve the performance of particle filters, in the context of visual contour tracking: the unscented particle filter, the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter, and the partitioned sampling technique. The tracking problem analyzed is the joint estimation of the global and local transformation of the outline of a given target, represented following the active shape model approach. The main contributions of the paper are the novel adaptations of the considered techniques on this generic problem, and the quantitative assessment of their performance in extensive experimental work done.
Keywords: Contour tracking; Active shape models; Kalman filter; Particle filter; Importance sampling; Unscented particle filter; Rao-Blackwellization; Partitioned sampling
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median Graphs: A Genetic Approach based on New Theoretical Properties. PR - Pattern Recognition, 42(9), 2003–2012.
Abstract: Given a set of graphs, the median graph has been theoretically presented as a useful concept to infer a representative of the set. However, the computation of the median graph is a highly complex task and its practical application has been very limited up to now. In this work we present two major contributions. On one side, and from a theoretical point of view, we show new theoretical properties of the median graph. On the other side, using these new properties, we present a new approximate algorithm based on the genetic search, that improves the computation of the median graph. Finally, we perform a set of experiments on real data, where none of the existing algorithms for the median graph computation could be applied up to now due to their computational complexity. With these results, we show how the concept of the median graph can be used in real applications and leaves the box of the only-theoretical concepts, demonstrating, from a practical point of view, that can be a useful tool to represent a set of graphs.
Keywords: Median graph; Genetic search; Maximum common subgraph; Graph matching; Structural pattern recognition
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Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Horst Bunke. (2011). Multiple Classifiers for Graph of Words Embedding. In Carlo Sansone, Josef Kittler, & Fabio Roli (Eds.), 10th International Conference on Multiple Classifier Systems (Vol. 6713, pp. 36–45). LNCS.
Abstract: During the last years, there has been an increasing interest in applying the multiple classifier framework to the domain of structural pattern recognition. Constructing base classifiers when the input patterns are graph based representations is not an easy problem. In this work, we make use of the graph embedding methodology in order to construct different feature vector representations for graphs. The graph of words embedding assigns a feature vector to every graph by counting unary and binary relations between node representatives and combining these pieces of information into a single vector. Selecting different node representatives leads to different vectorial representations and therefore to different base classifiers that can be combined. We experimentally show how this methodology significantly improves the classification of graphs with respect to single base classifiers.
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Pierluigi Casale, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Human Activity Recognition from Accelerometer Data using a Wearable Device. In J. Vitria, J. M. R. Sanches, & M. Hernández (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 289–296). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Activity Recognition is an emerging field of research, born from the larger fields of ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing and multimedia. Recently, recognizing everyday life activities becomes one of the challenges for pervasive computing. In our work, we developed a novel wearable system easy to use and comfortable to bring. Our wearable system is based on a new set of 20 computationally efficient features and the Random Forest classifier. We obtain very encouraging results with classification accuracy of human activities recognition of up to 94%.
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Lluis Pere de las Heras, & Gemma Sanchez. (2011). And-Or Graph Grammar for Architectural Floorplan Representation, Learning and Recognition. A Semantic, Structural and Hierarchical Model. In 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 17–24).
Abstract: This paper presents a syntactic model for architectural floor plan interpretation. A stochastic image grammar over an And-Or graph is inferred to represent the hierarchical, structural and semantic relations between elements of all possible floor plans. This grammar is augmented with three different probabilistic models, learnt from a training set, to account the frequency of that relations. Then, a Bottom-Up/Top-Down parser with a pruning strategy has been used for floor plan recognition. For a given input, the parser generates the most probable parse graph for that document. This graph not only contains the structural and semantic relations of its elements, but also its hierarchical composition, that allows to interpret the floor plan at different levels of abstraction.
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Jaume Gibert, Ernest Valveny, & Horst Bunke. (2011). Vocabulary Selection for Graph of Words Embedding. In J. Vitria, J. M. R. Sanches, & M. Hernández (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 216–223). LNCS. Berlin: Springer.
Abstract: The Graph of Words Embedding consists in mapping every graph in a given dataset to a feature vector by counting unary and binary relations between node attributes of the graph. It has been shown to perform well for graphs with discrete label alphabets. In this paper we extend the methodology to graphs with n-dimensional continuous attributes by selecting node representatives. We propose three different discretization procedures for the attribute space and experimentally evaluate the dependence on both the selector and the number of node representatives. In the context of graph classification, the experimental results reveal that on two out of three public databases the proposed extension achieves superior performance over a standard reference system.
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