Noha Elfiky, Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Color Constancy using 3D Scene Geometry derived from a Single Image. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(9), 3855–3868.
Abstract: The aim of color constancy is to remove the effect of the color of the light source. As color constancy is inherently an ill-posed problem, most of the existing color constancy algorithms are based on specific imaging assumptions (e.g. grey-world and white patch assumption).
In this paper, 3D geometry models are used to determine which color constancy method to use for the different geometrical regions (depth/layer) found
in images. The aim is to classify images into stages (rough 3D geometry models). According to stage models; images are divided into stage regions using hard and soft segmentation. After that, the best color constancy methods is selected for each geometry depth. To this end, we propose a method to combine color constancy algorithms by investigating the relation between depth, local image statistics and color constancy. Image statistics are then exploited per depth to select the proper color constancy method. Our approach opens the possibility to estimate multiple illuminations by distinguishing
nearby light source from distant illuminations. Experiments on state-of-the-art data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art
single color constancy algorithms with an improvement of almost 50% of median angular error. When using a perfect classifier (i.e, all of the test images are correctly classified into stages); the performance of the proposed method achieves an improvement of 52% of the median angular error compared to the best-performing single color constancy algorithm.
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Thierry Brouard, Jordi Gonzalez, Caifeng Shan, Massimo Piccardi, & Larry S. Davis. (2014). Special issue on background modeling for foreground detection in real-world dynamic scenes. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, 25(5), 1101–1103.
Abstract: Although background modeling and foreground detection are not mandatory steps for computer vision applications, they may prove useful as they separate the primal objects usually called “foreground” from the remaining part of the scene called “background”, and permits different algorithmic treatment in the video processing field such as video surveillance, optical motion capture, multimedia applications, teleconferencing and human–computer interfaces. Conventional background modeling methods exploit the temporal variation of each pixel to model the background, and the foreground detection is made using change detection. The last decade witnessed very significant publications on background modeling but recently new applications in which background is not static, such as recordings taken from mobile devices or Internet videos, need new developments to detect robustly moving objects in challenging environments. Thus, effective methods for robustness to deal both with dynamic backgrounds, i
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Context-aware features and robust image representations. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 25(2), 339–348.
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.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Shida Beigpour, Joost Van de Weijer, & Michael Felsberg. (2014). Painting-91: A Large Scale Database for Computational Painting Categorization. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, 25(6), 1385–1397.
Abstract: Computer analysis of visual art, especially paintings, is an interesting cross-disciplinary research domain. Most of the research in the analysis of paintings involve medium to small range datasets with own specific settings. Interestingly, significant progress has been made in the field of object and scene recognition lately. A key factor in this success is the introduction and availability of benchmark datasets for evaluation. Surprisingly, such a benchmark setup is still missing in the area of computational painting categorization. In this work, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The dataset consists of paintings from 91 different painters. We further show three applications of our dataset namely: artist categorization, style classification and saliency detection. We investigate how local and global features popular in image classification perform for the tasks of artist and style categorization. For both categorization tasks, our experimental results suggest that combining multiple features significantly improves the final performance. We show that state-of-the-art computer vision methods can correctly classify 50 % of unseen paintings to its painter in a large dataset and correctly attribute its artistic style in over 60 % of the cases. Additionally, we explore the task of saliency detection on paintings and show experimental findings using state-of-the-art saliency estimation algorithms.
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Frederic Sampedro, Anna Domenech, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Obtaining quantitative global tumoral state indicators based on whole-body PET/CT scans: A breast cancer case study. NMC - Nuclear Medicine Communications, 35(4), 362–371.
Abstract: Objectives: In this work we address the need for the computation of quantitative global tumoral state indicators from oncological whole-body PET/computed tomography scans. The combination of such indicators with other oncological information such as tumor markers or biopsy results would prove useful in oncological decision-making scenarios.
Materials and methods: From an ordering of 100 breast cancer patients on the basis of oncological state through visual analysis by a consensus of nuclear medicine specialists, a set of numerical indicators computed from image analysis of the PET/computed tomography scan is presented, which attempts to summarize a patient’s oncological state in a quantitative manner taking into consideration the total tumor volume, aggressiveness, and spread.
Results: Results obtained by comparative analysis of the proposed indicators with respect to the experts’ evaluation show up to 87% Pearson’s correlation coefficient when providing expert-guided PET metabolic tumor volume segmentation and 64% correlation when using completely automatic image analysis techniques.
Conclusion: Global quantitative tumor information obtained by whole-body PET/CT image analysis can prove useful in clinical nuclear medicine settings and oncological decision-making scenarios. The completely automatic computation of such indicators would improve its impact as time efficiency and specialist independence would be achieved.
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Jordi Roca, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Sophie Wuerger. (2014). Limitations of visual gamma corrections in LCD displays. Dis - Displays, 35(5), 227–239.
Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.
Keywords: Display calibration; Psychophysics; Perceptual; Visual gamma correction; Luminance matching; Observer-based calibration
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Albert Gordo, Florent Perronnin, Yunchao Gong, & Svetlana Lazebnik. (2014). Asymmetric Distances for Binary Embeddings. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(1), 33–47.
Abstract: In large-scale query-by-example retrieval, embedding image signatures in a binary space offers two benefits: data compression and search efficiency. While most embedding algorithms binarize both query and database signatures, it has been noted that this is not strictly a requirement. Indeed, asymmetric schemes which binarize the database signatures but not the query still enjoy the same two benefits but may provide superior accuracy. In this work, we propose two general asymmetric distances which are applicable to a wide variety of embedding techniques including Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), Locality Sensitive Binary Codes (LSBC), Spectral Hashing (SH), PCA Embedding (PCAE), PCA Embedding with random rotations (PCAE-RR), and PCA Embedding with iterative quantization (PCAE-ITQ). We experiment on four public benchmarks containing up to 1M images and show that the proposed asymmetric distances consistently lead to large improvements over the symmetric Hamming distance for all binary embedding techniques.
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Jiaolong Xu, Sebastian Ramos, David Vazquez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Domain Adaptation of Deformable Part-Based Models. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2367–2380.
Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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David Vazquez, Javier Marin, Antonio Lopez, Daniel Ponsa, & David Geronimo. (2014). Virtual and Real World Adaptation for Pedestrian Detection. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(4), 797–809.
Abstract: Pedestrian detection is of paramount interest for many applications. Most promising detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with annotated samples. However, the annotation step is a human intensive and subjective task worth to be minimized. By using virtual worlds we can automatically obtain precise and rich annotations. Thus, we face the question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in realistic virtual worlds work successfully for pedestrian detection in realworld images?. Conducted experiments show that virtual-world based training can provide excellent testing accuracy in real world, but it can also suffer the dataset shift problem as real-world based training does. Accordingly, we have designed a domain adaptation framework, V-AYLA, in which we have tested different techniques to collect a few pedestrian samples from the target domain (real world) and combine them with the many examples of the source domain (virtual world) in order to train a domain adapted pedestrian classifier that will operate in the target domain. V-AYLA reports the same detection accuracy than when training with many human-provided pedestrian annotations and testing with real-world images of the same domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating adaptation of virtual and real worlds for developing an object detector.
Keywords: Domain Adaptation; Pedestrian Detection
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Carlo Gatta, & Francesco Ciompi. (2014). Stacked Sequential Scale-Space Taylor Context. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(8), 1694–1700.
Abstract: We analyze sequential image labeling methods that sample the posterior label field in order to gather contextual information. We propose an effective method that extracts local Taylor coefficients from the posterior at different scales. Results show that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MSRC-21, CAMVID, eTRIMS8 and KAIST2 data sets.
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Jon Almazan, Albert Gordo, Alicia Fornes, & Ernest Valveny. (2014). Word Spotting and Recognition with Embedded Attributes. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(12), 2552–2566.
Abstract: This article addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks.
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Lorenzo Seidenari, Giuseppe Serra, Andrew Bagdanov, & Alberto del Bimbo. (2014). Local pyramidal descriptors for image recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 36(5), 1033–1040.
Abstract: In this paper we present a novel method to improve the flexibility of descriptor matching for image recognition by using local multiresolution
pyramids in feature space. We propose that image patches be represented at multiple levels of descriptor detail and that these levels be defined in terms of local spatial pooling resolution. Preserving multiple levels of detail in local descriptors is a way of hedging one’s bets on which levels will most relevant for matching during learning and recognition. We introduce the Pyramid SIFT (P-SIFT) descriptor and show that its use in four state-of-the-art image recognition pipelines improves accuracy and yields state-of-the-art results. Our technique is applicable independently of spatial pyramid matching and we show that spatial pyramids can be combined with local pyramids to obtain
further improvement.We achieve state-of-the-art results on Caltech-101
(80.1%) and Caltech-256 (52.6%) when compared to other approaches based on SIFT features over intensity images. Our technique is efficient and is extremely easy to integrate into image recognition pipelines.
Keywords: Object categorization; local features; kernel methods
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, A. Wahle, Petia Radeva, S. Carlier, et al. (2014). Standardized evaluation methodology and reference database for evaluating IVUS image segmentation. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(2), 70–90.
Abstract: This paper describes an evaluation framework that allows a standardized and quantitative comparison of IVUS lumen and media segmentation algorithms. This framework has been introduced at the MICCAI 2011 Computing and Visualization for (Intra)Vascular Imaging (CVII) workshop, comparing the results of eight teams that participated.
We describe the available data-base comprising of multi-center, multi-vendor and multi-frequency IVUS datasets, their acquisition, the creation of the reference standard and the evaluation measures. The approaches address segmentation of the lumen, the media, or both borders; semi- or fully-automatic operation; and 2-D vs. 3-D methodology. Three performance measures for quantitative analysis have
been proposed. The results of the evaluation indicate that segmentation of the vessel lumen and media is possible with an accuracy that is comparable to manual annotation when semi-automatic methods are used, as well as encouraging results can be obtained also in case of fully-automatic segmentation. The analysis performed in this paper also highlights the challenges in IVUS segmentation that remains to be
solved.
Keywords: IVUS (intravascular ultrasound); Evaluation framework; Algorithm comparison; Image segmentation
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Simeon Petkov, Xavier Carrillo, Petia Radeva, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Diaphragm border detection in coronary X-ray angiographies: New method and applications. CMIG - Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 38(4), 296–305.
Abstract: X-ray angiography is widely used in cardiac disease diagnosis during or prior to intravascular interventions. The diaphragm motion and the heart beating induce gray-level changes, which are one of the main obstacles in quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion. In this paper we focus on detecting the diaphragm border in both single images or whole X-ray angiography sequences. We show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art approaches. We extend a previous publicly available data set, adding new ground truth data. We also compose another set of more challenging images, thus having two separate data sets of increasing difficulty. Finally, we show three applications of our method: (1) a strategy to reduce false positives in vessel enhanced images; (2) a digital diaphragm removal algorithm; (3) an improvement in Myocardial Blush Grade semi-automatic estimation.
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Joan Marc Llargues Asensio, Juan Peralta, Raul Arrabales, Manuel Gonzalez Bedia, Paulo Cortez, & Antonio Lopez. (2014). Artificial Intelligence Approaches for the Generation and Assessment of Believable Human-Like Behaviour in Virtual Characters. EXSY - Expert Systems With Applications, 41(16), 7281–7290.
Abstract: Having artificial agents to autonomously produce human-like behaviour is one of the most ambitious original goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remains an open problem nowadays. The imitation game originally proposed by Turing constitute a very effective method to prove the indistinguishability of an artificial agent. The behaviour of an agent is said to be indistinguishable from that of a human when observers (the so-called judges in the Turing test) cannot tell apart humans and non-human agents. Different environments, testing protocols, scopes and problem domains can be established to develop limited versions or variants of the original Turing test. In this paper we use a specific version of the Turing test, based on the international BotPrize competition, built in a First-Person Shooter video game, where both human players and non-player characters interact in complex virtual environments. Based on our past experience both in the BotPrize competition and other robotics and computer game AI applications we have developed three new more advanced controllers for believable agents: two based on a combination of the CERA–CRANIUM and SOAR cognitive architectures and other based on ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks. These two new agents have been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition (Arrabales et al., 2012), and have showed a significant improvement in the humanness ratio. Additionally, we have confronted all these bots to both First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol) and Third-person believability assessment, demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour.
Keywords: Turing test; Human-like behaviour; Believability; Non-player characters; Cognitive architectures; Genetic algorithm; Artificial neural networks
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