Abstract: One of the most widely used assumptions in supervised learning is that data is independent and identically distributed. This assumption does not hold true in many real cases. Sequential learning is the discipline of machine learning that deals with dependent data such that neighboring examples exhibit some kind of relationship. In the literature, there are different approaches that try to capture and exploit this correlation, by means of different methodologies. In this paper we focus on meta-learning strategies and, in particular, the stacked sequential learning approach. The main contribution of this work is two-fold: first, we generalize the stacked sequential learning. This generalization reflects the key role of neighboring interactions modeling. Second, we propose an effective and efficient way of capturing and exploiting sequential correlations that takes into account long-range interactions by means of a multi-scale pyramidal decomposition of the predicted labels. Additionally, this new method subsumes the standard stacked sequential learning approach. We tested the proposed method on two different classification tasks: text lines classification in a FAQ data set and image classification. Results on these tasks clearly show that our approach outperforms the standard stacked sequential learning. Moreover, we show that the proposed method allows to control the trade-off between the detail and the desired range of the interactions.

Abstract: This paper describes a general method to address partial occlusions for human detection in still images. The Random Subspace Method (RSM) is chosen for building a classifier ensemble robust against partial occlusions. The component classifiers are chosen on the basis of their individual and combined performance. The main contribution of this work lies in our approach’s capability to improve the detection rate when partial occlusions are present without compromising the detection performance on non occluded data. In contrast to many recent approaches, we propose a method which does not require manual labelling of body parts, defining any semantic spatial components, or using additional data coming from motion or stereo. Moreover, the method can be easily extended to other object classes. The experiments are performed on three large datasets: the INRIA person dataset, the Daimler Multicue dataset, and a new challenging dataset, called PobleSec, in which a considerable number of targets are partially occluded. The different approaches are evaluated at the classification and detection levels for both partially occluded and non-occluded data. The experimental results show that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the presence of partial occlusions, while offering performance and reliability similar to those of the holistic approach on non-occluded data. The datasets used in our experiments have been made publicly available for benchmarking purposes

Abstract: Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.

Abstract: The median graph has been presented as a useful tool to represent a set of graphs. Nevertheless its computation is very complex and the existing algorithms are restricted to use limited amount of data. In this paper we propose a new approach for the computation of the median graph based on graph embedding. Graphs are embedded into a vector space and the median is computed in the vector domain. We have designed a procedure based on the weighted mean of a pair of graphs to go from the vector domain back to the graph domain in order to obtain a final approximation of the median graph. Experiments on three different databases containing large graphs show that we succeed to compute good approximations of the median graph. We have also applied the median graph to perform some basic classification tasks achieving reasonable good results. These experiments on real data open the door to the application of the median graph to a number of more complex machine learning algorithms where a representative of a set of graphs is needed.

Abstract: There are printed complex documents where text lines of a single page may have different orientations or the text lines may be curved in shape. As a result, it is difficult to detect the skew of such documents and hence character segmentation and recognition of such documents are a complex task. In this paper, using background and foreground information we propose a novel scheme towards the recognition of Indian complex documents of Bangla and Devnagari script. In Bangla and Devnagari documents usually characters in a word touch and they form cavity regions. To take care of these cavity regions, background information of such documents is used. Convex hull and water reservoir principle have been applied for this purpose. Here, at first, the characters are segmented from the documents using the background information of the text. Next, individual characters are recognized using rotation invariant features obtained from the foreground part of the characters.
For character segmentation, at first, writing mode of a touching component (word) is detected using water reservoir principle based features. Next, depending on writing mode and the reservoir base-region of the touching component, a set of candidate envelope points is then selected from the contour points of the component. Based on these candidate points, the touching component is finally segmented into individual characters. For recognition of multi-sized/multi-oriented characters the features are computed from different angular information obtained from the external and internal contour pixels of the characters. These angular information are computed in such a way that they do not depend on the size and rotation of the characters. Circular and convex hull rings have been used to divide a character into smaller zones to get zone-wise features for higher recognition results. We combine circular and convex hull features to improve the results and these features are fed to support vector machines (SVM) for recognition. From our experiment we obtained recognition results of 99.18% (98.86%) accuracy when tested on 7515 (7874) Devnagari (Bangla) characters.

Abstract: Perception 43 ECVP Abstract Supplement
High-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging refers to the methods designed to increase the brightness dynamic range present in standard digital imaging techniques. This increase is achieved by taking the same picture under dierent exposure values and mapping the intensity levels into a single image by way of a tone-mapping operator (TMO). Currently, there is no agreement on how to evaluate the quality
of dierent TMOs. In this work we psychophysically evaluate 15 dierent TMOs obtaining rankings based on the perceived properties of the resulting tone-mapped images. We performed two dierent experiments on a CRT calibrated display using 10 subjects: (1) a study of the internal relationships between grey-levels and (2) a pairwise comparison of the resulting 15 tone-mapped images. In (1) observers internally matched the grey-levels to a reference inside the tone-mapped images and in the real scene. In (2) observers performed a pairwise comparison of the tone-mapped images alongside the real scene. We obtained two rankings of the TMOs according their performance. In (1) the best algorithm
was ICAM by J.Kuang et al (2007) and in (2) the best algorithm was a TMO by Krawczyk et al (2005). Our results also show no correlation between these two rankings.

Abstract: Purpose: An intraluminal coronary stent is a metal mesh tube deployed in a stenotic artery during Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI), in order to prevent acute vessel occlusion. The identication of struts location and the denition of the stent shape are relevant for PCI planning 15 and for patient follow-up. We present a fully-automatic framework for Computer-Aided Detection
(CAD) of intra-coronary stents in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) image sequences. The CAD system is able to detect stent struts and estimate the stent shape.
Methods: The proposed CAD uses machine learning to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the local structure of the vessel by means of semantic classication. The output of the classication 20 stage is then used to detect struts and to estimate the stent shape. The proposed approach is validated using a multi-centric data-set of 1,015 images from 107 IVUS sequences containing both metallic and bio-absorbable stents.
Results: The method was able to detect structs in both metallic stents with an overall F-measure of 77.7% and a mean distance of 0.15 mm from manually annotated struts, and in bio-absorbable 25 stents with an overall F-measure of 77.4% and a mean distance of 0.09 mm from manually annotated struts.
Conclusions: The results are close to the inter-observer variability and suggest that the system has the potential of being used as method for aiding percutaneous interventions.