Abstract: Tissue biomechanical properties (like strain and stress) are playing an increasing role in diagnosis and long-term treatment of intravascular coronary diseases. Their assessment strongly relies on estimation of vessel wall deformation. Since intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences allow visualizing vessel morphology and reflect its dynamics, this technique represents a useful tool for evaluation of tissue mechanical properties. Image misalignment introduced by vessel-catheter motion is a major artifact for a proper tracking of tissue deformation. In this work, we focus on compensating and assessing IVUS rigid in-plane motion due to heart beating. Motion parameters are computed by considering both the vessel geometry and its appearance in the image. Continuum mechanics laws serve to introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; whereas results in in vivo pullbacks show the reliability of the presented methodologies in clinical cases.

Abstract: Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the standard belief propagation (BP) sequential technique proposed in the tree-reweighted sequential method [15] to the fully connected CRF models with the geodesic distance affinity. The proposed method has been applied to the stereo matching problem. Also a new approach to the BP marginal solution is proposed that we call one-view occlusion detection (OVOD). In contrast to the standard winner takes all (WTA) estimation, the proposed OVOD solution allows to find occluded regions in the disparity map and simultaneously improve the matching result. As a result we can perform only
one energy minimization process and avoid the cost calculation for the second view and the left-right check procedure. We show that the OVOD approach considerably improves results for cost augmentation and energy minimization techniques in comparison with the standard one-view affinity space implementation. We apply our method to the Middlebury data set and reach state-ofthe-art especially for median, average and mean squared error metrics.

Abstract: Deep convolutional networks can achieve impressive results on RGB scene recognition thanks to large data sets such as places. In contrast, RGB-D scene recognition is still underdeveloped in comparison, due to two limitations of RGB-D data we address in this paper. The first limitation is the lack of depth data for training deep learning models. Rather than fine tuning or transferring RGB-specific features, we address this limitation by proposing an architecture and a two-step training approach that directly learns effective depth-specific features using weak supervision via patches. The resulting RGB-D model also benefits from more complementary multimodal features. Another limitation is the short range of depth sensors (typically 0.5 m to 5.5 m), resulting in depth images not capturing distant objects in the scenes that RGB images can. We show that this limitation can be addressed by using RGB-D videos, where more comprehensive depth information is accumulated as the camera travels across the scenes. Focusing on this scenario, we introduce the ISIA RGB-D video data set to evaluate RGB-D scene recognition with videos. Our video recognition architecture combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks that are trained in three steps with increasingly complex data to learn effective features (i.e., patches, frames, and sequences). Our approach obtains the state-of-the-art performances on RGB-D image (NYUD2 and SUN RGB-D) and video (ISIA RGB-D) scene recognition.

Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy involves inspection of hours of video material by a highly qualified professional. Time episodes corresponding to intestinal contractions, which are of interest to the physician constitute about 1% of the video. The problem is to label automatically time episodes containing contractions so that only a fraction of the video needs inspection. As the classes of contraction and non-contraction images in the video are largely imbalanced, ROC curves are used to optimize the trade-off between false positive and false negative rates. Classifier ensemble methods and simple classifiers were examined. Our results reinforce the claims from recent literature that classifier ensemble methods specifically designed for imbalanced problems have substantial advantages over simple classifiers and standard classifier ensembles. By using ROC curves with the bagging ensemble method the inspection time can be drastically reduced at the expense of a small fraction of missed contractions.

Abstract: This paper presents a direct and stochastic technique for real-time estimation of on-board stereo head’s position and orientation. Unlike existing works which rely on feature extraction either in the image domain or in 3D space, our proposed approach directly estimates the unknown parameters from the stream of stereo pairs’ brightness. The pose parameters are tracked using the particle filtering framework which implicitly enforces the smoothness constraints on the estimated parameters. The proposed technique can be used with a driver assistance applications as well as with augmented reality applications. Extended experiments on urban environments with different road geometries are presented. Comparisons with a 3D data-based approach are presented. Moreover, we provide a performance study aiming at evaluating the accuracy of the proposed approach.