Abstract: There is a resurgence in the use of structural approaches in the usual object recognition and retrieval problem. Graph theory, in particular, graph matching plays a relevant role in that. Specifically, the detection of an object (or a part of that) in an image in terms of structural features can be formulated as a subgraph matching. Subgraph matching is a challenging task. Specially due to the presence of outliers most of the graph matching algorithms do not perform well in subgraph matching scenario. Also exact subgraph isomorphism has proven to be an NP-complete problem. So naturally, in graph matching community, there are lot of efforts addressing the problem of subgraph matching within suboptimal bound. Most of them work with approximate algorithms that try to get an inexact solution in estimated way. In addition, usual recognition must cope with distortion. Inexact graph matching consists in finding the best isomorphism under a similarity measure. Theoretically this thesis proposes algorithms for solving subgraph matching in an approximate and inexact way.
We consider the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents or line drawings from application point of view. This is a well known problem in the graphics recognition community. It can be further applied for indexing and classification of documents based on their contents. The structural nature of this kind of documents easily motivates one for giving a graph based representation. So the symbol spotting problem on graphical documents can be considered as a subgraph matching problem. The main challenges in this application domain is the noise and distortions that might come during the usage, digitalization and raster to vector conversion of those documents. Apart from that computer vision nowadays is not any more confined within a limited number of images. So dealing a huge number of images with graph based method is a further challenge.
In this thesis, on one hand, we have worked on efficient and robust graph representation to cope with the noise and distortions coming from documents. On the other hand, we have worked on different graph based methods and framework to solve the subgraph matching problem in a better approximated way, which can also deal with considerable number of images. Firstly, we propose a symbol spotting method by hashing serialized subgraphs. Graph serialization allows to create factorized substructures such as graph paths, which can be organized in hash tables depending on the structural similarities of the serialized subgraphs. The involvement of hashing techniques helps to reduce the search space substantially and speeds up the spotting procedure. Secondly, we introduce contextual similarities based on the walk based propagation on tensor product graph. These contextual similarities involve higher order information and more reliable than pairwise similarities. We use these higher order similarities to formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in the tensor product graph. Thirdly, we propose near convex grouping to form near convex region adjacency graph which eliminates the limitations of traditional region adjacency graph representation for graphic recognition. Fourthly, we propose a hierarchical graph representation by simplifying/correcting the structural errors to create a hierarchical graph of the base graph. Later these hierarchical graph structures are matched with some graph matching methods. Apart from that, in this thesis we have provided an overall experimental comparison of all the methods and some of the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, some dataset models have also been proposed.

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.

Abstract: In this work, a new one-class classification ensemble strategy called approximate polytope ensemble is presented. The main contribution of the paper is threefold. First, the geometrical concept of convex hull is used to define the boundary of the target class defining the problem. Expansions and contractions of this geometrical structure are introduced in order to avoid over-fitting. Second, the decision whether a point belongs to the convex hull model in high dimensional spaces is approximated by means of random projections and an ensemble decision process. Finally, a tiling strategy is proposed in order to model non-convex structures. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy is significantly better than state of the art one-class classification methods on over 200 datasets.

Abstract: CoRR abs/1402.5766
We propose a meta-parameter free, off-the-shelf, simple and fast unsupervised feature learning algorithm, which exploits a new way of optimizing for sparsity. Experiments on STL-10 show that the method presents state-of-the-art performance and provides discriminative features that generalize well.

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel polyp region segmentation method for colonoscopy videos. Our method uses valley information associated to polyp boundaries in order to provide an initial segmentation. This first segmentation is refined to eliminate boundary discontinuities caused by image artifacts or other elements of the scene. Experimental results over a publicly annotated database show that our method outperforms both general and specific segmentation methods by providing more accurate regions rich in polyp content. We also prove how image preprocessing is needed to improve final polyp region segmentation.

Abstract: This manuscript addresses the cross-spectral stereo correspondence problem. It proposes the usage of a dense flow field based representation instead of the original cross-spectral images, which have a low correlation. In this way, working in the flow field space, classical cost functions can be used as similarity measures. Preliminary experimental results on urban environments have been obtained showing the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Human detection in computer vision field is an active field of research. Extending this to human-like drawings such as the main characters in comic book stories is not trivial. Comics analysis is a very recent field of research at the intersection of graphics, texts, objects and people recognition. The detection of the main comic characters is an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. This paper presents a color-based approach for comics character retrieval using content-based drawing retrieval and color palette.