Abstract: This paper presents a novel system for automatic sleep system recommendation using RGB, depth and pressure information. It consists of a validated clinical knowledge-based model that, along with a set of prescription variables extracted automatically, obtains a personalized bed design recommendation. The automatic process starts by performing multi-part human body RGB-D segmentation combining GrabCut, 3D Shape Context descriptor and Thin Plate Splines, to then extract a set of anthropometric landmark points by applying orthogonal plates to the segmented human body. The extracted variables are introduced to the computerized clinical model to calculate body circumferences, weight, morphotype and Body Mass Index categorization. Furthermore, pressure image analysis is performed to extract pressure values and at-risk points, which are also introduced to the model to eventually obtain the final prescription of mattress, topper, and pillow. We validate the complete system in a set of 200 subjects, showing accurate category classification and high correlation results with respect to manual measures.

Abstract: The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modelling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness and orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images and a natural bacteria-centred coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimising an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modelling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at http://fluobactracker.inrialpes.fr.

Abstract: In this work we present a novel compact scene representation based on Stixels that infers geometric and semantic information. Our approach overcomes the previous rather restrictive geometric assumptions for Stixels by introducing a novel depth model to account for non-flat roads and slanted objects. Both semantic and depth cues are used jointly to infer the scene representation in a sound global energy minimization formulation. Furthermore, a novel approximation scheme is introduced that uses an extremely efficient over-segmentation. In doing so, the computational complexity of the Stixel inference algorithm is reduced significantly, achieving real-time computation capabilities with only a slight drop in accuracy. We evaluate the proposed approach in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time on four publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach maintains accuracy on flat road scene datasets while improving substantially on a novel non-flat road dataset.

Abstract: Natural image modeling is a landmark challenge of unsupervised learning. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) learn a useful latent representation and generate samples that preserve global structure but tend to suffer from image blurriness. PixelCNNs model sharp contours and details very well, but lack an explicit latent representation and have difficulty modeling large-scale structure in a computationally efficient way. In this paper, we present PixelVAE, a VAE model with an autoregressive decoder based on PixelCNN. The resulting architecture achieves state-of-the-art log-likelihood on binarized MNIST. We extend PixelVAE to a hierarchy of multiple latent variables at different scales; this hierarchical model achieves competitive likelihood on 64x64 ImageNet and generates high-quality samples on LSUN bedrooms.

Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
The proposal and implementation of a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from 99mTc-dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) scans. The aim of this work is to propose, implement, and validate a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from DMSA scans and in an observer-independent manner.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
From a set of 16 pediatric DMSA-positive scans and 16 matched controls and using both expert-guided and automatic approaches, a set of image-derived quantitative indicators was computed based on the relative size, intensity and histogram distribution of the lesion. A correlation analysis was conducted in order to investigate the association of these indicators with other clinical data of interest in this scenario, including C-reactive protein (CRP), white cell count, vesicoureteral reflux, fever, relative perfusion, and the presence of renal sequelae in a 6-month follow-up DMSA scan.
RESULTS:
A fully automatic lesion detection and segmentation system was able to successfully classify DMSA-positive from negative scans (AUC=0.92, sensitivity=81% and specificity=94%). The image-computed relative size of the lesion correlated with the presence of fever and CRP levels (p<0.05), and a measurement derived from the distribution histogram of the lesion obtained significant performance results in the detection of permanent renal damage (AUC=0.86, sensitivity=100% and specificity=75%).
CONCLUSIONS:
The proposal and implementation of a computational framework for the quantification of structural renal damage from DMSA scans showed a promising potential to complement visual diagnosis and non-imaging indicators.

Abstract: The human visual system and most digital cameras sample the continuous spectral power distribution through three classes of receptors. This implies that two distinct spectral reflectances can result in identical tristimulus values under one illuminant and differ under another – the problem of metamer mismatching. It is still debated how frequent this issue arises in the real world, using naturally occurring reflectance functions and common illuminants.
We gathered more than ten thousand spectral reflectance samples from various sources, covering a wide range of environments (e.g., flowers, plants, Munsell chips) and evaluated their responses under a number of natural and artificial source of lights. For each pair of reflectance functions, we estimated the perceived difference using the CIE-defined distance ΔE2000 metric in Lab color space.
The degree of metamer mismatching depended on the lower threshold value l when two samples would be considered to lead to equal sensor excitations (ΔE < l), and on the higher threshold value h when they would be considered different. For example, for l=h=1, we found that 43.129 comparisons out of a total of 6×107 pairs would be considered metameric (1 in 104). For l=1 and h=5, this number reduced to 705 metameric pairs (2 in 106). Extreme metamers, for instance l=1 and h=10, were rare (22 pairs or 6 in 108), as were instances where the two members of a metameric pair would be assigned to different color categories. Not unexpectedly, we observed variations among different reflectance databases and illuminant spectra with more frequency under artificial illuminants than natural ones.
Overall, our numbers are not very different from those obtained earlier (Foster et al, JOSA A, 2006). However, our results also show that the degree of metamerism is typically not very strong and that category switches hardly ever occur.

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions.
Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train.
In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets.