Abstract: The problem of texture segmentation and interpretation is one of the main concerns in the field of document analysis. Graphical documents often contain areas characterized by a structural texture whose recognition allows both the document understanding, and its storage in a more compact way. In this work, we focus on structural linial textures of regular repetition contained in plan documents. Starting from an atributed graph which represents the vectorized input image, we develop a method to segment textured areas and recognize their placement rules. We wish to emphasize that the searched textures do not follow a predefined pattern. Minimal closed loops of the input graph are computed, and then hierarchically clustered. In this hierarchical clustering, a distance function between two closed loops is defined in terms of their areas difference and boundary resemblance computed by a string matching procedure. Finally it is noted that, when the texture consists of isolated primitive elements, the same method can be used after computing a Voronoi Tesselation of the input graph.

Abstract: We propose to use deformable template matching as a new approach to recognize characters and lineal symbols in hand-written line drawings, instead of traditional methods based on vectorization and feature extraction. Bayesian formulation of the deformable template matching allows combining fidelity to the ideal shape of the symbol with maximum flexibility to get the best fit to the input image. Lineal nature of symbols can be exploited to define a suitable representation of models and the set of deformations to be applied to them. Matching, however, is done over the original binary image to avoid losing relevant features during vectorization. We have applied this method to hand-written architectural drawings and experimental results demonstrate that symbols with high distortions from ideal shape can be accurately identified.

Abstract: A main challenge in Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) is determining a termination condition ensuring stabilization close to the optimum in real-world applications. Although for known test functions distribution-based quantities are good candidates (as far as suitable parameters are used), in real-world problems an open question still remains unsolved. How can we estimate an upper-bound for the termination condition value ensuring a given accuracy for the (unknown) EA solution?
We claim that the termination problem would be fully solved if we defined a quantity (depending only on the EA output) behaving like the solution accuracy. The open question would be, then, satisfactorily answered if we had a model relating both quantities, since accuracy could be predicted from the alternative quantity. We present a statistical inference framework addressing two topics: checking the correlation between the two quantities and defining a regression model for predicting (at a given confidence level) accuracy values from the EA output.

Abstract: Obstacle avoidance remains a challenging task for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV), due to their limited payload capacity to carry advanced sensors. Unlike larger vehicles, MAV can only carry light weight sensors, for instance a camera, which is our main assumption in this work. We explore passive monocular depth estimation and propose a novel method Position Aided Depth Estimation
(PADE). We analyse PADE performance and compare it against the extensively used Time To Collision (TTC). We evaluate the accuracy, robustness to noise and speed of three Optical Flow (OF) techniques, combined with both depth estimation methods. Our results show PADE is more accurate than TTC at depths between 0-12 meters and is less sensitive to noise. Our findings highlight the potential application of PADE for MAV to perform safe autonomous navigation in
unknown and unstructured environments.

Abstract: Myocardial torsion (MT) plays a crucial role in the assessment of the functionality of the
left ventricle. For this purpose, the IAM group at the CVC has developed the Harmonic Phase Flow (HPF) plugin for the Osirix DICOM platform . We have validated its funcionalty on sequences acquired using different protocols and including healthy and pathological cases. Results show similar torsion trends for SPAMM acquisitions, with pathological cases introducing expected deviations from the ground truth. Finally, we provide the plugin free of charge at http://iam.cvc.uab.es