Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has benefited from computer vision and more recently, Deep Learning approaches, to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In our work, we test Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) with a dataset of deck areas of bridges for damage segmentation. We create a dataset for delamination and rebar exposure that has been collected from inspection records of bridges in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The dataset consists of 734 images with three labels per image, which makes it the largest dataset of images of bridge deck damage. This data allows us to estimate the performance of our method based on regions of agreement, which emulates the uncertainty of in-field inspections. We demonstrate the practicality of FCNs to perform automated semantic segmentation of surface damages. Our model achieves a mean accuracy of 89.7% for delamination and 78.4% for rebar exposure, and a weighted F1 score of 81.9%.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel method extracting biometric measures using depth sensors. Given a multi-part labeled training data, a new subject is aligned to the best model of the dataset, and soft biometrics such as lengths or circumference sizes of limbs and body are computed. The process is performed by training relevant pose clusters, defining a representative model, and fitting a 3D shape context descriptor within an iterative matching procedure. We show robust measures by applying orthogonal plates to body hull. We test our approach in a novel full-body RGB-Depth data set, showing accurate estimation of soft biometrics and better segmentation accuracy in comparison with random forest approach without requiring large training data.

Abstract: This paper presents the development of an Augmented Reality mobile application which aims at sensibilizing young children to abstract concepts of music. Such concepts are, for instance, the musical notation or the idea of rhythm. Recent studies in Augmented Reality for education suggest that such technologies have multiple benefits for students, including younger ones. As mobile document image acquisition and processing gains maturity on mobile platforms, we explore how it is possible to build a markerless and real-time application to augment the physical documents with didactic animations and interactive virtual content. Given a standard image processing pipeline, we compare the performance of different local descriptors at two key stages of the process. Results suggest alternatives to the SIFT local descriptors, regarding result quality and computational efficiency, both for document model identification and perspective transform estimation. All experiments are performed on an original and public dataset we introduce here.

Abstract: In this paper we present an efficient segmentation-free word spotting method, applied in the context of historical document collections, that follows the query-by-example paradigm. We use a patch-based framework where local patches are described by a bag-of-visual-words model powered by SIFT descriptors. By projecting the patch descriptors to a topic space with the latent semantic analysis technique and compressing the descriptors with the product quantization method, we are able to efficiently index the document information both in terms of memory and time. The proposed method is evaluated using four different collections of historical documents achieving good performances on both handwritten and typewritten scenarios. The yielded performances outperform the recent state-of-the-art keyword spotting approaches.

Abstract: Recent results on structured learning methods have shown the impact of structural information in a wide range of pattern recognition tasks. In the field of document image analysis, there is a long experience on structural methods for the analysis and information extraction of multiple types of documents. Yet, the lack of conveniently annotated and free access databases has not benefited the progress in some areas such as technical drawing understanding. In this paper, we present a floor plan database, named CVC-FP, that is annotated for the architectural objects and their structural relations. To construct this database, we have implemented a groundtruthing tool, the SGT tool, that allows to make specific this sort of information in a natural manner. This tool has been made for general purpose groundtruthing: It allows to define own object classes and properties, multiple labeling options are possible, grants the cooperative work, and provides user and version control. We finally have collected some of the recent work on floor plan interpretation and present a quantitative benchmark for this database. Both CVC-FP database and the SGT tool are freely released to the research community to ease comparisons between methods and boost reproducible research.