Abstract: In this paper we present an efficient segmentation-free word spotting method, applied in the context of historical document collections, that follows the query-by-example paradigm.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 The proposed method is evaluated using four different collections of historical documents achieving good performances on both handwritten and typewritten scenarios.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: Research in computer vision is advancing by the availability of good datasets that help to improve algorithms, validate results and obtain comparative analysis. The datasets can be real or synthetic. For some of the computer vision problems such as optical flow it is not possible to obtain ground-truth optical flow with high accuracy in natural outdoor real scenarios directly by any sensor, although it is possible to obtain ground-truth data of real scenarios in a laboratory setup with limited motion. In this difficult situation computer graphics offers a viable option for creating realistic virtual scenarios. In the current work we present a framework to design virtual scenes and generate sequences as well as ground-truth flow fields. Particularly, we generate a dataset containing sequences of driving scenarios. The sequences in the dataset vary in different speeds of the on-board vision system, different road textures, complex motion of vehicle and independent moving vehicles in the scene. This dataset enables analyzing and adaptation of existing optical flow methods, and leads to invention of new approaches particularly for driver assistance systems.

Abstract: Clothing is still manually manufactured for the most part nowadays, resulting in discrepancies between nominal and real dimensions, and potentially ill-fitting garments. Hence, it is common in the apparel industry to manually perform measures at preshipment time. We present an automatic method to obtain such measures from a single image of a garment that speeds up this task. It is generic and extensible in the sense that it does not depend explicitly on the garment shape or type. Instead, it learns through a probabilistic graphical model to identify the different contour parts. Subsequently, a set of Lasso regressors, one per desired measure, can predict the actual values of the measures. We present results on a dataset of 130 images of jackets and 98 of pants, of varying sizes and styles, obtaining 1.17 and 1.22 cm of mean absolute error, respectively.