Abstract: 5Y Impact Factor: 2.99 / 1st (Ophthalmology)
An achromatic stimulus is defined as a patch of light that is devoid of any hue. This is usually achieved by asking observers to adjust the stimulus such that it looks neither red nor green and at the same time neither yellow nor blue. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of the achromatic locus, little is known about the variability in these settings. The main purpose of the current study was to evaluate whether achromatic settings were dependent on the task of the observers, namely the navigation direction in color space. Observers could either adjust the test patch along the two chromatic axes in the CIE u*v* diagram or, alternatively, navigate along the unique-hue lines. Our main result is that the navigation method affects the reliability of these achromatic settings. Observers are able to make more reliable achromatic settings when adjusting the test patch along the directions defined by the four unique hues as opposed to navigating along the main axes in the commonly used CIE u*v* chromaticity plane. This result holds across different ambient viewing conditions (Dark, Daylight, Cool White Fluorescent) and different test luminance levels (5, 20, and 50 cd/m2). The reduced variability in the achromatic settings is consistent with the idea that internal color representations are more aligned with the unique-hue lines than the u* and v* axes.

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: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.