Abstract: The purpose of this study was to assess whether age-related chromatic sensitivity changes are associated with corresponding changes in hue perception in a large sample of colour-normal observers over a wide age range (n = 185; age range: 18-75 years). In these observers we determined both the sensitivity along the protan, deutan and tritan line; and settings for the four unique hues, from which the characteristics of the higher-order colour mechanisms can be derived. We found a significant decrease in chromatic sensitivity due to ageing, in particular along the tritan line. From the unique hue settings we derived the cone weightings associated with the colour mechanisms that are at equilibrium for the four unique hues. We found that the relative cone weightings (w(L) /w(M) and w(L) /w(S)) associated with the unique hues were independent of age. Our results are consistent with previous findings that the unique hues are rather constant with age while chromatic sensitivity declines. They also provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that higher-order colour mechanisms are equipped with flexible cone weightings, as opposed to fixed weights. The mechanism underlying this compensation is still poorly understood.

Abstract: Outlier detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. Their detection is especially determinant in small sample size unbalanced problems, since in such settings outliers become highly influential and significantly bias models. This particular experimental settings are usual in medical applications, like diagnosis of rare pathologies, outcome of experimental personalized treatments or pandemic emergencies. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches compute an outlier score from the neighbors of each sample, are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. A main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters, like the number of neighbors.
This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data sets show that our approach outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.

Abstract: Graph-based representations of patterns are very flexible and powerful, but they are not easily processed due to the lack of learning algorithms in the domain of graphs. Embedding a graph into a vector space solves this problem since graphs are turned into feature vectors and thus all the statistical learning machinery becomes available for graph input patterns. In this work we present a new way of embedding discrete attributed graphs into vector spaces using node and edge label frequencies. The methodology is experimentally tested on graph classification problems, using patterns of different nature, and it is shown to be competitive to state-of-the-art classification algorithms for graphs, while being computationally much more efficient.

Abstract: IF: 0.061)

Abstract: Information extraction is a fundamental task of many business intelligence services that entail massive document processing. Understanding a document page structure in terms of its layout provides contextual support which is helpful in the semantic interpretation of the document terms. In this paper, inspired by the progress of deep learning methodologies applied to the task of object recognition, we transfer these models to the specific case of document object detection, reformulating the traditional problem of document layout analysis. Moreover, we importantly contribute to prior arts by defining the task of instance segmentation on the document image domain. An instance segmentation paradigm is especially important in complex layouts whose contents should interact for the proper rendering of the page, i.e., the proper text wrapping around an image. Finally, we provide an extensive evaluation, both qualitative and quantitative, that demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed methodology over the current state of the art.