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Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera, Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Roca, & Felipe Lumbreras. (2015). Multi-part body segmentation based on depth maps for soft biometry analysis. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 56, 14–21.
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.
Keywords: 3D shape context; 3D point cloud alignment; Depth maps; Human body segmentation; Soft biometry analysis
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Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, Petia Radeva, Jordi Vitria, & Maria Teresa Anguera. (2010). Automatic Detection of Dominance and Expected Interest. EURASIPJ - EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, , 12.
Abstract: Article ID 491819
Social Signal Processing is an emergent area of research that focuses on the analysis of social constructs. Dominance and interest are two of these social constructs. Dominance refers to the level of influence a person has in a conversation. Interest, when referred in terms of group interactions, can be defined as the degree of engagement that the members of a group collectively display during their interaction. In this paper, we argue that only using behavioral motion information, we are able to predict the interest of observers when looking at face-to-face interactions as well as the dominant people. First, we propose a simple set of movement-based features from body, face, and mouth activity in order to define a higher set of interaction indicators. The considered indicators are manually annotated by observers. Based on the opinions obtained, we define an automatic binary dominance detection problem and a multiclass interest quantification problem. Error-Correcting Output Codes framework is used to learn to rank the perceived observer's interest in face-to-face interactions meanwhile Adaboost is used to solve the dominant detection problem. The automatic system shows good correlation between the automatic categorization results and the manual ranking made by the observers in both dominance and interest detection problems.
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Maria Salamo, & Sergio Escalera. (2011). Increasing Retrieval Quality in Conversational Recommenders. TKDE - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 99, 1.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 2.286 2009 24/103
JCR Impact Factor 2010: 1.851
A major task of research in conversational recommender systems is personalization. Critiquing is a common and powerful form of feedback, where a user can express her feature preferences by applying a series of directional critiques over the recommendations instead of providing specific preference values. Incremental Critiquing is a conversational recommender system that uses critiquing as a feedback to efficiently personalize products. The expectation is that in each cycle the system retrieves the products that best satisfy the user’s soft product preferences from a minimal information input. In this paper, we present a novel technique that increases retrieval quality based on a combination of compatibility and similarity scores. Under the hypothesis that a user learns Turing the recommendation process, we propose two novel exponential reinforcement learning approaches for compatibility that take into account both the instant at which the user makes a critique and the number of satisfied critiques. Moreover, we consider that the impact of features on the similarity differs according to the preferences manifested by the user. We propose a global weighting approach that uses a common weight for nearest cases in order to focus on groups of relevant products. We show that our methodology significantly improves recommendation efficiency in four data sets of different sizes in terms of session length in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our recommender shows higher robustness against noisy user data when compared to classical approaches
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Laura Igual, Joan Carles Soliva, Antonio Hernandez, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Jimenez, Oscar Vilarroya, et al. (2011). A fully-automatic caudate nucleus segmentation of brain MRI: Application in volumetric analysis of pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. BEO - BioMedical Engineering Online, 10(105), 1–23.
Abstract: Background
Accurate automatic segmentation of the caudate nucleus in magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain is of great interest in the analysis of developmental disorders. Segmentation methods based on a single atlas or on multiple atlases have been shown to suitably localize caudate structure. However, the atlas prior information may not represent the structure of interest correctly. It may therefore be useful to introduce a more flexible technique for accurate segmentations.
Method
We present Cau-dateCut: a new fully-automatic method of segmenting the caudate nucleus in MRI. CaudateCut combines an atlas-based segmentation strategy with the Graph Cut energy-minimization framework. We adapt the Graph Cut model to make it suitable for segmenting small, low-contrast structures, such as the caudate nucleus, by defining new energy function data and boundary potentials. In particular, we exploit information concerning the intensity and geometry, and we add supervised energies based on contextual brain structures. Furthermore, we reinforce boundary detection using a new multi-scale edgeness measure.
Results
We apply the novel CaudateCut method to the segmentation of the caudate nucleus to a new set of 39 pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients and 40 control children, as well as to a public database of 18 subjects. We evaluate the quality of the segmentation using several volumetric and voxel by voxel measures. Our results show improved performance in terms of segmentation compared to state-of-the-art approaches, obtaining a mean overlap of 80.75%. Moreover, we present a quantitative volumetric analysis of caudate abnormalities in pediatric ADHD, the results of which show strong correlation with expert manual analysis.
Conclusion
CaudateCut generates segmentation results that are comparable to gold-standard segmentations and which are reliable in the analysis of differentiating neuroanatomical abnormalities between healthy controls and pediatric ADHD.
Keywords: Brain caudate nucleus; segmentation; MRI; atlas-based strategy; Graph Cut framework
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Frederic Sampedro, Sergio Escalera, & Anna Puig. (2014). Iterative Multiclass Multiscale Stacked Sequential Learning: definition and application to medical volume segmentation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 46, 1–10.
Abstract: In this work we present the iterative multi-class multi-scale stacked sequential learning framework (IMMSSL), a novel learning scheme that is particularly suited for medical volume segmentation applications. This model exploits the inherent voxel contextual information of the structures of interest in order to improve its segmentation performance results. Without any feature set or learning algorithm prior assumption, the proposed scheme directly seeks to learn the contextual properties of a region from the predicted classifications of previous classifiers within an iterative scheme. Performance results regarding segmentation accuracy in three two-class and multi-class medical volume datasets show a significant improvement with respect to state of the art alternatives. Due to its easiness of implementation and its independence of feature space and learning algorithm, the presented machine learning framework could be taken into consideration as a first choice in complex volume segmentation scenarios.
Keywords: Machine learning; Sequential learning; Multi-class problems; Contextual learning; Medical volume segmentation
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