Abstract: We present a fully automatic diagnostic imaging test for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis assistance based on previously found evidences of caudate nucleus volumetric abnormalities. The proposed method consists of different steps: a new automatic method for external and internal segmentation of caudate based on Machine Learning methodologies; the definition of a set of new volume relation features, 3D Dissociated Dipoles, used for caudate representation and classification. We separately validate the contributions using real data from a pediatric population and show precise internal caudate segmentation and discrimination power of the diagnostic test, showing significant performance improvements in comparison to other state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: In this article, a novel technique for user’s authentication and verification using gait as a biometric unobtrusive pattern is proposed. The method is based on a two stages pipeline. First, a general activity recognition classifier is personalized for an specific user using a small sample of her/his walking pattern. As a result, the system is much more selective with respect to the new walking pattern. A second stage verifies whether the user is an authorized one or not. This stage is defined as a one-class classification problem. In order to solve this problem, a four-layer architecture is built around the geometric concept of convex hull. This architecture allows to improve robustness to outliers, modeling non-convex shapes, and to take into account temporal coherence information. Two different scenarios are proposed as validation with two different wearable systems. First, a custom high-performance wearable system is built and used in a free environment. A second dataset is acquired from an Android-based commercial device in a ‘wild’ scenario with rough terrains, adversarial conditions, crowded places and obstacles. Results on both systems and datasets are very promising, reducing the verification error rates by an order of magnitude with respect to the state-of-the-art technologies.

Abstract: One of the most widely used assumptions in supervised learning is that data is independent and identically distributed. This assumption does not hold true in many real cases. Sequential learning is the discipline of machine learning that deals with dependent data such that neighboring examples exhibit some kind of relationship. In the literature, there are different approaches that try to capture and exploit this correlation, by means of different methodologies. In this paper we focus on meta-learning strategies and, in particular, the stacked sequential learning approach. The main contribution of this work is two-fold: first, we generalize the stacked sequential learning. This generalization reflects the key role of neighboring interactions modeling. Second, we propose an effective and efficient way of capturing and exploiting sequential correlations that takes into account long-range interactions by means of a multi-scale pyramidal decomposition of the predicted labels. Additionally, this new method subsumes the standard stacked sequential learning approach. We tested the proposed method on two different classification tasks: text lines classification in a FAQ data set and image classification. Results on these tasks clearly show that our approach outperforms the standard stacked sequential learning. Moreover, we show that the proposed method allows to control the trade-off between the detail and the desired range of the interactions.