Abstract: The design of a slide presentation is a creative process. In this process first, humans visualize in their minds what they want to explain. Then, they have to be able to represent this knowledge in an understandable way. There exists a lot of commercial software that allows to create our own slide presentations but the creativity of the user is rather limited. In this article we present an application that allows the user to create and visualize a slide presentation from a sketch. A slide may be seen as a graphical document or a diagram where its elements are placed in a particular spatial arrangement. To describe and recognize slides a syntactic approach is proposed. This approach is based on an Adjacency Grammar and a parsing methodology to cope with this kind of grammars. The experimental evaluation shows the performance of our methodology from a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. Six different slides containing different number of symbols, from 4 to 7, have been given to the users and they have drawn them without restrictions in the order of the elements. The quantitative results give an idea on how suitable is our methodology to describe and recognize the different elements in a slide.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a new approach to recognize symbols by the use of a concept lattice. We propose to build a concept lattice in terms of graphical patterns. Each model symbol is decomposed in a set of composing graphical patterns taken as primitives. Each one of these primitives is described by boundary moment invariants. The obtained concept lattice relates which symbolic patterns compose a given graphical symbol. A Hasse diagram is derived from the context and is used to recognize symbols affected by noise. We present some preliminary results over a variation of the dataset of symbols from the GREC 2005 symbol recognition contest.

Abstract: Most conventional learning algorithms require both positive and negative training data for achieving accurate classification results. However, the problem of learning classifiers from only positive data arises in many applications where negative data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Minimum Spanning Tree Class Descriptor (MSTCD) was presented as a method that achieves better accuracies than other one-class classifiers in high dimensional data. However, the presence of outliers in the target class severely harms the performance of this classifier. In this paper we propose two bagging strategies for MSTCD that reduce the influence of outliers in training data. We show the improved performance on both real and artificially contaminated data.

Abstract: Affective computing is at the core of a new paradigm in HCI and AI represented by human-centered computing. Within this paradigm, it is expected that machines will be enabled with perceiving capabilities, making them aware about users’ affective state. The current paper addresses the problem of facial expression recognition from monocular videos sequences. We propose a dynamic facial expression recognition scheme, which is proven to be very efficient. Furthermore, it is conveniently compared with several static-based systems adopting different magnitude of facial expression. We provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM). We also provide performance evaluations using arbitrary test video sequences.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the geometric distance from a given point to the corresponding implicit quadric curve/surface. The proposed estimation is based on the height of a tetrahedron, which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the real distance. The estimated distance is then used for finding the best set of quadric parameters, by means of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, which is a common framework in other geometric fitting approaches. Comparisons of the proposed approach with previous ones are provided to show both improvements in CPU time as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results.

Abstract: Multi-class binary symbol classification requires the use of rich descriptors and robust classifiers. Shape representation is a difficult task because of several symbol distortions, such as occlusions, elastic deformations, gaps or noise. In this paper, we present the Circular Blurred Shape Model descriptor. This descriptor encodes the arrangement information of object parts in a correlogram structure. A prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed to the symbol. Moreover, we learn the new feature space using a set of Adaboost classifiers, which are combined in the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework to deal with the multi-class categorization problem. The presented work has been validated over different multi-class data sets, and compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors, showing significant performance improvements.

Abstract: Bag-of-words model (BOW) is inspired by the text classification problem, where a document is represented by an unsorted set of contained words. Analogously, in the object categorization problem, an image is represented by an unsorted set of discrete visual words (BOVW). In these models, relations among visual words are performed after dictionary construction. However, close object regions can have far descriptions in the feature space, being grouped as different visual words. In this paper, we present a method for considering geometrical information of visual words in the dictionary construction step. Object interest regions are obtained by means of the Harris-Affine detector and then described using the SIFT descriptor. Afterward, a contextual-space and a feature-space are defined, and a merging process is used to fuse feature words based on their proximity in the contextual-space. Moreover, we use the Error Correcting Output Codes framework to learn the new dictionary in order to perform multi-class classification. Results show significant classification improvements when spatial information is taken into account in the dictionary construction step.

Abstract: Smoothing of biomedical images should preserve gray-level transitions between adjacent tissues, while restoring contours consistent with anatomical structures. Anisotropic diffusion operators are based on image appearance discontinuities (either local or contextual) and might fail at weak inter-tissue transitions. Meanwhile, the output of block-wise and morphological operations is prone to present a block structure due to the shape and size of the considered pixel neighborhood. In this contribution, we use differential geometry concepts to define a diffusion operator that restricts to image consistent level-sets. In this manner, the final state is a non-uniform intensity image presenting homogeneous inter-tissue transitions along anatomical structures, while smoothing intra-structure texture. Experiments on different types of medical images (magnetic resonance, computerized tomography) illustrate its benefit on a further process (such as segmentation) of images.