Publications

This paper proposes a comparison of color features for image retrieval. In particular the UCID image database has been employed to compare the retrieval capabilities of different color descriptors. The set of descriptors comprises global and spatially related features, and the tests show that HSV based global features provide the best performance at varying brightness and contrast settings.

This paper presents a novel approach for detecting multipleinstances of the same object for pick-and-place automation.The working conditions are very challenging, with complex objects, arranged at random in the scene, and heavily occluded. This approach exploits SIFT to obtain a set of correspondences between the object model and the current image. In order to segment the multiple instances of the object, the correspondences are clustered among the objects using a voting scheme which determines the best estimate of the object’s center through mean shift. This procedure is compared in terms of accuracy with existing homography-based solutions which make use of RANSAC to eliminate outliers in the homography estimation.

This work proposes a general approach to optimize the time required to perform a choice in a decision support system, with particular reference to image processing tasks with neighborhood analysis. The decisions are encoded in a decision table paradigm that allows multiple equivalent procedures to be performed for the same situation. An automatic synthesis of the optimal decision tree is implemented in order to generate the most efficient order in which conditions should be considered to minimize the computational requirements.To test out approach, the connected component labeling scenario is considered. Results will show the speedup introduced using an automatically built decision system able to efficiently analyze and explore the neighborhood.

This paper presents an innovative approach for localizingand segmenting duplicate objects for industrial applications.The working conditions are challenging, withcomplex heavily-occluded objects, arranged at random inthe scene. To account for high flexibility and processingspeed, this approach exploits SIFT keypoint extraction andmean shift clustering to efficiently partition the correspondencesbetween the object model and the duplicates ontothe different object instances. The re-projection (by meansof an Euclidean transform) of some delimiting points ontothe current image is used to segment the object shapes. Thisprocedure is compared in terms of accuracy with existinghomography-based solutions which make use of RANSACto eliminate outliers in the homography estimation. Moreover,in order to improve the extraction in the case of reflectiveor transparent objects, multiple object models are usedand fused together. Experimental results on different andchallenging kinds of objects are reported.

In this paper we propose an integrated system for face detection and face recognition based on improved versions of state-of-the-art statistical learning techniques such as Boosting and LDA. Both the detection and the recognition processes are performed on facial features (e.g., the eyes, the nose, the mouth, etc) in order to improve the recognition accuracy and to exploit their statistical independence in the training phase. Experimental results on real images show the superiority of our proposed techniques with respect to the existing ones in both the detection and the recognition phase. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

In this work we propose a system for automatic document segmentation to extract graphical elements from historical manuscripts and then to identify significant pictures from them, removing floral and abstract decorations. The system performs a block based analysis by means of color and texture features. The Gradient Spatial Dependency Matrix, a new texture operator particularly effective for this task, is proposed. The feature vectors are processed by an embedding procedure which allows increased performance in later SVM classification. Results for both feature extraction and embedding based classification are reported, supporting the effectiveness of the proposal.

In this paper we present a new optimization technique for the neighborhood computation in connected component labeling focused on images stored in raster scan order. This new technique is based on a 2x2 square block analysis of the image, and it exploits the fact that, when using 8-connection, the pixels of a 2x2 square are all connected to each other. This implies that they will share the same label at the end of the computation. To prove the effectiveness of our proposal, we show a comprehensive comparison of the most used and advanced connected components labeling techniques presented so far. The tests are conducted on high resolution images obtained from digitized historical manuscripts and a set of transformations is applied in order to show the algorithms behavior at different image resolutions and with a varying number of labels.

This paper presents a novel approach for detecting multiple instances of the same object for pick-and-place automation. The working conditions are very challenging, with complex objects, arranged at random in the scene, and heavily occluded. This approach exploits SIFT to obtain a set of correspondences between the object model and the current image. In order to segment the multiple instances of the object, the correspondences are clustered among the objects using a voting scheme which determines the best estimate of the object's center through mean shift. This procedure is compared in terms of accuracy with existing homography-based solutions which make use of RANSAC to eliminate outliers in the homography estimation.