Witnessing the omnipresence of ever complex yet so intuitive digital video media, research community has raised the question of its meaningful use and management. Stored in immense multimedia databases, digital videos need to be retrieved and structured in an intelligent way, relying on the content and the rich semantics involved. Therefore, the third generation of Content Based Video Indexing and Retrieval systems faces the problem of the semantic gap between the simplicity of the available visual features and the richness of user semantics. This work focuses on the issues of efficiency and scalability in video indexing and retrieval to facilitate a video representation model capable of semantic annotation. A highly efficient algorithm for temporal analysis and key-frame extraction is developed. It is based on the prediction information extracted directly from the compressed-domain features and the robust scalable analysis in the ...

Growth in storage capacity has led to large digital video repositories and complicated the discovery of specific information without the laborious manual annotation of data. The research focuses on creating a retrieval system that is ultimately independent of manual work. To retrieve relevant content, the semantic gap between the searcher's information need and the content data has to be overcome using content-based technology. Semantic gap constitutes of two distinct elements: the ambiguity of the true information need and the equivocalness of digital video data. The research problem of this thesis is: what computational content-based models for retrieval increase the effectiveness of the semantic retrieval of digital video? The hypothesis is that semantic search performance can be improved using pattern recognition, data abstraction and clustering techniques jointly with human interaction through manually created queries and visual browsing. The results of this ...

The explosion of Deep Learning (DL) added a boost to the already rapidly developing field of Computer Vision to such a point that vision-based tasks are now parts of our everyday lives. Applications such as image classification, photo stylization, or face recognition are nowadays pervasive, as evidenced by the advent of modern systems trivially integrated into mobile applications. In this thesis, we investigated and enhanced the visual counting task, which automatically estimates the number of objects in still images or video frames. Recently, due to the growing interest in it, several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based solutions have been suggested by the scientific community. These artificial neural networks, inspired by the organization of the animal visual cortex, provide a way to automatically learn effective representations from raw visual data and can be successfully employed to address typical challenges characterizing this task, ...

In the modern world, we are increasingly surrounded by computation devices with communication links and one or more microphones. Such devices are, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops or hearing aids. These devices can work together as nodes in an acoustic sensor network (ASN). Such networks are a growing platform that opens the possibility for many practical applications. ASN based speech enhancement, source localization, and event detection can be applied for teleconferencing, camera control, automation, or assisted living. For this kind of applications, the awareness of auditory objects and their spatial positioning are key properties. In order to provide these two kinds of information, novel methods have been developed in this thesis. Information on the type of auditory objects is provided by a novel real-time sound classification method. Information on the position of human speakers is provided by a novel localization ...

The subject of this PhD thesis is the efficient and robust processing and analysis of the audio recordings that are derived from a call center. The thesis is comprised of two parts. The first part is dedicated to dialogue/non-dialogue detection and to speaker segmentation. The systems that are developed are prerequisite for detecting (i) the audio segments that actually contain a dialogue between the system and the call center customer and (ii) the change points between the system and the customer. This way the volume of the audio recordings that need to be processed is significantly reduced, while the system is automated. To detect the presence of a dialogue several systems are developed. This is the first effort found in the international literature that the audio channel is exclusively exploited. Also, it is the first time that the speaker utterance ...

The recent progress in artificial neural networks (rebranded as “deep learning”) has significantly boosted the state-of-the-art in numerous domains of computer vision offering an opportunity to approach the problems which were hardly solvable with conventional machine learning. Thus, in the frame of this PhD study, we explore how deep learning techniques can help in the analysis of one the most basic and essential semantic traits revealed by a human face, namely, gender and age. In particular, two complementary problem settings are considered: (1) gender/age prediction from given face images, and (2) synthesis and editing of human faces with the required gender/age attributes. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has currently become a standard model for image-based object recognition in general, and therefore, is a natural choice for addressing the first of these two problems. However, our preliminary studies have shown that the ...

Historical photos are significant attestations of the inheritance of the past. Since Photography is an art that is more than 150 years old, more and more diffuse are the photographic archives all over the world. Nevertheless, time and bad preservation corrupts physical supports, and many important historical documents risk to be ruined and their content lost. Therefore solutions must be implemented to preserve their state and to recover damaged information. This PhD thesis proposes a general methodology, and several applicative solutions, to handle these problems, by means of digitization and digital restoration. The purpose is to create a useful tool to support non-expert users in the restoration process of damaged historical images. The content of this thesis is outlined as follows: Chapter 1 gives an overview on the problems related to management and preservation of cultural repositories, and discusses about ...

The unprecedented processing demand, posed by the explosion of big data, challenges researchers to design efficient and adaptive machine learning algorithms that do not require persistent retraining and avoid learning redundant information. Inspired from learning techniques of intelligent biological agents, identifying transferable knowledge across learning problems has been a significant research focus to improve machine learning algorithms. In this thesis, we address the challenges of knowledge transfer through embedding spaces that capture and store hierarchical knowledge. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the problem of cross-domain knowledge transfer. We first address zero-shot image classification, where the goal is to identify images from unseen classes using semantic descriptions of these classes. We train two coupled dictionaries which align visual and semantic domains via an intermediate embedding space. We then extend this idea by training deep networks that ...

Cancer, with its varying and hard to detect types, became one of the most dangerous diseases for humans. Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that has the most mortality rate among its type. The usual melanoma detection process is based on awareness of the patient and the experience of the visual investigator. Even though the invention of dermoscopes reduce its effects, “subjectivity” problem plays a huge role on the detection accuracy, which creates a need for automated detection. In this thesis, history of automated melanoma detection on dermoscopic images and caveats of present frameworks are studied. Different approaches to overcome these caveats are explored. As a result, a new melanoma detection algorithm based on Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) concept, which combines traditional methods with new age deep learning techniques, is created. The performance of the new algorithm is ...

In recent years Machine Learning and in particular Deep Learning have excelled in object recognition and classification tasks in computer vision. As these methods extract features from the data itself by learning features that are relevant for a particular task, a key aspect of this remarkable success is the amount of data on which these methods train. Biomedical applications face the problem that the amount of training data is limited. In particular, labels and annotations are usually scarce and expensive to obtain as they require biological or medical expertise. One way to overcome this issue is to use additional knowledge about the data at hand. This guidance can come from expert knowledge, which puts focus on specific, relevant characteristics in the images, or geometric priors which can be used to exploit the spatial relationships in the images. This thesis presents ...

Automatic ear recognition systems have seen increased interest over recent years due to multiple desirable characteristics. Ear images used in such systems can typically be extracted from profile head shots or video footage. The acquisition procedure is contactless and non-intrusive, and it also does not depend on the cooperation of the subjects. In this regard, ear recognition technology shares similarities with other image-based biometric modalities. Another appealing property of ear biometrics is its distinctiveness. Recent studies even empirically validated existing conjectures that certain features of the ear are distinct for identical twins. This fact has significant implications for security-related applications and puts ear images on a par with epigenetic biometric modalities, such as the iris. Ear images can also supplement other biometric modalities in automatic recognition systems and provide identity cues when other information is unreliable or even unavailable. In ...

The thesis deals with automatic interpretation of naturally spoken utterances for limited-domain applications. Specifically, the problem is examined by means of a dialogue system for an airport information application. In contrast to traditional two-stage systems, speech recognition and semantic processing are tightly coupled. This avoids interpretation errors due to early decisions. The presented one-stage decoding approach utilizes a uniform, stochastic knowledge representation based on weighted transition network hierarchies, which describe phonemes, words, word classes and semantic concepts. A robust semantic model, which is estimated by combination of data-driven and rule-based approaches, is part of this representation. The investigation of this hierarchical language model is the focus of this work. Furthermore, methods for modeling out-of-vocabulary words and for evaluating semantic trees are introduced.

The increasing use of technological devices and biometric recognition systems in people daily lives has motivated a great deal of research interest in the development of effective and robust systems. However, there are still some challenges to be solved in these systems when Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are employed. For this reason, this thesis proposes different approaches to address these issues. First of all, we have analyzed the effect of introducing the most widespread DNN architectures to develop systems for face and text-dependent speaker verification tasks. In this analysis, we observed that state-of-the-art DNNs established for many tasks, including face verification, did not perform efficiently for text-dependent speaker verification. Therefore, we have conducted a study to find the cause of this poor performance and we have noted that under certain circumstances this problem is due to the use of a ...

Advances in compression techniques, decreasing cost of storage, and high-speed transmission have facilitated the way videos are created, stored and distributed. As a consequence, videos are now being used in many applications areas. The increase in the amount of video data deployed and used in today's applications reveals not only the importance as multimedia data type, but also led to the requirement of efficient management of video data. This management paved the way for new research areas, such as indexing and retrieval of video with respect to their spatio-temporal, visual and semantic contents. This thesis presents work towards a unified framework for semi-automated video indexing and interactive retrieval. To create an efficient index, a set of representative key frames are selected which capture and encapsulate the entire video content. This is achieved by, firstly, segmenting the video into its constituent ...

Vision sensor networks and video cameras find widespread usage in several applications that rely on effective representation of scenes or analysis of 3D information. These systems usually acquire multiple images of the same 3D scene from different viewpoints or at different time instants. Therefore, these images are generally correlated through displacement of scene objects. Efficient compression techniques have to exploit this correlation in order to efficiently communicate the 3D scene information. Instead of joint encoding that requires communication between the cameras, in this thesis we concentrate on distributed representation, where the captured images are encoded independently, but decoded jointly to exploit the correlation between images. One of the most important and challenging tasks relies in estimation of the underlying correlation from the compressed correlated images for effective reconstruction or analysis in the joint decoder. This thesis focuses on developing efficient ...