Carlos M. Travieso

Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Miguel A. Ferrer-Ballester, Carlos M. Travieso-González et al.

This paper presents a biometric recognition system based on hand geometry. We describe a database specially collected for research purposes, which consists of 50 people and 10 different acquisitions of the right hand. This database can be freely downloaded. In addition, we describe a feature extraction procedure and we obtain experimental results using different classification strategies based on Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLP). We have evaluated identification rates and Detection Cost Function (DCF) values for verification applications. Experimental results reveal up to 100% identification and 0% DCF

Martin Kolarik, Radim Burget, Carlos M. Travieso-Gonzalez et al.

We present a novel approach of 2D to 3D transfer learning based on mapping pre-trained 2D convolutional neural network weights into planar 3D kernels. The method is validated by the proposed planar 3D res-u-net network with encoder transferred from the 2D VGG-16, which is applied for a single-stage unbalanced 3D image data segmentation. In particular, we evaluate the method on the MICCAI 2016 MS lesion segmentation challenge dataset utilizing solely fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequence without brain extraction for training and inference to simulate real medical praxis. The planar 3D res-u-net network performed the best both in sensitivity and Dice score amongst end to end methods processing raw MRI scans and achieved comparable Dice score to a state-of-the-art unimodal not end to end approach. Complete source code was released under the open-source license, and this paper complies with the Machine learning reproducibility checklist. By implementing practical transfer learning for 3D data representation, we could segment heavily unbalanced data without selective sampling and achieved more reliable results using less training data in a single modality. From a medical perspective, the unimodal approach gives an advantage in real praxis as it does not require co-registration nor additional scanning time during an examination. Although modern medical imaging methods capture high-resolution 3D anatomy scans suitable for computer-aided detection system processing, deployment of automatic systems for interpretation of radiology imaging is still rather theoretical in many medical areas. Our work aims to bridge the gap by offering a solution for partial research questions.

C. González, N. Ayobi, I. Hernández et al.

This paper proposes Panoptic Narrative Grounding, a spatially fine and general formulation of the natural language visual grounding problem. We establish an experimental framework for the study of this new task, including new ground truth and metrics, and we propose a strong baseline method to serve as stepping stone for future work. We exploit the intrinsic semantic richness in an image by including panoptic categories, and we approach visual grounding at a fine-grained level by using segmentations. In terms of ground truth, we propose an algorithm to automatically transfer Localized Narratives annotations to specific regions in the panoptic segmentations of the MS COCO dataset. To guarantee the quality of our annotations, we take advantage of the semantic structure contained in WordNet to exclusively incorporate noun phrases that are grounded to a meaningfully related panoptic segmentation region. The proposed baseline achieves a performance of 55.4 absolute Average Recall points. This result is a suitable foundation to push the envelope further in the development of methods for Panoptic Narrative Grounding.

Carlos Gonzalez, Victor Barasuol, Marco Frigerio et al.

The ability of legged systems to traverse highly-constrained environments depends by and large on the performance of their motion and balance controllers. This paper presents a controller that excels in a scenario that most state-of-the-art balance controllers have not yet addressed: line walking, or walking on nearly null support regions. Our approach uses a low-dimensional virtual model (2-DoF) to generate balancing actions through a previously derived four-term balance controller and transforms them to the robot through a derived kinematic mapping. The capabilities of this controller are tested in simulation, where we show the 90kg quadruped robot HyQ crossing a bridge of only 6 cm width (compared to its 4 cm diameter spherical foot), by balancing on two feet at any time while moving along a line. Lastly, we present our preliminary experimental results showing HyQ balancing on two legs while being disturbed.