Figure Text Extraction in Biomedical Literature

Background: Figures are ubiquitous in biomedical full-text articles, and they represent important biomedical knowledge. However, the sheer volume of biomedical publications has made it necessary to develop computational approaches for accessing figures. Therefore, we are developing the Biomedical Figure Search engin

Use of reconstructed skin model to assess the photoprotection afforded by three sunscreen products having different SPF values against DNA lesions and cellular alterations

Introduction: Both UVB and UVA rays induce biological damages in the epidermis and the dermis that contribute to photo-carcinogenesis and photoaging. In the present study, the photoprotective effect of 2 ISO standard sunscreens, P3 (Sun Protection Factor [SPF]15) and P6 (SPF40) and of an SPF50+ labeled commercial sunscreen product was tested in reconstructed skin tissues exposed to increasing doses of UV Solar Simulated Radiation (UV-SSR). UV-induced damages were evaluated using several biological markers, including DNA lesions in the presence or absence of sunscreen protection. Method: T-Skin™ model samples (EPISKIN), composed of a fibroblast-populated dermal equivalent and a fully differentiated epidermis, were protected with the test sunscreens (1.3 mg/cm² topically applied on molded polymethyl methacrylate plate) before being exposed to increasing UV doses (0 – 2.5 – 5 - 25 – 40 J/cm²). Twenty-four hours after exposure, tissues with and without sunscreen protection, were analyzed for skin viability and morphology, DNA lesions (cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer) and inflammatory mediator quantification. Results were compared to untreated exposed tissues using a Wilcoxon non-parametric test. Results: For untreated tissues, UV-SSR exposure induced a dose-dependent decrease in epidermal and dermal viabilities, an increase in release of proinflammatory cytokines and matrix metalloproteinases and were associated with morphological damages at doses as low as 5 J/cm2. DNA lesions were even detected at the lowest dose of 2.5 J/cm2, and their number increased with the UV-SSR dose. In the samples protected with sunscreens, these abnormalities were partially or totally prevented with P6 providing a better protection compared to P3, and the SPF50+ sunscreen showing a trend for better protection than P6, for example against DNA damage. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that photoprotective effects of different sunscreens can be discriminated and ranked on reconstructed skin tissues (T-Skin™ model) exposed to UV-SSR. Showing significant differences between the reference products P3 and P6 in line with their respective SPF values, such study allows the evaluation of epidermal and dermal damages at the tissue, cellular and molecular levels. It thus opens the way to a new model of integrated assessment of sunscreens. In line with its labeled 50+ SPF, the commercial test product confirmed its improved protection especially on DNA damage prevention

A Multifunctional Reading Assistant for the Visually Impaired

<p/> <p>In the growing market of camera phones, new applications for the visually impaired are nowadays being developed thanks to the increasing capabilities of these equipments. The need to access to text is of primary importance for those people in a society driven by information. To meet this need, our project objective was to develop a multifunctional reading assistant for blind community. The main functionality is the recognition of text in mobile situations but the system can also deal with several specific recognition requests such as banknotes or objects through labels. In this paper, the major challenge is to fully meet user requirements taking into account their disability and some limitations of hardware such as poor resolution, blur, and uneven lighting. For these applications, it is necessary to take a satisfactory picture, which may be challenging for some users. Hence, this point has also been considered by proposing a training tutorial based on image processing methods as well. Developed in a user-centered design, text reading applications are described along with detailed results performed on databases mostly acquired by visually impaired users.</p

Coaching - Theorie & Praxis

CAPTCHA is a standard defence mechanism against bots, or automated programs, that attempt to use web-based services meant for human users. While there are many different types of CAPTCHA schemes that have emerged over the years, to date, the most widely used type is 2D text-based CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately, a large number of 2D CAPTCHA schemes have been successfully broken. Thus, 3D-based CAPTCHAs are seen as an alternative paradigm which has been explored by a number of CAPTCHA designers. 3D CAPTCHAs are meant to overcome the limitations of 2D CAPTCHAs and are supposed to be more robust and secure against automated attacks. To investigate the robustness of 3D text-based CAPTCHAs, this paper presents an approach to breaking a representative 3D CAPTCHA scheme called Teabag 3D. In particular, this paper describes the techniques that were used to break this CAPTCHA, and as such highlights various security issues that have to be considered in order to design better 3D CAPTCHA schemes

A Rarity-Based Visual Attention Map - Application to Texture Description

This paper describes a simple and "pre-cortical" visual attention model, which does not take image directions into account. We compute rarity-based saliency maps and then we describe the relation between texture and visual attention. Finally we decompose the image into several textures with different regularities. Our purpose is to compress textures into images using small repeating pattern

Hierarchical text detection: From word level to character level

Conference Name:19th International Conference on Advances in Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2013. Conference Address: Huangshan, China. Time:January 7, 2013 - January 9, 2013.Hefei University of Technology; National Natural Foundation of China; Beijing Ricoh Research Center; Microsoft Research Asia; FX Palo Alto LaboratoryText detection is a challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on English text detection in a natural scene image. We propose a hierarchical approach for text detection, which unifies the word-level text detection and character-level detection as well as the text spatial layout. In our approach, we firstly use stroke width transformation (SWT) to filter an image in a word level. Secondly, we employ the random forest to select discriminative features of characters and compute the confident values of characters. Finally, we use conditional random field to integrate the discriminative information with the text spatial layout, which separates the text from the background. The proposed approach is implemented on the ICDAR dataset, which is a challenging dataset for text detection, and the experiment results demonstrate that our approach is efficient and effective, and it is superior to the state-of-the- art methods in comprehensive criteria. ? Springer-Verlag 2013