Exploiting context information to aid landmark detection in SenseCam images

In this paper, we describe an approach designed to exploit context information in order to aid the detection of landmark images from a large collection of photographs. The photographs were generated using Microsoft’s SenseCam, a device designed to passively record a visual diary and cover a typical day of the user wearing the camera. The proliferation of digital photos along with the associated problems of managing and organising these collections provide the background motivation for this work. We believe more ubiquitious cameras, such as SenseCam, will become the norm in the future and the management of the volume of data generated by such devices is a key issue. The goal of the work reported here is to use context information to assist in the detection of landmark images or sequences of images from the thousands of photos taken daily by SenseCam. We will achieve this by analysing the images using low-level MPEG-7 features along with metadata provided by SenseCam, followed by simple clustering to identify the landmark images

Coherent segmentation of video into syntactic regions

In this paper we report on our work in realising an approach to video shot matching which involves automatically segmenting video into abstract intertwinded shapes in such a way that there is temporal coherency. These shapes representing approximations of objects and background regions can then be matched giving fine-grained shot-shot matching. The main contributions of the paper are firstly the extension of our segmentation algorithm for still images to spatial segmentation in video, and secondly the introduction a measurement of temporal coherency of the spatial segmentation. This latter allows us to quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real video data

Analysis of CcDREB1D promoter region from drought-tolerant and susceptible clones of Coffea canephora by homologous genetic transformation of Coffea arabica

In several plant species, the DREB genes play a key role in responses to abiotic stress. Since the development of molecular markers is one of the major goals for accelerating breeding programs, a study was done to evaluate the sequence variability of the DREBID gene in several Coffee genotypes. The promoter and coding regions of DREBID gene were cloned and sequenced from 16 coffee plants (10 from C. arabica and 4 from C. canephora), most of them characterized by different phenotypes (tolerance vs. susceptibility) regarding to drought. This showed a high conservation of DREB1 D proteins among the homologous sequences due to the low level of diversity and the high number of synonymous mutations and neutral changes which represents the majority of sequence variations. However, several nucleic polymorphisms ("single nucleotide polymorphism" and insertion/deletion [InDels]) were found in the coffee DREBID promoters. A comparison of predicted cis-acting elements for all the promoter sequences signaled the loss of some regulatory DNA elements. The sequence variation and the loss of some regulatory DNA elements could explain the differences of DREBID gene expression previously observed in leaves of drought tolerant (clone 14) and susceptible (clone 22) clones of C. canephora. In fact, both clones 14 and 22, have one same CcDREBID allelic sequence (hp15), and diverge at a second allele. Thus, the CcDREBID allele in the tolerant 14 (hp16) was considered to be the favorable/tolerant allele and the allele in 22 (hp17) was inferior/sensitive. The capacity of CcDREBID promoter to control the expression of the uidA reporter gene is under evaluation in transgenic plants of Coffee arabica cv. caturra stably transformed by Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated gene transfer procedure. Caturra transgenic embryos were placed on a clean bench and subjected to dehydration tests. Preliminary results of bioassays checking GUS (/3-glucuronidase) activities indicate that the observed sequence variations have a direct role in the regulation of CcDREBID expression. The proximal promoter of CcDREBID for the three alleles tested (hp15, hp16 and hp17) equally induced the uidA gene expression, however, expression of uidA under control of the complete CcDREBID promoter was significantly induced in the tolerant allele (hp16) in response to the osmotic stress, whereas, it was not significantly upregulated for the common (hp15) and sensitive alleles (hp17). These results also evidence that the sequence variation present at the first -700 by of CcDREBID promoter do not interfere the regulation activity of the promoter, probably due to the non-overlapping of SNPs and cis-regulatory elements. Though, the higher sequence variation and co-occurrence of SNPs and cis-regulatory elements observed between -700 and -1500 by seems to affect the regulation of CcDREBID promoter in response to drought stress.Support: CAPES COFECUB, INCT-Café, CNPq and ConsOrcio Pesquisa Café. (Texte intégral

Rushes video summarization using a collaborative approach

This paper describes the video summarization system developed by the partners of the K-Space European Network of Excellence for the TRECVID 2008 BBC rushes summarization evaluation. We propose an original method based on individual content segmentation and selection tools in a collaborative system. Our system is organized in several steps. First, we segment the video, secondly we identify relevant and redundant segments, and finally, we select a subset of segments to concatenate and build the final summary with video acceleration incorporated. We analyze the performance of our system through the TRECVID evaluation

Físchlár-TRECVid2004: Combined text- and image-based searching of video archives

The Fischlar-TRECVid-2004 system was developed for Dublin City University's participation in the 2004 TRECVid video information retrieval benchmarking activity. The system allows search and retrieval of video shots from over 60 hours of content. The shot retrieval engine employed is based on a combination of query text matched against spoken dialogue combined with image-image matching where a still image (sourced externally), or a keyframe (from within the video archive itself), is matched against all keyframes in the video archive. Three separate text retrieval engines are employed for closed caption text, automatic speech recognition and video OCR. Visual shot matching is primarily based on MPEG-7 low-level descriptors. The system supports relevance feedback at the shot level enabling augmentation and refinement using relevant shots located by the user. Two variants of the system were developed, one that supports both text- and image-based searching and one that supports image only search. A user evaluation experiment compared the use of the two systems. Results show that while the system combining text- and image-based searching achieves greater retrieval effectiveness, users make more varied and extensive queries with the image only based searching version

Seroprevalence and risk factors for Neospora caninum in small dairy farms in central Chile

Indexación: Scopus.Objetivos. Proveer información sobre la seroprevalencia y factores de riesgo asociados a la infección por Neospora caninum en bovinos en Chile central. Materiales y métodos. La población estudiada corresponde a pequeñas lecherías que son parte de un programa gubernamental de Asistencia Técnica (SAT), en la región de O´Higgins en Chile central. Muestras de suero fueron recolectadas desde vacas en lactancia y analizadas mediante un kit comercial ELISA. Además, se aplicó un cuestionario a los dueños de los animales para la identificación de factores de riesgo a través de regresión logística. Resultados. Se identificó una prevalencia a nivel de granja del 67%, mientras que dentro de las granjas positivas, esta fue en promedio de 55%. El historial de abortos (p= 0.037, OR=5.09), la fuente de alimentación de perros (p= 0.0429, OR=6), la fuente de agua de bebida de las vacas (p=0.034, OR=4.5) y el manejo de los abortos (p=0.017, OR=7.43) fueron identificados como factores de riesgo para la infección. Conclusiones. Se observa una alta seroprevalencia de N. caninum en pequeños productores lecheros pertenecientes al SAT en Chile central. Los resultados presentados resaltan la necesidad de mejorar las acciones de vigilancia de esta enfermedad y el desarrollo de medidas preventivas para evitar las pérdidas asociadas a esta enfermedad.Objective. To provide information about seroprevalence and risk factors of Neospora caninum infection in bovines of central Chile. Material and Methods. The study population are small dairy farms that are part of a Government Technical Support Service (SAT) in the O'Higgins region in central Chile. Sera samples were collected from milking cows and analyzed by a commercial ELISA kit. Additionally, a questionnaire was applied to farmers to identify risk factors through logistic regression. Results. The farm level prevalence was found to be 67%, and within farms seroprevalence 55%. Abortion history (p= 0.037, OR=5.09), dogs feed source (p= 0.0429, OR=6), cattle drinking water source (p=0.034, OR=4.5) and abortions management (p=0.017, OR=7.43) were found as significant risk factors for infection. Conclusion. There is a high N. caninum seroprevalence in small SAT's dairy farms in O'Higgins region. These results highlight the need of improving N. caninum surveillance, and the development of preventive measures to avoid losses related with this disease.http://revistas.unicordoba.edu.co/index.php/revistamvz/article/view/92

TRECVID 2004 experiments in Dublin City University

In this paper, we describe our experiments for TRECVID 2004 for the Search task. In the interactive search task, we developed two versions of a video search/browse system based on the Físchlár Digital Video System: one with text- and image-based searching (System A); the other with only image (System B). These two systems produced eight interactive runs. In addition we submitted ten fully automatic supplemental runs and two manual runs. A.1, Submitted Runs: • DCUTREC13a_{1,3,5,7} for System A, four interactive runs based on text and image evidence. • DCUTREC13b_{2,4,6,8} for System B, also four interactive runs based on image evidence alone. • DCUTV2004_9, a manual run based on filtering faces from an underlying text search engine for certain queries. • DCUTV2004_10, a manual run based on manually generated queries processed automatically. • DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, seven fully automatic runs based on language models operating over ASR text transcripts and visual features. • DCUauto_{01,02,03}, three fully automatic runs based on exploring the benefits of multiple sources of text evidence and automatic query expansion. A.2, In the interactive experiment it was confirmed that text and image based retrieval outperforms an image-only system. In the fully automatic runs, DCUauto_{01,02,03}, it was found that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the text ranking outperforms using ASR text alone. Furthermore, applying automatic query expansion to the initial results of ASR, CC, OCR text further increases performance (MAP), though not at high rank positions. For the language model-based fully automatic runs, DCU_AUTOLM{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, we found that interpolated language models perform marginally better than other tested language models and that combining image and textual (ASR) evidence was found to marginally increase performance (MAP) over textual models alone. For our two manual runs we found that employing a face filter disimproved MAP when compared to employing textual evidence alone and that manually generated textual queries improved MAP over fully automatic runs, though the improvement was marginal. A.3, Our conclusions from our fully automatic text based runs suggest that integrating ASR, CC and OCR text into the retrieval mechanism boost retrieval performance over ASR alone. In addition, a text-only Language Modelling approach such as DCU_AUTOLM1 will outperform our best conventional text search system. From our interactive runs we conclude that textual evidence is an important lever for locating relevant content quickly, but that image evidence, if used by experienced users can aid retrieval performance. A.4, We learned that incorporating multiple text sources improves over ASR alone and that an LM approach which integrates shot text, neighbouring shots and entire video contents provides even better retrieval performance. These findings will influence how we integrate textual evidence into future Video IR systems. It was also found that a system based on image evidence alone can perform reasonably and given good query images can aid retrieval performance

Uma análise dos efeitos da crise económico-financeira sobre as políticas de incentivo às energias renováveis

Hervé Alan, Robert-Cuendet Sabrina, El Boudouhi Saïda. Les rapports des groupes spéciaux et de l’organe d’appel de l’O.M.C. (2013). In: Annuaire français de droit international, volume 59, 2013. pp. 487-507