Abstract
The increasing demand for human activity analysis in surveillance scenarios has been triggered by the emergence of new features and concepts to help in identifying activities of interest. However, the characterisation of individual and group behaviours is a topic not so well studied in the video surveillance community due to not only its intrinsic difficulty and large variety of topics involved, but also because of the lack of valid semantic concepts that relate human activity to social context. In this paper, we address the topic of social semantic meaning in a well-defined surveillance scenario, namely shopping mall, and propose new definitions of individual and group behaviour that consider environment context, a relational descriptor that emphasises position and attention-based characteristics, and a new classification approach based on mini-batches. We also present a wide evaluation process that analyses the sociological meaning of the individual features and outlines the performance impact of automatic features extraction processes into our classification framework. We verify the discriminative value of the selected features, state the descriptor performance and robustness over different stress conditions, confirm the advantage of the proposed mini-batch classification approach which obtains promising results, and outline future research lines to improve our novel social behavioural analysis framework.

Abstract
In many applications, false positives (type I error) and false negatives (type II) have different impact. In medicine, it is not considered as bad to falsely diagnosticate someone healthy as sick (false positive) as it is to diagnosticate someone sick as healthy (false negative). But we are also willing to accept some rate of false negatives errors in order to make the classification task possible at all. Where the line is drawn is subjective and prone to controversy. Usually, this compromise is given by a cost matrix where an exchange rate between errors is defined. For many reasons, however, it might not be natural to think of this trade-off in terms of relative costs. We explore novel learning paradigms where this trade-off can be given in the form of the amount of false negatives we are willing to tolerate. The classifier then tries to minimize false positives while keeping false negatives within the acceptable bound. Here we consider classifiers based on kernel density estimation, gradient descent modifications and applying a threshold to classifying and ranking scores.

Abstract
Despite the existence of patterns able to discriminate between consensual and non-consensual intercourse, the relevance of genital lesions in the corroboration of a legal rape complaint is currently under debate in many countries. The testimony of the physicians when assessing these lesions has been questioned in court due to several factors (e.g. a lack of comprehensive knowledge of lesions, wide spectrum of background area, among others). Thereby, it is relevant to provide automated tools to support the decision process in an objective manner. In this work, we compare traditional handcrafted features and deep learning techniques in the automated processing of colposcopic images for genital injury detection. Positive results where achieved by both paradigms in segmentation and classification subtasks, being traditional and deep models the best strategy for each subtask type respectively.

Abstract

Abstract
Classification datasets, which feature a skewed class distribution, are said to be class imbalance. Traditional methods favor the larger classes. We propose pairwise ranking as a method for imbalance classification so that learning compares pairs of observations from each class, and therefore both contribute equally to the decision boundary. In previous work, we suggested treating the binary classification as a ranking problem, followed by a threshold mapping to convert back the ranking score to the original classes. In this work, the method is extended to multi-class ordinal classification, and a new mapping threshold is proposed. Results are compared with traditional and ordinal SVMs, and ranking obtains competitive results.

Abstract
Microscopy examination has been the pillar of malaria diagnosis, being the recommended procedure when its quality can be maintained. However, the need for trained personnel and adequate equipment limits its availability and accessibility in malaria-endemic areas. Rapid, accurate, accessible diagnostic tools are increasingly required, as malaria control programs extend parasite-based diagnosis and the prevalence decreases. This paper presents an image processing and analysis methodology using supervised classification to assess the presence of malaria parasites and determine the species and life cycle stage in Giemsa-stained thin blood smears. The main differentiation factor is the usage of microscopic images exclusively acquired with low cost and accessible tools such as smartphones, a dataset of 566 images manually annotated by an experienced parasilogist being used. Eight different species-stage combinations were considered in this work, with an automatic detection performance ranging from 73.9% to 96.2% in terms of sensitivity and from 92.6% to 99.3% in terms of specificity. These promising results attest to the potential of using this approach as a valid alternative to conventional microscopy examination, with comparable detection performances and acceptable computational times.