Abstract
The extraction of morphometric features from images of biological structures is a crucial task for the study of several diseases. Particularly, concerning neuropathies, the state of the myelination process is vital for neuronal integrity and may be an indicator of the disease type and state. Few approaches exist to automatically analyse nerve morphometry and assist researchers in this time consuming task. The aim of this work is to develop an algorithm to detect axons and myelin contours in myelinated fibres of sciatic nerve images, thus allowing the automated assessment and quantification of myelination through the measurement of the g-ratio. The application of a directional gradient together with an active contour algorithm was able to effectively and accurately determine the degree of myelination in an imagiological dataset of sciatic nerves. It was obtained an average error of 1.80%, in comparison with the manual annotation performed by the specialist in all dataset.

Abstract
The increasing incidence of melanoma has recently promoted the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems for the classification of dermoscopic images. Unfortunately, the performance of such systems cannot be compared since they are evaluated in different sets of images by their authors and there are no public databases available to perform a fair evaluation of multiple systems. In this paper, a dermoscopic image database, called PH2, is presented. The PH2 database includes the manual segmentation, the clinical diagnosis, and the identification of several dermoscopic structures, performed by expert dermatologists, in a set of 200 dermoscopic images. The PH2 database will be made freely available for research and benchmarking purposes.

Abstract
Fingerprint segmentation is a crucial step of an automatic fingerprint identification system, since an accurate segmentation promote both the elimination of spurious minutiae close to the foreground boundaries and the reduction of the computation time of the following steps. In this paper, a new, and more robust fingerprint segmentation algorithm is proposed. The main novelty is the introduction of a more robust binarization process in the framework, mainly based on the fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate significant benchmark progress on three existing FVC datasets.

Abstract
Currently, there is a great interest in the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for dermoscopic images. The segmentation step is one of the most important ones, since its accuracy determines the eventual success or failure of a CAD system. In this paper, different kinds of algorithms for the automatic segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopic images were implemented and evaluated, namely automatic thresholding, k-means, mean-shift, region growing, gradient vector flow (GVF), and watershed. The segmentation methods were evaluated with three distinct metrics, using as ground truth a database of 50 images manually segmented by an expert dermatologist. Among the implemented segmentation approaches, the GVF snake method achieved the best segmentation performance.

Abstract

Abstract
Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has becoming one of the most important research areas in the field of human computer interaction. SLR systems are meant to automatically translate sign language into text or speech, in order to reduce the communicational gap between deaf and hearing people. The aim of this paper is to exploit multimodal learning techniques for an accurate SLR, making use of data provided by Kinect and Leap Motion. In this regard, single-modality approaches as well as different multimodal methods, mainly based on convolutional neural networks, are proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal learning yields an overall improvement in the sign recognition performance.