Cette dernière décennie, la modélisation des villes 3D est devenue l'un des enjeux de la recherche multimédia et un axe important en reconnaissance d'objets. Dans cette thèse nous nous sommes intéressés à localiser différentes primitives, plus particulièrement les fenêtres, dans les façades de Paris. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons une analyse des façades et des différentes propriétés des fenêtres. Nous en déduisons et proposons ensuite un algorithme capable d'extraire automatiquement des hypothèses de fenêtres. Dans une deuxième partie, nous abordons l'extraction et la reconnaissance des primitives à l'aide d'appariement de graphes de contours. En effet une image de contours est lisible par l'oeil humain qui effectue un groupement perceptuel et distingue les entités présentes dans la scène. C'est ce mécanisme que nous avons cherché à reproduire. L'image est représentée sous la forme d'un graphe d'adjacence de segments de contours, valué par des informations d'orientation et de proximité des segments de contours. Pour la mise en correspondance inexacte des graphes, nous proposons plusieurs variantes d'une nouvelle similarité basée sur des ensembles de chemins tracés sur les graphes, capables d'effectuer les groupements des contours et robustes aux changements d'échelle. La similarité entre chemins prend en compte la similarité des ensembles de segments de contours et la similarité des régions définies par ces chemins. La sélection des images d'une base contenant un objet particulier s'effectue à l'aide d'un classifieur SVM ou kppv. La localisation des objets dans l'image utilise un système de vote à partir des chemins sélectionnés par l'algorithme d'appariement. / This last decade, modeling of 3D city became one of the challenges of multimedia search and an important focus in object recognition. In this thesis we are interested to locate various primitive, especially the windows, in the facades of Paris. At first, we present an analysis of the facades and windows properties. Then we propose an algorithm able to extract automatically window candidates. In a second part, we discuss about extraction and recognition primitives using graph matching of contours. Indeed an image of contours is readable by the human eye, which uses perceptual grouping and makes distinction between entities present in the scene. It is this mechanism that we have tried to replicate. The image is represented as a graph of adjacency of segments of contours, valued by information orientation and proximity to edge segments. For the inexact matching of graphs, we propose several variants of a new similarity based on sets of paths, able to group several contours and robust to scale changes. The similarity between paths takes into account the similarity of sets of segments of contours and the similarity of the regions defined by these paths. The selection of images from a database containing a particular object is done using a KNN or SVM classifier.

Les réseaux complexes constituent un outil pratique pour modéliser les systèmes complexes réels. Pour cette raison, ils sont devenus très populaires au cours de la dernière décennie. De nombreux outils existent pour étudier les réseaux complexes. Parmi ceux-ci, la détection de la communauté est l’un des plus importants. Une communauté est grossièrement définie comme un groupe de nœuds plus densément connectés entre eux qu’avec le reste du réseau. Dans la littérature, cette définition intuitive a été formalisée de plusieurs différentes façons, ce qui a conduit à d’innombrables méthodes et variantes permettant de les détecter. Du point de vue applicatif, le sens des communautés est aussi important que leur détection. Cependant, bien que la tâche de détection de communautés en elle-même ait attiré énormément d’attention, le problème de leur interprétation n’a pas été sérieusement abordé jusqu’à présent. Dans cette thèse, nous voyons l’interprétation des communautés comme un problème indépendant du processus de leur détection, consistant à identifier les éléments leurs caractéristiques les plus typiques. Nous le décomposons en deux sous-problèmes : 1) trouver un moyen approprié pour représenter une communauté ; et 2) sélectionner de façon objective les parties les plus caractéristiques de cette représentation. Pour résoudre ces deux sous-problèmes, nous exploitons l’information encodée dans les réseaux dynamiques attribués. Nous proposons une nouvelle représentation des communautés sous la forme de séquences temporelles de descripteurs associés à chaque nœud individuellement. Ces descripteurs peuvent être des mesures topologiques et des attributs nodaux. Nous détectons ensuite les motifs séquentiels émergents dans cet ensemble de données, afin d’identifier les ceux qui sont les plus caractéristiques de la communauté. Nous effectuons une validation de notre procédé sur des réseaux attribués dynamiques générés artificiellement. A cette occasion, nous étudions son comportement relativement à des changements structurels de la structure de communautés, à des modifications des valeurs des attributs. Nous appliquons également notre procédé à deux systèmes du monde réel : un réseau de collaborations scientifiques issu de DBLP, et un réseau d’interactions sociales et musicales tiré du service LastFM. Nos résultats montrent que les communautés détectées ne sont pas complètement homogènes. Certaines communautés sont composées de petits groupes de nœuds qui ont tendance à évoluer ensemble au cours du temps, que ce soit en termes de propriétés individuelles ou collectives. Les anomalies détectées correspondent généralement à des profils typiques : nœuds mal placés par l’outil de détection de communautés, ou nœuds différant des tendances de leur communautés sur certains points, et/ou non-synchrones avec l’évolution de leur communauté, ou encore nœuds complètement différents. / Complex Networks constitute a convenient tool to model real-world complex systems. For this reason, they have become very popular in the last decade. Many tools exist to study complex networks. Among them, community detection is one of the most important. A community is roughly defined as a group of nodes more connected internally than to the rest of the network. In the literature, this intuitive definition has been formalized in many ways, leading to countless different methods and variants to detect communities. In the large majority of cases, the result of these methods is set of node groups in which each node group corresponds to a community. From the applicative point of view, the meaning of these groups is as important as their detection. However, although the task of detecting communities in itself took a lot of attraction, the problem of interpreting them has not been properly tackled until now. In this thesis, we see the interpretation of communities as a problem independent from the community detection process, consisting in identifying the most characteristic features of communities. We break it down into two sub-problems: 1) finding an appropriate way to represent a community and 2) objectively selecting the most characteristic parts of this representation. To solve them, we take advantage of the information encoded in dynamic attributed networks. We propose a new representation of communities under the form of temporal sequences of topological measures and attribute values associated to individual nodes. We then look for emergent sequential patterns in this dataset, in order to identify the most characteristic community features. We perform a validation of our framework on artificially generated dynamic attributed networks. At this occasion, we study its behavior relatively to changes in the temporal evolution of the communities, and to the distribution and evolution of nodal features. We also apply our framework to real-world systems: a DBLP network of scientific collaborations, and a LastFM network of social and musical interactions. Our results show that the detected communities are not completely homogeneous, in the sense several node topic or interests can be identified for a given community. Some communities are composed of smaller groups of nodes which tend to evolve together as time goes by, be it in terms of individual (attributes, topological measures) or relational (community migration) features. The detected anomalies generally fit some generic profiles: nodes misplaced by the community detection tool, nodes relatively similar to their communities, but also significantly different on certain features and/or not synchronized with their community evolution, and finally nodes with completely different interests.

Diversos problemas práticos envolvendo sistemas de visão computacional, tais como vigilância automatizada, pesquisas de conteúdo específico em bancos de dados multimídias ou edição de vídeo, requerem a localização e o reconhecimento de objetos dentro de seqüências de imagens ou vídeos digitais. Mais formalmente, denomina-se rastreamento o processo de determinação da posição de certo(s) objeto(s) ao longo do tempo numa seqüência de imagens. Já a tarefa de reconhecimento caracteriza-se pela classificação desses objetos de acordo com algum rótulo pré-estabelecido ou apoiada em conhecimento prévio tipicamente introduzido através de um modelo dos objetos de interesse. No entanto, rastrear e classificar objetos em vídeo digital são tarefas desafiadoras, tanto pelas dificuldades inerentes a esse tipo de elemento pictórico, quanto pelo variável grau de complexidade que os quadros sob análise podem apresentar. Este documento apresenta uma metodologia baseada em modelo para rastrear e reconhecer objetos em vídeo digital através de uma representação por grafos relacionais com atributos (ARGs). Tais estruturas surgiram dentro do paradigma de reconhecimento estrutural de padrões e têm se mostrado bastante flexíveis e poderosas para modelar problemas diversos, pois podem transmitir dados quantitativos, relacionais, estruturais e simbólicos. Como modelo e entrada são descritos através desses grafos, a questão de reconhecimento é interpretada como um problema de casamento inexato entre grafos, que consiste em mapear os vértices do ARG de entrada nos vértices do ARG modelo. Em seguida, é realizado o rastreamento dos objetos de acordo com uma transformação afim derivada de parâmetros obtidos da etapa de reconhecimento. Para validar a metodologia proposta, resultados sobre seqüências de imagens digitais, sintéticas e reais, são apresentados e discutidos. / Several practical problems involving computer vision systems, such as automated surveillance, content-based queries in multimedia databases or video editing require the location and recognition of objects within image sequences or digital video. More formally, the process of determining the position of certain objects in an image sequence throughout time is called tracking, whereas the recognition task is characterized by the classification of such objects according to pre-defined labels or a priori knowledge, typically introduced by means of a model of the target objects. However, tracking and recognition of objects in digital video are not simple tasks, either because of the inherent difficulties of such a pictorial element, or due to the variable level of complexity that the frames under consideration might present. This document presents a model-based methodology for tracking and recognizing objects represented by attributed relational graphs (ARGs) in digital video. These structures have arisen from the paradigm of structural pattern recognition and have proven to be very flexible and powerful for modeling various problems, as they can hold many sorts of data (e.g: quantitative, relational, structural and symbolic). Since both model and input data are described through these graphs, the recognition matter may be interpreted as an inexact graph matching problem, which consists in finding a correspondence between the set of vertices of the input ARG and that of the model ARG. In the next step, object tracking is performed according to an affine transform derived from parameters extracted from the recognition phase. To validate the proposed methodology, results obtained from real and synthetic digital image sequences are presented and discussed.

How distinct implicit and explicit motive systems differ has long been unclear. Schultheiss' (2001) information processing account of implicit motive arousal hypothesized that implicit motives respond to nonverbal stimuli to influence non-declarative measures of motivation and that explicit motives respond to verbal stimuli to influence declarative measures of motivation. Moreover, in individuals high in referential competence, i.e., with the ability to quickly translate non-verbal stimuli into a verbal representation, implicit motives are thought to respond to verbal stimuli and influence declarative measures of motivation and explicit motives are thought to respond to nonverbal stimuli and to influence non-declarative measures of motivation. The present study tested these hypotheses by assessing liking ratings as a declarative response format and an affective stroop task as a non-declarative response format using emotion words as verbal and emotional facial expressions as non-verbal stimuli. Individual power, affiliation, and achievement motive dispositions were assessed via the Picture Story Excercise for implicit motives and via questionnaires for explicit motives. Referential competence was assessed via a colour-naming/-reading task. I found that as expected explicit and implicit motives overall were not correlated across subjects. Moreover, implicit and explicit motives affected declarative and non-declarative responses for verbal and non-verbal stimuli. As predicted, however, implicit motives responded to verbal stimuli and influenced declarative responses more strongly for individuals high compared to those low in referential competence. Likewise, explicit motive effects were moderated by referential competence in some - but not all - of the predicted conditions. These results show that implicit and explicit motives can influence declarative and non-declarative responses to verbal and non-verbal stimuli. They support the hypothesis that referential processing is needed for implicit motives to respond to verbal stimuli and influence declarative response formats, and they partly support the hypothesis that referential processing plays a role for the influence of explicit motives. Results for explicit motives may suggest that new measures are needed to assess the referential competence to translate verbal stimuli into non-verbal representations. Overall, the findings provide support to the information processing account of implicit motive arousal by Schultheiss' (2001), suggesting that a non-verbal and non-declarative implicit motive system and a distinct verbal and declarative explicit motive system interact via referential processing, i.e., by translating information between representational formats. / Wie sich distinkte implizite und explizite Motivsysteme voneinander unterscheiden war lange unklar. Schultheiss' (2001) Informationsverarbeitungsansatz für implizite Motivanregung hat die Hypothese aufgestellt, dass implizite Motive auf nonverbale Reize reagieren um nicht-deklarative Motivationsmaße zu beeinflussen, und dass explizite Motive auf verbale Reize reagieren um deklarative Motivationsmaße zu beeinflussen. Zudem wird angenommen, dass in Individuen mit einer hohen referentiellen Kompetenz - d.h. mit der Fähigkeit nonverbale Reize schnell in eine verbale Repräsentation zu übersetzen - implizite Motive auf verbale Reize reagieren und deklarative Motivationsmaße beeinflussen, und explizite Motive auf nonverbale Reize reagieren um non-deklarative Motivationsmaße zu beeinflussen. Die aktuelle Studie hat diese Hypothesen getested indem sie Bewertungen zum individuellen Gefallen von Reizen als ein deklaratives Antwortformat und eine affektive Stroop-Aufgabe als ein nicht-deklaratives Antwortformat unter Verwendung von Emotionswörtern als verbale Reize und emotionalen Gesichtsausdrücken als nonverbalen Reizen gemessen hat. Individuelle Macht-, Anschluss-, und Leistungsmotivdispositionen wurden durch die Bildgeschichtenaufgabe für implizite Motive und durch Fragebögen für explizite Motive gemessen. Referentielle Kompetenz wurde durch eine Farb-Nennungs/-Lesen Aufgabe gemessen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass - wie erwartet - implizite und explizite Motive über Versuchspersonen hinweg nicht korreliert waren. Zudem zeigte sich insgesamt ein Einfluss von impliziten und expliziten Motiven auf deklarative und nicht-deklarative Antworten für verbale und nonverbale Reize. Wie vorhergesagt reagierten implizite Motive auf verbale Reize und beeinflussten deklarative Antworten stärker für Individuen mit einer hohen im Vergleich zu einer niedrigen referentiellen Kompetenz. Zudem wurden explizite Motiveffekte in einigen, aber nicht in allen vorhergesagten Bedingungen von referentieller Kompetenz moderiert. Diese Ergebnisse zeigen, dass implizite und explizite Motive deklarative und nicht-deklarative Antworten auf verbale und nonverbale Reize beeinflussen können. Sie unterstützen die Hypothese, dass referentielle Verarbeitung notwendig ist damit implizite Motive auf verbale Reize reagieren und deklarative Antworten beeinflussen können, und unterstützen teilweise die Hypothese, dass referentielle Verarbeitung eine Rolle für den Einfluss von expliziten Motiven spielt. Das Ergebnis für explizite Motive könnte Nahe legen, dass neue Maße notwendig sind um die referentielle Kompetenz zu messen um verbale Reize in nonverbale Repräsentationen zu übersetzen. Zusammengefasst bieten diese Befunde Unterstützung für den Informationsverarbeitungsansatz der impliziten Motivanregung von Schultheiss (2001), welcher vorschlägt, dass ein nonverbales und nicht-deklaratives implizites Motivsystem und ein distinktes verbales und deklaratives explizites Motivsystem miteinander durch referentielle Verarbeitung wechselwirken, d.h., indem Information zwischen repräsentationalen Formaten übersetzt wird.

Diversos problemas práticos envolvendo sistemas de visão computacional, tais como vigilância automatizada, pesquisas de conteúdo específico em bancos de dados multimídias ou edição de vídeo, requerem a localização e o reconhecimento de objetos dentro de seqüências de imagens ou vídeos digitais. Mais formalmente, denomina-se rastreamento o processo de determinação da posição de certo(s) objeto(s) ao longo do tempo numa seqüência de imagens. Já a tarefa de reconhecimento caracteriza-se pela classificação desses objetos de acordo com algum rótulo pré-estabelecido ou apoiada em conhecimento prévio tipicamente introduzido através de um modelo dos objetos de interesse. No entanto, rastrear e classificar objetos em vídeo digital são tarefas desafiadoras, tanto pelas dificuldades inerentes a esse tipo de elemento pictórico, quanto pelo variável grau de complexidade que os quadros sob análise podem apresentar. Este documento apresenta uma metodologia baseada em modelo para rastrear e reconhecer objetos em vídeo digital através de uma representação por grafos relacionais com atributos (ARGs). Tais estruturas surgiram dentro do paradigma de reconhecimento estrutural de padrões e têm se mostrado bastante flexíveis e poderosas para modelar problemas diversos, pois podem transmitir dados quantitativos, relacionais, estruturais e simbólicos. Como modelo e entrada são descritos através desses grafos, a questão de reconhecimento é interpretada como um problema de casamento inexato entre grafos, que consiste em mapear os vértices do ARG de entrada nos vértices do ARG modelo. Em seguida, é realizado o rastreamento dos objetos de acordo com uma transformação afim derivada de parâmetros obtidos da etapa de reconhecimento. Para validar a metodologia proposta, resultados sobre seqüências de imagens digitais, sintéticas e reais, são apresentados e discutidos. / Several practical problems involving computer vision systems, such as automated surveillance, content-based queries in multimedia databases or video editing require the location and recognition of objects within image sequences or digital video. More formally, the process of determining the position of certain objects in an image sequence throughout time is called tracking, whereas the recognition task is characterized by the classification of such objects according to pre-defined labels or a priori knowledge, typically introduced by means of a model of the target objects. However, tracking and recognition of objects in digital video are not simple tasks, either because of the inherent difficulties of such a pictorial element, or due to the variable level of complexity that the frames under consideration might present. This document presents a model-based methodology for tracking and recognizing objects represented by attributed relational graphs (ARGs) in digital video. These structures have arisen from the paradigm of structural pattern recognition and have proven to be very flexible and powerful for modeling various problems, as they can hold many sorts of data (e.g: quantitative, relational, structural and symbolic). Since both model and input data are described through these graphs, the recognition matter may be interpreted as an inexact graph matching problem, which consists in finding a correspondence between the set of vertices of the input ARG and that of the model ARG. In the next step, object tracking is performed according to an affine transform derived from parameters extracted from the recognition phase. To validate the proposed methodology, results obtained from real and synthetic digital image sequences are presented and discussed.

A análise de redes sociais permite estudar a maneira como são estabelecidas as conexões entre indivíduos e como estas evoluem ao longo do tempo. A coautoria é uma das formas mais estudadas e bem documentadas de colaboração científica. Existem muitos aspectos de redes de colaboração científica, os quais podem ser rastreados de forma confiável através da análise de redes de colaboração usando métodos bibliométricos. Diversos esforços em diferentes áreas de pesquisa tentam analisar, entender, explicar e predizer o comportamento de sistemas modelados através de redes sociais. Nestes estudos, os indivíduos são modelados como vértices de um grafo, enquanto as relações entre eles são representadas por arestas. Atualmente, o estudo de redes de colaboração científica é importante e necessário para apoiar o planejamento estratégico, implementação e gestão dos programas de pesquisa científica. Neste trabalho, apresentamos um modelo de análise de redes científicas baseado em Grafos Relacionais com Atributos (ARG). O modelo proposto permite representar as redes de colaboração científica incluindo atributos individuais dos pesquisadores e atributos dos trabalhos colaborativos de pares de pesquisadores. Os dados correspondem às produções científicas de pesquisadores cadastrados na plataforma Lattes e extraídas automaticamente usando a ferramenta scriptLattes. Na primeira etapa, foi implementado o cálculo automatizado da taxa de internacionalização de cada pesquisador, a qual mostra a proporção entre o número de publicações internacionais e o número total de publicações. Esta medida junto com a produção científica individual discretizada em diversos grupos fazem parte das informações armazenadas nos vetores de atributos dos vértice dos ARGs. Por outro lado os vetores de atributos das arestas armazenam informações dos trabalhos colaborativos discretizados segundo a classificação da CAPES. Adicionalmente, neste trabalho foram exploradas duas aplicações relacionadas à (i) predição de trabalhos colaborativos futuros e à (ii) influência dos pesquisadores na rede de colaboração. O resultado da predição de vínculos foi usado para determinar a influência dos pesquisadores na redes de colaboração. A influência tem sido explorada com base na variação da predição de ligações com a presença ou a ausência do pesquisador na rede. Nossa proposta foi avaliada considerando diferentes testes sobre redes de coautoria científica de diversos grupos de pesquisadores. Os resultados obtidos são promissores para a análise de redes sociais em geral. / The social network analysis allows the study of how the relationships are established between individuals and how their are evolving with the time. The co-authorship is one of the most studied and documented scientific collaboration. There are some aspects which could be traced in a reliable way through the social network analysis using bibliometric methods. There are several proposals in different research areas trying to analyse, understand, explain and predict the behaviour of systems modeled as social networks. In this study, the individuals are modeled as vertices of a graph, while the relationships between them are represented by edges. Currently the study of scientific collaboration networks is important and necessary to support the strategic planning, implementation and management of scientific research programs. In this work, we present an scientific networks analysis model based on Attributed Relational Graphs (ARG). The proposed model allows to represent the scientific collaboration networks including individual attributes of researchers and attributes of the collaborative work of researchers pairs. The data correspond to the scientific production of researchers, registered in the Lattes Platform and automatically extracted using the tool scriptLattes \\citep{Mena-Chalco:2009}. In the first step, was implemented the automated computation of the internationalization rate for each researcher, that shows the ratio between the number of international publications and the total number of publications. This measure together with the individual scientific production discretized in diverse groups form part of the information stored in the vertices of the ARGs. On the other hand, the edges store information of collaborative work discretized according to the CAPES classification. Additionally, this work explores two related applications (i) prediction of future collaborative work and (ii) influence of researchers in collaboration network. The result of the link prediction was used to determine the influence of researchers in collaborative networks. The influence in collaboration network is computed based on the variation of the link prediction with the presence or absence of the researcher in the network. Our proposal was evaluated with different real scientific co-authorship networks and with different research groups. The results obtained look promising for analyzing social networks in general.

Esta tese de doutorado aborda os tópicos de modelagem e de reconhecimento de objetos estruturados, ou sistemas estruturados de objetos, em imagens. Um objeto ou sistema estruturado é aquele que pode ser descrito através de elementos primitivos que o compõem e pelas relações existentes entre esses elementos. Por exemplo, uma aeronave pode ser descrita pelos seguintes elementos primitivos: asas direita e esquerda, fuselagem e cockpit. O aspecto relacional de um objeto estruturado direciona sua representação computacional e seu reconhecimento em imagens ao paradigma estrutural de reconhecimento de padrões. Contudo, a variabilidade das características dos seus elementos primitivos é melhor representada através do paradigma estatístico de reconhecimento de padrões. Devido à complementaridade dos paradigmas, a conjunção dessas abordagens é um tema de pesquisa de interesse atual. Para conjugar esses dois aspectos, esta tese propôs uma metodologia que combina o conhecimento a priori das relações que caracterizam um objeto estruturado com dados estatísticos coletados de amostras desse objeto, num modelo híbrido denominado grafo estatístico-relacional (GER). Segundo essa representação, foi estudada uma abordagem probabilística para reconhecer um objeto estruturado em imagens. Nesse cenário, o GER modelo é considerado uma variável aleatória, enquanto uma rotulação de uma imagem de entrada é interpretada como uma potencial observação do modelo. A tarefa de reconhecimento foi então formulada como um problema de otimização, que busca maximizar a probabilidade da observação de acordo com o modelo. O método foi aplicado à modelagem de órgãos abdominais em imagens de ressonância magnética não-contrastadas. Esses órgãos apresentam um arranjo espacial consistente em imagens distintas, além de propriedades de aparência e anatômicas variáveis, o que vem ao encontro da proposta da representação por GER e da abordagem probabilística para o reconhecimento dos órgãos em novas imagens. / The purpose of this thesis was to propose a formalism for the problems of modeling and recognition of a structured object, or a system of structured objects, in images. A structured object is one that may be described in terms of its compound primitive elements and their inherent relations. For instance, an aircraft may be described in terms of the following primitives: right and left wings, fuselage, and cockpit. The relational aspect of structured objects leads these problems to solutions in structural pattern recognition, which describes patterns as primitives and relations. Nevertheless, the variability of primitive elements and of their relations is better modeled by traditional statistical pattern recognition methods. Because of the complementary capabilities of these approaches, the fusion of both has recently been pointed out as a trend in computer vision. To consider these sources of information, the methodology presented herein combines relational cues inherent to a structured object with statistical information learned from a set of object samples. A hybrid model of a structured object is represented by means of a statistical relational graph (SRG). The SRG is a prototype attributed relational graph (ARG) in which nodes represent primitive elements and arcs link nodes representing related primitives. Each node or arc is associated with attributes which are parameters of probability distributions that describe random variables representing primitive or relational attributes. Based on this representation, a probabilistic approach was proposed to tackle the problem of recognizing a structured object in an input image. The model SRG is interpreted as a random variable, whereas a labeling of the input image is considered a potential observation of the model. The recognition task was formulated as the optimization of an objective-function that is actually a probability measure to be maximized. The proposed approach was applied to the modeling of abdominal organs in non-contrasted magnetic resonance images. These organs present consistent spatial arrangement in distinct images, as well as varying appearance and anatomical properties, which meet the principle of the SRG representation and the associated probabilistic recognition scenario.

A análise de redes sociais permite estudar a maneira como são estabelecidas as conexões entre indivíduos e como estas evoluem ao longo do tempo. A coautoria é uma das formas mais estudadas e bem documentadas de colaboração científica. Existem muitos aspectos de redes de colaboração científica, os quais podem ser rastreados de forma confiável através da análise de redes de colaboração usando métodos bibliométricos. Diversos esforços em diferentes áreas de pesquisa tentam analisar, entender, explicar e predizer o comportamento de sistemas modelados através de redes sociais. Nestes estudos, os indivíduos são modelados como vértices de um grafo, enquanto as relações entre eles são representadas por arestas. Atualmente, o estudo de redes de colaboração científica é importante e necessário para apoiar o planejamento estratégico, implementação e gestão dos programas de pesquisa científica. Neste trabalho, apresentamos um modelo de análise de redes científicas baseado em Grafos Relacionais com Atributos (ARG). O modelo proposto permite representar as redes de colaboração científica incluindo atributos individuais dos pesquisadores e atributos dos trabalhos colaborativos de pares de pesquisadores. Os dados correspondem às produções científicas de pesquisadores cadastrados na plataforma Lattes e extraídas automaticamente usando a ferramenta scriptLattes. Na primeira etapa, foi implementado o cálculo automatizado da taxa de internacionalização de cada pesquisador, a qual mostra a proporção entre o número de publicações internacionais e o número total de publicações. Esta medida junto com a produção científica individual discretizada em diversos grupos fazem parte das informações armazenadas nos vetores de atributos dos vértice dos ARGs. Por outro lado os vetores de atributos das arestas armazenam informações dos trabalhos colaborativos discretizados segundo a classificação da CAPES. Adicionalmente, neste trabalho foram exploradas duas aplicações relacionadas à (i) predição de trabalhos colaborativos futuros e à (ii) influência dos pesquisadores na rede de colaboração. O resultado da predição de vínculos foi usado para determinar a influência dos pesquisadores na redes de colaboração. A influência tem sido explorada com base na variação da predição de ligações com a presença ou a ausência do pesquisador na rede. Nossa proposta foi avaliada considerando diferentes testes sobre redes de coautoria científica de diversos grupos de pesquisadores. Os resultados obtidos são promissores para a análise de redes sociais em geral. / The social network analysis allows the study of how the relationships are established between individuals and how their are evolving with the time. The co-authorship is one of the most studied and documented scientific collaboration. There are some aspects which could be traced in a reliable way through the social network analysis using bibliometric methods. There are several proposals in different research areas trying to analyse, understand, explain and predict the behaviour of systems modeled as social networks. In this study, the individuals are modeled as vertices of a graph, while the relationships between them are represented by edges. Currently the study of scientific collaboration networks is important and necessary to support the strategic planning, implementation and management of scientific research programs. In this work, we present an scientific networks analysis model based on Attributed Relational Graphs (ARG). The proposed model allows to represent the scientific collaboration networks including individual attributes of researchers and attributes of the collaborative work of researchers pairs. The data correspond to the scientific production of researchers, registered in the Lattes Platform and automatically extracted using the tool scriptLattes \\citep{Mena-Chalco:2009}. In the first step, was implemented the automated computation of the internationalization rate for each researcher, that shows the ratio between the number of international publications and the total number of publications. This measure together with the individual scientific production discretized in diverse groups form part of the information stored in the vertices of the ARGs. On the other hand, the edges store information of collaborative work discretized according to the CAPES classification. Additionally, this work explores two related applications (i) prediction of future collaborative work and (ii) influence of researchers in collaboration network. The result of the link prediction was used to determine the influence of researchers in collaborative networks. The influence in collaboration network is computed based on the variation of the link prediction with the presence or absence of the researcher in the network. Our proposal was evaluated with different real scientific co-authorship networks and with different research groups. The results obtained look promising for analyzing social networks in general.

Esta tese de doutorado aborda os tópicos de modelagem e de reconhecimento de objetos estruturados, ou sistemas estruturados de objetos, em imagens. Um objeto ou sistema estruturado é aquele que pode ser descrito através de elementos primitivos que o compõem e pelas relações existentes entre esses elementos. Por exemplo, uma aeronave pode ser descrita pelos seguintes elementos primitivos: asas direita e esquerda, fuselagem e cockpit. O aspecto relacional de um objeto estruturado direciona sua representação computacional e seu reconhecimento em imagens ao paradigma estrutural de reconhecimento de padrões. Contudo, a variabilidade das características dos seus elementos primitivos é melhor representada através do paradigma estatístico de reconhecimento de padrões. Devido à complementaridade dos paradigmas, a conjunção dessas abordagens é um tema de pesquisa de interesse atual. Para conjugar esses dois aspectos, esta tese propôs uma metodologia que combina o conhecimento a priori das relações que caracterizam um objeto estruturado com dados estatísticos coletados de amostras desse objeto, num modelo híbrido denominado grafo estatístico-relacional (GER). Segundo essa representação, foi estudada uma abordagem probabilística para reconhecer um objeto estruturado em imagens. Nesse cenário, o GER modelo é considerado uma variável aleatória, enquanto uma rotulação de uma imagem de entrada é interpretada como uma potencial observação do modelo. A tarefa de reconhecimento foi então formulada como um problema de otimização, que busca maximizar a probabilidade da observação de acordo com o modelo. O método foi aplicado à modelagem de órgãos abdominais em imagens de ressonância magnética não-contrastadas. Esses órgãos apresentam um arranjo espacial consistente em imagens distintas, além de propriedades de aparência e anatômicas variáveis, o que vem ao encontro da proposta da representação por GER e da abordagem probabilística para o reconhecimento dos órgãos em novas imagens. / The purpose of this thesis was to propose a formalism for the problems of modeling and recognition of a structured object, or a system of structured objects, in images. A structured object is one that may be described in terms of its compound primitive elements and their inherent relations. For instance, an aircraft may be described in terms of the following primitives: right and left wings, fuselage, and cockpit. The relational aspect of structured objects leads these problems to solutions in structural pattern recognition, which describes patterns as primitives and relations. Nevertheless, the variability of primitive elements and of their relations is better modeled by traditional statistical pattern recognition methods. Because of the complementary capabilities of these approaches, the fusion of both has recently been pointed out as a trend in computer vision. To consider these sources of information, the methodology presented herein combines relational cues inherent to a structured object with statistical information learned from a set of object samples. A hybrid model of a structured object is represented by means of a statistical relational graph (SRG). The SRG is a prototype attributed relational graph (ARG) in which nodes represent primitive elements and arcs link nodes representing related primitives. Each node or arc is associated with attributes which are parameters of probability distributions that describe random variables representing primitive or relational attributes. Based on this representation, a probabilistic approach was proposed to tackle the problem of recognizing a structured object in an input image. The model SRG is interpreted as a random variable, whereas a labeling of the input image is considered a potential observation of the model. The recognition task was formulated as the optimization of an objective-function that is actually a probability measure to be maximized. The proposed approach was applied to the modeling of abdominal organs in non-contrasted magnetic resonance images. These organs present consistent spatial arrangement in distinct images, as well as varying appearance and anatomical properties, which meet the principle of the SRG representation and the associated probabilistic recognition scenario.

Recently, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is getting a lot of attention mainly for two reasons. First, it is one of the most commonly found childhood behavioral disorders. Around 5-10% of the children all over the world are diagnosed with ADHD. Second, the root cause of the problem is still unknown and therefore no biological measure exists to diagnose ADHD. Instead, doctors need to diagnose it based on the clinical symptoms, such as inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity, which are all subjective. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data has become a popular tool to understand the functioning of the brain such as identifying the brain regions responsible for different cognitive tasks or analyzing the statistical differences of the brain functioning between the diseased and control subjects. ADHD is also being studied using the fMRI data. In this dissertation we aim to solve the problem of automatic diagnosis of the ADHD subjects using their resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data. As a core step of our approach, we model the functions of a brain as a connectivity network, which is expected to capture the information about how synchronous different brain regions are in terms of their functional activities. The network is constructed by representing different brain regions as the nodes where any two nodes of the network are connected by an edge if the correlation of the activity patterns of the two nodes is higher than some threshold. The brain regions, represented as the nodes of the network, can be selected at different granularities e.g. single voxels or cluster of functionally homogeneous voxels. The topological differences of the constructed networks of the ADHD and control group of subjects are then exploited in the classification approach. We have developed a simple method employing the Bag-of-Words (BoW) framework for the classification of the ADHD subjects. We represent each node in the network by a 4-D feature vector: node degree and 3-D location. The 4-D vectors of all the network nodes of the training data are then grouped in a number of clusters using K-means; where each such cluster is termed as a word. Finally, each subject is represented by a histogram (bag) of such words. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used for the detection of the ADHD subjects using their histogram representation. The method is able to achieve 64% classification accuracy. The above simple approach has several shortcomings. First, there is a loss of spatial information while constructing the histogram because it only counts the occurrences of words ignoring the spatial positions. Second, features from the whole brain are used for classification, but some of the brain regions may not contain any useful information and may only increase the feature dimensions and noise of the system. Third, in our study we used only one network feature, the degree of a node which measures the connectivity of the node, while other complex network features may be useful for solving the proposed problem. In order to address the above shortcomings, we hypothesize that only a subset of the nodes of the network possesses important information for the classification of the ADHD subjects. To identify the important nodes of the network we have developed a novel algorithm. The algorithm generates different random subset of nodes each time extracting the features from a subset to compute the feature vector and perform classification. The subsets are then ranked based on the classification accuracy and the occurrences of each node in the top ranked subsets are measured. Our algorithm selects the highly occurring nodes for the final classification. Furthermore, along with the node degree, we employ three more node features: network cycles, the varying distance degree and the edge weight sum. We concatenate the features of the selected nodes in a fixed order to preserve the relative spatial information. Experimental validation suggests that the use of the features from the nodes selected using our algorithm indeed help to improve the classification accuracy. Also, our finding is in concordance with the existing literature as the brain regions identified by our algorithms are independently found by many other studies on the ADHD. We achieved a classification accuracy of 69.59% using this approach. However, since this method represents each voxel as a node of the network which makes the number of nodes of the network several thousands. As a result, the network construction step becomes computationally very expensive. Another limitation of the approach is that the network features, which are computed for each node of the network, captures only the local structures while ignore the global structure of the network. Next, in order to capture the global structure of the networks, we use the Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) technique to project all the subjects from an unknown network-space to a low dimensional space based on their inter-network distance measures. For the purpose of computing distance between two networks, we represent each node by a set of attributes such as the node degree, the average power, the physical location, the neighbor node degrees, and the average powers of the neighbor nodes. The nodes of the two networks are then mapped in such a way that for all pair of nodes, the sum of the attribute distances, which is the inter-network distance, is minimized. To reduce the network computation cost, we enforce that the maximum relevant information is preserved with minimum redundancy. To achieve this, the nodes of the network are constructed with clusters of highly active voxels while the activity levels of the voxels are measured based on the average power of their corresponding fMRI time-series. Our method shows promise as we achieve impressive classification accuracies (73.55%) on the ADHD-200 data set. Our results also reveal that the detection rates are higher when classification is performed separately on the male and female groups of subjects. So far, we have only used the fMRI data for solving the ADHD diagnosis problem. Finally, we investigated the answers of the following questions. Do the structural brain images contain useful information related to the ADHD diagnosis problem? Can the classification accuracy of the automatic diagnosis system be improved combining the information of the structural and functional brain data? Towards that end, we developed a new method to combine the information of structural and functional brain images in a late fusion framework. For structural data we input the gray matter (GM) brain images to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The output of the CNN is a feature vector per subject which is used to train the SVM classifier. For the functional data we compute the average power of each voxel based on its fMRI time series. The average power of the fMRI time series of a voxel measures the activity level of the voxel. We found significant differences in the voxel power distribution patterns of the ADHD and control groups of subjects. The Local binary pattern (LBP) texture feature is used on the voxel power map to capture these differences. We achieved 74.23% accuracy using GM features, 77.30% using LBP features and 79.14% using combined information. In summary this dissertation demonstrated that the structural and functional brain imaging data are useful for the automatic detection of the ADHD subjects as we achieve impressive classification accuracies on the ADHD-200 data set. Our study also helps to identify the brain regions which are useful for ADHD subject classification. These findings can help in understanding the pathophysiology of the problem. Finally, we expect that our approaches will contribute towards the development of a biological measure for the diagnosis of the ADHD subjects.