Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality globally, but early diagnosis and treatment can increase the cancer survival rate. In this context, thermography is a suitable approach to help early diagnosis due to the temperature difference between cancerous tissues and healthy neighboring tissues. This work proposes an ensemble method for selecting models and features by combining a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to diagnose breast cancer. Our evaluation demonstrates that the approach presents a significant contribution to the early diagnosis of breast cancer, presenting results with 94.79% Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and 97.18% of Accuracy.

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Foveation is a technique that allows real-time image processing by drastically reducing the amount of visual data without loosing essential information around some focused area. When a robot needs to pay attention at two or more regions of the image at the same time, e.g., for tracking two or more objects, multifoveation is necessary. In this case, computing features twice in the intersections between the different foveated structures, which could linearly increase the processing time, must be avoided. To solve this redundancy removal problem, we propose two algorithms. The first one is based on the previous calculation of redundant blocks and the second one is based on a pixel-by-pixel processing at execution time. Experimental results show a gain in processing time for the block-based model in comparison with the pixel-by-pixel and also of both in comparison with other approaches that sequentially calculate various single foveated images. Robotics vision and other tasks related to dynamic visual attention, as recognition, real-time surveillance, video transmission, and image rendering, are examples of applications that can rely on and strongly benefit from such model.

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Target detection enables running a robotic task. However, their limited resources make large amount of data processing harder. Image foveation is an approach that can reduce processing demand by reducing the amount of data to be processed. However, as an important visual stimulli can be attenuated by this reduction, some strategy should be applied in order to keep/recover awareness of it. This work compares gradient descent (potential field), maximum likelihood, multilateration, trilateration, and barycentric coordinates to solve this problem in a multiple mobile foveas context. Our results demonstrate that the proposed methodology detects the target converging with an average euclidian distance of 51 pixels from the target's center position.