Objective: Over the last few decades, there has been significant interest in the automatic analysis of respiratory sounds. However, currently there are no publicly available large databases with which new algorithms can be evaluated and compared. Further developments in the field are dependent on the creation of such databases. Approach: This paper describes a public respiratory sound database, which was compiled for an international competition, the first scientific challenge of the IFMBE’s International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics. The database includes 920 recordings acquired from 126 participants and two sets of annotations. One set contains 6898 annotated respiratory cycles, some including crackles, wheezes, or a combination of both, and some with no adventitious respiratory sounds. In the other set, precise locations of 10 775 events of crackles and wheezes were annotated. Main results: The best system that participated in the challenge achieved an average score of 52.5% with the respiratory cycle annotations and an average score of 91.2% with the event annotations. Significance: The creation and public release of this database will be useful to the research community and could bring attention to the respiratory sound classification problem.

Face landmarking, defined as the detection and localization of certain characteristic points on the face, is an important intermediary step for many subsequent face processing operations that range from biometric recognition to the understanding of mental states. Despite its conceptual simplicity, this computer vision problem has proven extremely challenging due to inherent face variability as well as the multitude of confounding factors such as pose, expression, illumination and occlusions. The purpose of this survey is to give an overview of landmarking algorithms and their progress over the last decade, categorize them and show comparative performance statistics of the state of the art. We discuss the main trends and indicate current shortcomings with the expectation that this survey will provide further impetus for the much needed high-performance, real-life face landmarking operating at video rates.

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This paper presents a hybrid method for face detection in color images. The well known Haar feature-based face detector developed by Viola and Jones (VJ), that has been designed for gray-scale images is combined with a skin-color filter, which provides complementary information in color images. The image is first passed through a Haar-Feature based face detector, which is adjusted such that it is operating at a point on its ROC curve that has a low number of missed faces but a high number of false detections. Then, using the proposed skin color post-filtering method many of these false detections can be eliminated easily. We also use a color compensation algorithm to reduce the effects of lighting. Our experimental results on the Bao color face database show that the proposed method is superior to the original VJ algorithm and also to other skin color based pre-filtering methods in the literature in terms of precision.