Persistence diagrams (PD)s play a central role in topological data analysis, and are used in an ever increasing variety of applications. The comparison of PD data requires computing distances among large sets of PDs, with metrics which are accurate, theoretically sound, and fast to compute. Especially for denser multi-dimensional PDs, such comparison metrics are lacking. While on the one hand, Wasserstein-type distances have high accuracy and theoretical guarantees, they incur high computational cost. On the other hand, distances between vectorizations such as Persistence Statistics (PS)s have lower computational cost, but lack the accuracy guarantees and theoretical properties of a true distance over PD space. In this work we introduce a class of pseudodistances called Extended Topological Pseudodistances (ETD)s, which have tunable complexity, and can approximate Sliced and classical Wasserstein distances at the high-complexity extreme, while being computationally lighter and close to Persistence Statistics at the lower complexity extreme, and thus allow users to interpolate between the two metrics. We build theoretical comparisons to show how to fit our new distances at an intermediate level between persistence vectorizations and Wasserstein distances. We also experimentally verify that ETDs outperform PSs in terms of accuracy and outperform Wasserstein and Sliced Wasserstein distances in terms of computational complexity.

MOTIVATION: Quantitative descriptions of multi-cellular structures from optical microscopy imaging are prime to understand the variety of three-dimensional (3D) shapes in living organisms. Experimental models of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants, such as zebrafish, killifish, Drosophila or Marchantia, mainly comprise multilayer tissues, and even if microscopes can reach the needed depth, their geometry hinders the selection and subsequent analysis of the optical volumes of interest. Computational tools to "peel" tissues by removing specific layers and reducing 3D volume into planar images, can critically improve visualization and analysis. RESULTS: We developed VolumePeeler, a versatile FIJI plugin for virtual 3D "peeling" of image stacks. The plugin implements spherical and spline surface projections. We applied VolumePeeler to perform peeling in 3D images of spherical embryos, as well as non-spherical tissue layers. The produced images improve the 3D volume visualization and enable analysis and quantification of geometrically challenging microscopy datasets. AVAILABILITY: ImageJ/FIJI software, source code, examples, and tutorials are openly available in https://cimt.uchile.cl/mcerda.

A Bilingual Multimodal Speech Communication Corpus incorporating acoustic data as well as visual data related to face, hands and arms gestures during speech, is presented in this paper.This corpus comprises different speaking modalities, including scripted text speech, natural conversation, and free speech.The corpus has been compiled in two different languages, viz., French and Spanish.The experimental setups for the recording of the corpus, the acquisition protocols, and the employed equipment are described.Statistics regarding the number and gender of the speakers, number of words, number of sentences, and duration of the recording sessions, are also provided.Preliminary results from the analysis of the correlation among speech, head and hand movements during spontaneous speech are also presented in this paper, showing that acoustic prosodic features are related with head and hand gestures.

In this paper, a system for speech-driven animation of generic 3D head models is presented. The system is based on the inversion of a joint Audio-Visual Hidden Markov Model to estimate the visual information from speech data. Estimated visual speech features are used to animate a simple face model. The animation of a more complex head model is then obtained by automatically mapping the deformation of the simple model to it. The proposed algorithm allows the animation of 3D head models of arbitrary complexity through a simple setup procedure. The resulting animation is evaluated in terms of intelligibility of visual speech through subjective tests, showing a promising performance.