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In this paper we present a technique for fusion of optical and thermal face images based on image pixel fusion approach. Out of several factors, which affect face recognition performance in case of visual images, illumination changes are a significant factor that needs to be addressed. Thermal images are better in handling illumination conditions but not very consistent in capturing texture details of the faces. Other factors like sunglasses, beard, moustache etc also play active role in adding complicacies to the recognition process. Fusion of thermal and visual images is a solution to overcome the drawbacks present in the individual thermal and visual face images. Here fused images are projected into an eigenspace and the projected images are classified using a radial basis function (RBF) neural network and also by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). In the experiments Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database benchmark for thermal and visual face images have been used. Comparison of experimental results show that the proposed approach performs significantly well in recognizing face images with a success rate of 96% and 95.07% for RBF Neural Network and MLP respectively.
Image Pixel Fusion for Human Face Recognition
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Here an efficient fusion technique for automatic face recognition has been presented. Fusion of visual and thermal images has been done to take the advantages of thermal images as well as visual images. By employing fusion a new image can be obtained, which provides the most detailed, reliable, and discriminating information. In this method fused images are generated using visual and thermal face images in the first step. In the second step, fused images are projected into eigenspace and finally classified using a radial basis function neural network. In the experiments Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database benchmark for thermal and visual face images have been used. Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs well in recognizing unknown individuals with a maximum success rate of 96%.
Classification of Fused Images using Radial Basis Function Neural Network for Human Face Recognition
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This paper presents a concept of image pixel fusion of visual and thermal faces, which can significantly improve the overall performance of a face recognition system. Several factors affect face recognition performance including pose variations, facial expression changes, occlusions, and most importantly illumination changes. So, image pixel fusion of thermal and visual images is a solution to overcome the drawbacks present in the individual thermal and visual face images. Fused images are projected into eigenspace and finally classified using a multi-layer perceptron. In the experiments we have used Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database benchmark thermal and visual face images. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the verification and identification performance and the success rate is 95.07%. The main objective of employing fusion is to produce a fused image that provides the most detailed and reliable information. Fusion of multiple images together produces a more efficient representation of the image.
Classification of fused face images using multilayer perceptron neural network
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In this paper we present a simple novel approach to tackle the challenges of scaling and rotation of face images in face recognition. The proposed approach registers the training and testing visual face images by log-polar transformation, which is capable to handle complicacies introduced by scaling and rotation. Log-polar images are projected into eigenspace and finally classified using an improved multi-layer perceptron. In the experiments we have used ORL face database and Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database for visual face images. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the recognition performances from visual to log-polar-visual face images. In case of ORL face database, recognition rate for visual face images is 89.5% and that is increased to 97.5% for log-polar-visual face images whereas for OTCBVS face database recognition rate for visual images is 87.84% and 96.36% for log-polar-visual face images.
Classification of Log-Polar-Visual Eigenfaces using Multilayer Perceptron
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In this work we investigate a novel approach to handle the challenges of face recognition, which includes rotation, scale, occlusion, illumination etc. Here, we have used thermal face images as those are capable to minimize the affect of illumination changes and occlusion due to moustache, beards, adornments etc. The proposed approach registers the training and testing thermal face images in polar coordinate, which is capable to handle complicacies introduced by scaling and rotation. Line features are extracted from thermal polar images and feature vectors are constructed using these line. Feature vectors thus obtained passes through principal component analysis (PCA) for the dimensionality reduction of feature vectors. Finally, the images projected into eigenspace are classified using a multi-layer perceptron. In the experiments we have used Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the verification and identification performance and the success rate is 99.25%.
Human Face Recognition using Line Features
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Nonlinear bilateral filters (BF) deliver a fine blend of computational simplicity and blur-free denoising. However, little is known about their nature, noise-suppressing properties, and optimal choices of filter parameters. Our study is meant to fill this gap-explaining the underlying mechanism of bilateral filtering and providing the methodology for optimal filter selection. Practical application to CT image denoising is discussed to illustrate our results.
Bilateral filters: what they can and cannot do
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A lot of image registration techniques have been developed with great significance for data analysis in medicine, astrophotography, satellite imaging and few other areas. This work proposes a method for medical image registration using Fast Walsh Hadamard transform. This algorithm registers images of the same or different modalities. Each image bit is lengthened in terms of Fast Walsh Hadamard basis functions. Each basis function is a notion of determining various aspects of local structure, e.g., horizontal edge, corner, etc. These coefficients are normalized and used as numerals in a chosen number system which allows one to form a unique number for each type of local structure. The experimental results show that Fast Walsh Hadamard transform accomplished better results than the conventional Walsh transform in the time domain. Also Fast Walsh Hadamard transform is more reliable in medical image registration consuming less time.
Registration of Brain Images using Fast Walsh Hadamard Transform
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The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-known model organism used to investigate fundamental questions in biology. Motility assays of this small roundworm are designed to study the relationships between genes and behavior. Commonly, motility analysis is used to classify nematode movements and characterize them quantitatively. Over the past years, C. elegans' motility has been studied across a wide range of environments, including crawling on substrates, swimming in fluids, and locomoting through microfluidic substrates. However, each environment often requires customized image processing tools relying on heuristic parameter tuning. In the present study, we propose a novel Multi-Environment Model Estimation (MEME) framework for automated image segmentation that is versatile across various environments. The MEME platform is constructed around the concept of Mixture of Gaussian (MOG) models, where statistical models for both the background environment and the nematode appearance are explicitly learned and used to accurately segment a target nematode. Our method is designed to simplify the burden often imposed on users; here, only a single image which includes a nematode in its environment must be provided for model learning. In addition, our platform enables the extraction of nematode `skeletons' for straightforward motility quantification. We test our algorithm on various locomotive environments and compare performances with an intensity-based thresholding method. Overall, MEME outperforms the threshold-based approach for the overwhelming majority of cases examined. Ultimately, MEME provides researchers with an attractive platform for C. elegans' segmentation and `skeletonizing' across a wide range of motility assays.
Multi-environment model estimation for motility analysis of Caenorhabditis Elegans
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RANSAC is a popular technique for estimating model parameters in the presence of outliers. The best speed is achieved when the minimum possible number of points is used to estimate hypotheses for the model. Many useful problems can be represented using polynomial constraints (for instance, the determinant of a fundamental matrix must be zero) and so have a number of solutions which are consistent with a minimal set. A considerable amount of effort has been expended on finding the constraints of such problems, and these often require the solution of systems of polynomial equations. We show that better performance can be achieved by using a simple optimization based approach on minimal sets. For a given minimal set, the optimization approach is not guaranteed to converge to the correct solution. However, when used within RANSAC the greater speed and numerical stability results in better performance overall, and much simpler algorithms. We also show that by selecting more than the minimal number of points and using robust optimization can yield better results for very noisy by reducing the number of trials required. The increased speed of our method demonstrated with experiments on essential matrix estimation.
Improved RANSAC performance using simple, iterative minimal-set solvers
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Template matching is one of the simplest methods used for eyes and mouth detection. However, it can be modified and extended to become a powerful tool. Since the patch itself plays a significant role in optimizing detection performance, a study on the influence of patch size and shape is carried out. The optimum patch size and shape is determined using the proposed method. Usually, template matching is also combined with other methods in order to improve detection accuracy. Thus, in this paper, the effectiveness of two image processing methods i.e. grayscale and Haar wavelet transform, when used with template matching are analyzed.
A Study on the Effectiveness of Different Patch Size and Shape for Eyes and Mouth Detection
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We propose a new approach for constructing a 3D representation from a 2D wireframe drawing. A drawing is simply a parallel projection of a 3D object onto a 2D surface; humans are able to recreate mental 3D models from 2D representations very easily, yet the process is very difficult to emulate computationally. We hypothesize that our ability to perform this construction relies on the angles in the 2D scene, among other geometric properties. Being able to reproduce this reconstruction process automatically would allow for efficient and robust 3D sketch interfaces. Our research focuses on the relationship between 2D geometry observable in the sketch and 3D geometry derived from a potential 3D construction. We present a fully automated system that constructs 3D representations from 2D wireframes using a neural network in conjunction with a genetic search algorithm.
Neural Network Based Reconstruction of a 3D Object from a 2D Wireframe
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VERSA provides a general-purpose framework for defining and recognizing events in live or recorded surveillance video streams. The approach for event recognition in VERSA is using a declarative logic language to define the spatial and temporal relationships that characterize a given event or activity. Doing so requires the definition of certain fundamental spatial and temporal relationships and a high-level syntax for specifying frame templates and query parameters. Although the handling of uncertainty in the current VERSA implementation is simplistic, the language and architecture is amenable to extending using Fuzzy Logic or similar approaches. VERSA's high-level architecture is designed to work in XML-based, services- oriented environments. VERSA can be thought of as subscribing to the XML annotations streamed by a lower-level video analytics service that provides basic entity detection, labeling, and tracking. One or many VERSA Event Monitors could thus analyze video streams and provide alerts when certain events are detected.
Video Event Recognition for Surveillance Applications (VERSA)
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This paper proposes a robust ear identification system which is developed by fusing SIFT features of color segmented slice regions of an ear. The proposed ear identification method makes use of Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to build ear model with mixture of Gaussian using vector quantization algorithm and K-L divergence is applied to the GMM framework for recording the color similarity in the specified ranges by comparing color similarity between a pair of reference ear and probe ear. SIFT features are then detected and extracted from each color slice region as a part of invariant feature extraction. The extracted keypoints are then fused separately by the two fusion approaches, namely concatenation and the Dempster-Shafer theory. Finally, the fusion approaches generate two independent augmented feature vectors which are used for identification of individuals separately. The proposed identification technique is tested on IIT Kanpur ear database of 400 individuals and is found to achieve 98.25% accuracy for identification while top 5 matched criteria is set for each subject.
Ear Identification by Fusion of Segmented Slice Regions using Invariant Features: An Experimental Manifold with Dual Fusion Approach
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In this paper we present an efficient computer aided mass classification method in digitized mammograms using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which performs benign-malignant classification on region of interest (ROI) that contains mass. One of the major mammographic characteristics for mass classification is texture. ANN exploits this important factor to classify the mass into benign or malignant. The statistical textural features used in characterizing the masses are mean, standard deviation, entropy, skewness, kurtosis and uniformity. The main aim of the method is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the classification process in an objective manner to reduce the numbers of false-positive of malignancies. Three layers artificial neural network (ANN) with seven features was proposed for classifying the marked regions into benign and malignant and 90.91% sensitivity and 83.87% specificity is achieved that is very much promising compare to the radiologist's sensitivity 75%.
An Efficient Automatic Mass Classification Method In Digitized Mammograms Using Artificial Neural Network
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The physiological and behavioral trait is employed to develop biometric authentication systems. The proposed work deals with the authentication of iris and signature based on minimum variance criteria. The iris patterns are preprocessed based on area of the connected components. The segmented image used for authentication consists of the region with large variations in the gray level values. The image region is split into quadtree components. The components with minimum variance are determined from the training samples. Hu moments are applied on the components. The summation of moment values corresponding to minimum variance components are provided as input vector to k-means and fuzzy k-means classifiers. The best performance was obtained for MMU database consisting of 45 subjects. The number of subjects with zero False Rejection Rate [FRR] was 44 and number of subjects with zero False Acceptance Rate [FAR] was 45. This paper addresses the computational load reduction in off-line signature verification based on minimal features using k-means, fuzzy k-means, k-nn, fuzzy k-nn and novel average-max approaches. FRR of 8.13% and FAR of 10% was achieved using k-nn classifier. The signature is a biometric, where variations in a genuine case, is a natural expectation. In the genuine signature, certain parts of signature vary from one instance to another. The system aims to provide simple, fast and robust system using less number of features when compared to state of art works.
Biometric Authentication using Nonparametric Methods
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Due to the rapid development of World Wide Web (WWW) and imaging technology, more and more images are available in the Internet and stored in databases. Searching the related images by the querying image is becoming tedious and difficult. Most of the images on the web are compressed by methods based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) including Joint Photographic Experts Group(JPEG) and H.261. This paper presents an efficient content-based image indexing technique for searching similar images using discrete cosine transform features. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority with the existing techniques.
A Miniature-Based Image Retrieval System
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Cascade classifiers are widely used in real-time object detection. Different from conventional classifiers that are designed for a low overall classification error rate, a classifier in each node of the cascade is required to achieve an extremely high detection rate and moderate false positive rate. Although there are a few reported methods addressing this requirement in the context of object detection, there is no a principled feature selection method that explicitly takes into account this asymmetric node learning objective. We provide such an algorithm here. We show a special case of the biased minimax probability machine has the same formulation as the linear asymmetric classifier (LAC) of \cite{wu2005linear}. We then design a new boosting algorithm that directly optimizes the cost function of LAC. The resulting totally-corrective boosting algorithm is implemented by the column generation technique in convex optimization. Experimental results on object detection verify the effectiveness of the proposed boosting algorithm as a node classifier in cascade object detection, and show performance better than that of the current state-of-the-art.
Optimally Training a Cascade Classifier
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Human ovarian reserve is defined by the population of nongrowing follicles (NGFs) in the ovary. Direct estimation of ovarian reserve involves the identification of NGFs in prepared ovarian tissue. Previous studies involving human tissue have used hematoxylin and eosin (HE) stain, with NGF populations estimated by human examination either of tissue under a microscope, or of images taken of this tissue. In this study we replaced HE with proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), and automated the identification and enumeration of NGFs that appear in the resulting microscopic images. We compared the automated estimates to those obtained by human experts, with the "gold standard" taken to be the average of the conservative and liberal estimates by three human experts. The automated estimates were within 10% of the "gold standard", for images at both 100x and 200x magnifications. Automated analysis took longer than human analysis for several hundred images, not allowing for breaks from analysis needed by humans. Our results both replicate and improve on those of previous studies involving rodent ovaries, and demonstrate the viability of large-scale studies of human ovarian reserve using a combination of immunohistochemistry and computational image analysis techniques.
Proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) allows the automatic identification of follicles in microscopic images of human ovarian tissue
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Object detection has been a focus of research in human-computer interaction. Skin area detection has been a key to different recognitions like face recognition, human motion detection, pornographic and nude image prediction, etc. Most of the research done in the fields of skin detection has been trained and tested on human images of African, Mongolian and Anglo-Saxon ethnic origins. Although there are several intensity invariant approaches to skin detection, the skin color of Indian sub-continentals have not been focused separately. The approach of this research is to make a comparative study between three image segmentation approaches using Indian sub-continental human images, to optimize the detection criteria, and to find some efficient parameters to detect the skin area from these images. The experiments observed that HSV color model based approach to Indian sub-continental skin detection is more suitable with considerable success rate of 91.1% true positives and 88.1% true negatives.
Comparative Study of Statistical Skin Detection Algorithms for Sub-Continental Human Images
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Recognizing a face based on its attributes is an easy task for a human to perform as it is a cognitive process. In recent years, Face Recognition is achieved with different kinds of facial features which were used separately or in a combined manner. Currently, Feature fusion methods and parallel methods are the facial features used and performed by integrating multiple feature sets at different levels. However, this integration and the combinational methods do not guarantee better result. Hence to achieve better results, the feature fusion model with multiple weighted facial attribute set is selected. For this feature model, face images from predefined data set has been taken from Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) and applied on different methods like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based Eigen feature extraction technique, Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) based feature extraction technique, Histogram Based Feature Extraction technique and Simple Intensity based features. The extracted feature set obtained from these methods were compared and tested for accuracy. In this work we have developed a model which will use the above set of feature extraction techniques with different levels of weights to attain better accuracy. The results show that the selection of optimum weight for a particular feature will lead to improvement in recognition rate.
Weighted Attribute Fusion Model for Face Recognition
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Color space transformations are frequently used in image processing, graphics, and visualization applications. In many cases, these transformations are complex nonlinear functions, which prohibits their use in time-critical applications. In this paper, we present a new approach called Minimax Approximations for Color-space Transformations (MACT).We demonstrate MACT on three commonly used color space transformations. Extensive experiments on a large and diverse image set and comparisons with well-known multidimensional lookup table interpolation methods show that MACT achieves an excellent balance among four criteria: ease of implementation, memory usage, accuracy, and computational speed.
Fast Color Space Transformations Using Minimax Approximations
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Accurately detecting pedestrians in images plays a critically important role in many computer vision applications. Extraction of effective features is the key to this task. Promising features should be discriminative, robust to various variations and easy to compute. In this work, we present novel features, termed dense center-symmetric local binary patterns (CS-LBP) and pyramid center-symmetric local binary/ternary patterns (CS-LBP/LTP), for pedestrian detection. The standard LBP proposed by Ojala et al. \cite{c4} mainly captures the texture information. The proposed CS-LBP feature, in contrast, captures the gradient information and some texture information. Moreover, the proposed dense CS-LBP and the pyramid CS-LBP/LTP are easy to implement and computationally efficient, which is desirable for real-time applications. Experiments on the INRIA pedestrian dataset show that the dense CS-LBP feature with linear supporct vector machines (SVMs) is comparable with the histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) feature with linear SVMs, and the pyramid CS-LBP/LTP features outperform both HOG features with linear SVMs and the start-of-the-art pyramid HOG (PHOG) feature with the histogram intersection kernel SVMs. We also demonstrate that the combination of our pyramid CS-LBP feature and the PHOG feature could significantly improve the detection performance-producing state-of-the-art accuracy on the INRIA pedestrian dataset.
Effective Pedestrian Detection Using Center-symmetric Local Binary/Trinary Patterns
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Reduced ordering based vector filters have proved successful in removing long-tailed noise from color images while preserving edges and fine image details. These filters commonly utilize variants of the Minkowski distance to order the color vectors with the aim of distinguishing between noisy and noise-free vectors. In this paper, we review various alternative distance measures and evaluate their performance on a large and diverse set of images using several effectiveness and efficiency criteria. The results demonstrate that there are in fact strong alternatives to the popular Minkowski metrics.
Distance Measures for Reduced Ordering Based Vector Filters
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Vector filters based on order-statistics have proved successful in removing impulsive noise from color images while preserving edges and fine image details. Among these filters, the ones that involve the cosine distance function (directional filters) have particularly high computational requirements, which limits their use in time critical applications. In this paper, we introduce two methods to speed up these filters. Experiments on a diverse set of color images show that the proposed methods provide substantial computational gains without significant loss of accuracy.
Real-Time Implementation of Order-Statistics Based Directional Filters
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Vector operators based on robust order statistics have proved successful in digital multichannel imaging applications, particularly color image filtering and enhancement, in dealing with impulsive noise while preserving edges and fine image details. These operators often have very high computational requirements which limits their use in time-critical applications. This paper introduces techniques to speed up vector filters using the minimax approximation theory. Extensive experiments on a large and diverse set of color images show that proposed approximations achieve an excellent balance among ease of implementation, accuracy, and computational speed.
Cost-Effective Implementation of Order-Statistics Based Vector Filters Using Minimax Approximations
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In this paper, we present a fast switching filter for impulsive noise removal from color images. The filter exploits the HSL color space, and is based on the peer group concept, which allows for the fast detection of noise in a neighborhood without resorting to pairwise distance computations between each pixel. Experiments on large set of diverse images demonstrate that the proposed approach is not only extremely fast, but also gives excellent results in comparison to various state-of-the-art filters.
A Fast Switching Filter for Impulsive Noise Removal from Color Images
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In this paper, a comprehensive survey of 48 filters for impulsive noise removal from color images is presented. The filters are formulated using a uniform notation and categorized into 8 families. The performance of these filters is compared on a large set of images that cover a variety of domains using three effectiveness and one efficiency criteria. In order to ensure a fair efficiency comparison, a fast and accurate approximation for the inverse cosine function is introduced. In addition, commonly used distance measures (Minkowski, angular, and directional-distance) are analyzed and evaluated. Finally, suggestions are provided on how to choose a filter given certain requirements.
Nonlinear Vector Filtering for Impulsive Noise Removal from Color Images
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Dermoscopy is a non-invasive skin imaging technique, which permits visualization of features of pigmented melanocytic neoplasms that are not discernable by examination with the naked eye. One of the most important features for the diagnosis of melanoma in dermoscopy images is the blue-white veil (irregular, structureless areas of confluent blue pigmentation with an overlying white "ground-glass" film). In this article, we present a machine learning approach to the detection of blue-white veil and related structures in dermoscopy images. The method involves contextual pixel classification using a decision tree classifier. The percentage of blue-white areas detected in a lesion combined with a simple shape descriptor yielded a sensitivity of 69.35% and a specificity of 89.97% on a set of 545 dermoscopy images. The sensitivity rises to 78.20% for detection of blue veil in those cases where it is a primary feature for melanoma recognition.
Automatic Detection of Blue-White Veil and Related Structures in Dermoscopy Images
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Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, dermoscopy image analysis has become an important research area. One of the most important steps in dermoscopy image analysis is the automated detection of lesion borders. Although numerous methods have been developed for the detection of lesion borders, very few studies were comprehensive in the evaluation of their results. Methods: In this paper, we evaluate five recent border detection methods on a set of 90 dermoscopy images using three sets of dermatologist-drawn borders as the ground-truth. In contrast to previous work, we utilize an objective measure, the Normalized Probabilistic Rand Index, which takes into account the variations in the ground-truth images. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the differences between four of the evaluated border detection methods are in fact smaller than those predicted by the commonly used XOR measure.
An Improved Objective Evaluation Measure for Border Detection in Dermoscopy Images
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Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the first step in this analysis. Methods: In this article, we present an approximate lesion localization method that serves as a preprocessing step for detecting borders in dermoscopy images. In this method, first the black frame around the image is removed using an iterative algorithm. The approximate location of the lesion is then determined using an ensemble of thresholding algorithms. Results: The method is tested on a set of 428 dermoscopy images. The localization error is quantified by a metric that uses dermatologist determined borders as the ground truth. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the method presented here achieves both fast and accurate localization of lesions in dermoscopy images.
Approximate Lesion Localization in Dermoscopy Images
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In this paper, Deterministic Cellular Automata (DCA) based video shot classification and retrieval is proposed. The deterministic 2D Cellular automata model captures the human facial expressions, both spontaneous and posed. The determinism stems from the fact that the facial muscle actions are standardized by the encodings of Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and Action Units (AUs). Based on these encodings, we generate the set of evolutionary update rules of the DCA for each facial expression. We consider a Person-Independent Facial Expression Space (PIFES) to analyze the facial expressions based on Partitioned 2D-Cellular Automata which capture the dynamics of facial expressions and classify the shots based on it. Target video shot is retrieved by comparing the similar expression is obtained for the query frame's face with respect to the key faces expressions in the database video. Consecutive key face expressions in the database that are highly similar to the query frame's face, then the key faces are used to generate the set of retrieved video shots from the database. A concrete example of its application which realizes an affective interaction between the computer and the user is proposed. In the affective interaction, the computer can recognize the facial expression of any given video shot. This interaction endows the computer with certain ability to adapt to the user's feedback.
Evolutionary Computational Method of Facial Expression Analysis for Content-based Video Retrieval using 2-Dimensional Cellular Automata
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Image hashing is the process of associating a short vector of bits to an image. The resulting summaries are useful in many applications including image indexing, image authentication and pattern recognition. These hashes need to be invariant under transformations of the image that result in similar visual content, but should drastically differ for conceptually distinct contents. This paper proposes an image hashing method that is invariant under rotation, scaling and translation of the image. The gist of our approach relies on the geometric characterization of salient point distribution in the image. This is achieved by the definition of a "saliency graph" connecting these points jointly with an image intensity function on the graph nodes. An invariant hash is then obtained by considering the spectrum of this function in the eigenvector basis of the Laplacian graph, that is, its graph Fourier transform. Interestingly, this spectrum is invariant under any relabeling of the graph nodes. The graph reveals geometric information of the image, making the hash robust to image transformation, yet distinct for different visual content. The efficiency of the proposed method is assessed on a set of MRI 2-D slices and on a database of faces.
Invariant Spectral Hashing of Image Saliency Graph
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Real-time object detection is one of the core problems in computer vision. The cascade boosting framework proposed by Viola and Jones has become the standard for this problem. In this framework, the learning goal for each node is asymmetric, which is required to achieve a high detection rate and a moderate false positive rate. We develop new boosting algorithms to address this asymmetric learning problem. We show that our methods explicitly optimize asymmetric loss objectives in a totally corrective fashion. The methods are totally corrective in the sense that the coefficients of all selected weak classifiers are updated at each iteration. In contract, conventional boosting like AdaBoost is stage-wise in that only the current weak classifier's coefficient is updated. At the heart of the totally corrective boosting is the column generation technique. Experiments on face detection show that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art asymmetric boosting methods.
Asymmetric Totally-corrective Boosting for Real-time Object Detection
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This paper deals with an improvement of vertex based nonlinear diffusion for mesh denoising. This method directly filters the position of the vertices using Laplace, reduced centered Gaussian and Rayleigh probability density functions as diffusivities. The use of these PDFs improves the performance of a vertex-based diffusion method which are adapted to the underlying mesh structure. We also compare the proposed method to other mesh denoising methods such as Laplacian flow, mean, median, min and the adaptive MMSE filtering. To evaluate these methods of filtering, we use two error metrics. The first is based on the vertices and the second is based on the normals. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in comparison with the existing methods.
3D-Mesh denoising using an improved vertex based anisotropic diffusion
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Many algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor search in high-dimensional spaces partition the data into clusters. At query time, in order to avoid exhaustive search, an index selects the few (or a single) clusters nearest to the query point. Clusters are often produced by the well-known $k$-means approach since it has several desirable properties. On the downside, it tends to produce clusters having quite different cardinalities. Imbalanced clusters negatively impact both the variance and the expectation of query response times. This paper proposes to modify $k$-means centroids to produce clusters with more comparable sizes without sacrificing the desirable properties. Experiments with a large scale collection of image descriptors show that our algorithm significantly reduces the variance of response times without seriously impacting the search quality.
Balancing clusters to reduce response time variability in large scale image search
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This project aims to create 3d model of the natural world and model changes in it instantaneously. A framework for modeling instantaneous changes natural scenes in real time using Lagrangian Particle Framework and a fluid-particle grid approach is presented. This project is presented in the form of a proof-based system where we show that the design is very much possible but currently we only have selective scripts that accomplish the given job, a complete software however is still under work. This research can be divided into 3 distinct sections: the first one discusses a multi-camera rig that can measure ego-motion accurately up to 88%, how this device becomes the backbone of our framework, and some improvements devised to optimize a know framework for depth maps and 3d structure estimation from a single still image called make3d. The second part discusses the fluid-particle framework to model natural scenes, presents some algorithms that we are using to accomplish this task and we show how an application of our framework can extend make3d to model natural scenes in real time. This part of the research constructs a bridge between computer vision and computer graphics so that now ideas, answers and intuitions that arose in the domain of computer graphics can now be applied to computer vision and natural modeling. The final part of this research improves upon what might become the first general purpose vision system using deep belief architectures and provides another framework to improve the lower bound on training images for boosting by using a variation of Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM). We also discuss other applications that might arise from our work in these areas.
Modeling Instantaneous Changes In Natural Scenes
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We propose a mid-level image segmentation framework that combines multiple figure-ground hypothesis (FG) constrained at different locations and scales, into interpretations that tile the entire image. The problem is cast as optimization over sets of maximal cliques sampled from the graph connecting non-overlapping, putative figure-ground segment hypotheses. Potential functions over cliques combine unary Gestalt-based figure quality scores and pairwise compatibilities among spatially neighboring segments, constrained by T-junctions and the boundary interface statistics resulting from projections of real 3d scenes. Learning the model parameters is formulated as rank optimization, alternating between sampling image tilings and optimizing their potential function parameters. State of the art results are reported on both the Berkeley and the VOC2009 segmentation dataset, where a 28% improvement was achieved.
Image Segmentation by Discounted Cumulative Ranking on Maximal Cliques
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This paper introduces a novel method for human face detection with its orientation by using wavelet, principle component analysis (PCA) and redial basis networks. The input image is analyzed by two-dimensional wavelet and a two-dimensional stationary wavelet. The common goals concern are the image clearance and simplification, which are parts of de-noising or compression. We applied an effective procedure to reduce the dimension of the input vectors using PCA. Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network is then used as a function approximation network to detect where either the input image is contained a face or not and if there is a face exists then tell about its orientation. We will show how RBF can perform well then back-propagation algorithm and give some solution for better regularization of the RBF (GRNN) network. Compared with traditional RBF networks, the proposed network demonstrates better capability of approximation to underlying functions, faster learning speed, better size of network, and high robustness to outliers.
Rotation Invariant Face Detection Using Wavelet, PCA and Radial Basis Function Networks
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There is an abundant literature on face detection due to its important role in many vision applications. Since Viola and Jones proposed the first real-time AdaBoost based face detector, Haar-like features have been adopted as the method of choice for frontal face detection. In this work, we show that simple features other than Haar-like features can also be applied for training an effective face detector. Since, single feature is not discriminative enough to separate faces from difficult non-faces, we further improve the generalization performance of our simple features by introducing feature co-occurrences. We demonstrate that our proposed features yield a performance improvement compared to Haar-like features. In addition, our findings indicate that features play a crucial role in the ability of the system to generalize.
Face Detection with Effective Feature Extraction
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Image segmentation has been a very active research topic in image analysis area. Currently, most of the image segmentation algorithms are designed based on the idea that images are partitioned into a set of regions preserving homogeneous intra-regions and inhomogeneous inter-regions. However, human visual intuition does not always follow this pattern. A new image segmentation method named Visual-Hint Boundary to Segment (VHBS) is introduced, which is more consistent with human perceptions. VHBS abides by two visual hint rules based on human perceptions: (i) the global scale boundaries tend to be the real boundaries of the objects; (ii) two adjacent regions with quite different colors or textures tend to result in the real boundaries between them. It has been demonstrated by experiments that, compared with traditional image segmentation method, VHBS has better performance and also preserves higher computational efficiency.
Visual-hint Boundary to Segment Algorithm for Image Segmentation
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We present here a first prototype of a "Speed Limit Support" Advance Driving Assistance System (ADAS) producing permanent reliable information on the current speed limit applicable to the vehicle. Such a module can be used either for information of the driver, or could even serve for automatic setting of the maximum speed of a smart Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC). Our system is based on a joint interpretation of cartographic information (for static reference information) with on-board vision, used for traffic sign detection and recognition (including supplementary sub-signs) and visual road lines localization (for detection of lane changes). The visual traffic sign detection part is quite robust (90% global correct detection and recognition for main speed signs, and 80% for exit-lane sub-signs detection). Our approach for joint interpretation with cartography is original, and logic-based rather than probability-based, which allows correct behaviour even in cases, which do happen, when both vision and cartography may provide the same erroneous information.
Joint interpretation of on-board vision and static GPS cartography for determination of correct speed limit
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The so-called factorization methods recover 3-D rigid structure from motion by factorizing an observation matrix that collects 2-D projections of features. These methods became popular due to their robustness - they use a large number of views, which constrains adequately the solution - and computational simplicity - the large number of unknowns is computed through an SVD, avoiding non-linear optimization. However, they require that all the entries of the observation matrix are known. This is unlikely to happen in practice, due to self-occlusion and limited field of view. Also, when processing long videos, regions that become occluded often appear again later. Current factorization methods process these as new regions, leading to less accurate estimates of 3-D structure. In this paper, we propose a global factorization method that infers complete 3-D models directly from the 2-D projections in the entire set of available video frames. Our method decides whether a region that has become visible is a region that was seen before, or a previously unseen region, in a global way, i.e., by seeking the simplest rigid object that describes well the entire set of observations. This global approach increases significantly the accuracy of the estimates of the 3-D shape of the scene and the 3-D motion of the camera. Experiments with artificial and real videos illustrate the good performance of our method.
3-D Rigid Models from Partial Views - Global Factorization
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The majority of the approaches to the automatic recovery of a panoramic image from a set of partial views are suboptimal in the sense that the input images are aligned, or registered, pair by pair, e.g., consecutive frames of a video clip. These approaches lead to propagation errors that may be very severe, particularly when dealing with videos that show the same region at disjoint time intervals. Although some authors have proposed a post-processing step to reduce the registration errors in these situations, there have not been attempts to compute the optimal solution, i.e., the registrations leading to the panorama that best matches the entire set of partial views}. This is our goal. In this paper, we use a generative model for the partial views of the panorama and develop an algorithm to compute in an efficient way the Maximum Likelihood estimate of all the unknowns involved: the parameters describing the alignment of all the images and the panorama itself.
Maximum Likelihood Mosaics
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In image analysis, many tasks require representing two-dimensional (2D) shape, often specified by a set of 2D points, for comparison purposes. The challenge of the representation is that it must not only capture the characteristics of the shape but also be invariant to relevant transformations. Invariance to geometric transformations, such as translation, rotation, and scale, has received attention in the past, usually under the assumption that the points are previously labeled, i.e., that the shape is characterized by an ordered set of landmarks. However, in many practical scenarios, the points describing the shape are obtained from automatic processes, e.g., edge or corner detection, thus without labels or natural ordering. Obviously, the combinatorial problem of computing the correspondences between the points of two shapes in the presence of the aforementioned geometrical distortions becomes a quagmire when the number of points is large. We circumvent this problem by representing shapes in a way that is invariant to the permutation of the landmarks, i.e., we represent bags of unlabeled 2D points. Within our framework, a shape is mapped to an analytic function on the complex plane, leading to what we call its analytic signature (ANSIG). To store an ANSIG, it suffices to sample it along a closed contour in the complex plane. We show that the ANSIG is a maximal invariant with respect to the permutation group, i.e., that different shapes have different ANSIGs and shapes that differ by a permutation (or re-labeling) of the landmarks have the same ANSIG. We further show how easy it is to factor out geometric transformations when comparing shapes using the ANSIG representation. Finally, we illustrate these capabilities with shape-based image classification experiments.
ANSIG - An Analytic Signature for Arbitrary 2D Shapes (or Bags of Unlabeled Points)
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When comparing 2D shapes, a key issue is their normalization. Translation and scale are easily taken care of by removing the mean and normalizing the energy. However, defining and computing the orientation of a 2D shape is not so simple. In fact, although for elongated shapes the principal axis can be used to define one of two possible orientations, there is no such tool for general shapes. As we show in the paper, previous approaches fail to compute the orientation of even noiseless observations of simple shapes. We address this problem. In the paper, we show how to uniquely define the orientation of an arbitrary 2D shape, in terms of what we call its Principal Moments. We show that a small subset of these moments suffice to represent the underlying 2D shape and propose a new method to efficiently compute the shape orientation: Principal Moment Analysis. Finally, we discuss how this method can further be applied to normalize grey-level images. Besides the theoretical proof of correctness, we describe experiments demonstrating robustness to noise and illustrating the method with real images.
Revisiting Complex Moments For 2D Shape Representation and Image Normalization
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A new framework of compressive sensing (CS), namely statistical compressive sensing (SCS), that aims at efficiently sampling a collection of signals that follow a statistical distribution and achieving accurate reconstruction on average, is introduced. For signals following a Gaussian distribution, with Gaussian or Bernoulli sensing matrices of O(k) measurements, considerably smaller than the O(k log(N/k)) required by conventional CS, where N is the signal dimension, and with an optimal decoder implemented with linear filtering, significantly faster than the pursuit decoders applied in conventional CS, the error of SCS is shown tightly upper bounded by a constant times the k-best term approximation error, with overwhelming probability. The failure probability is also significantly smaller than that of conventional CS. Stronger yet simpler results further show that for any sensing matrix, the error of Gaussian SCS is upper bounded by a constant times the k-best term approximation with probability one, and the bound constant can be efficiently calculated. For signals following Gaussian mixture models, SCS with a piecewise linear decoder is introduced and shown to produce for real images better results than conventional CS based on sparse models.
Statistical Compressive Sensing of Gaussian Mixture Models
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A collaborative framework for detecting the different sources in mixed signals is presented in this paper. The approach is based on C-HiLasso, a convex collaborative hierarchical sparse model, and proceeds as follows. First, we build a structured dictionary for mixed signals by concatenating a set of sub-dictionaries, each one of them learned to sparsely model one of a set of possible classes. Then, the coding of the mixed signal is performed by efficiently solving a convex optimization problem that combines standard sparsity with group and collaborative sparsity. The present sources are identified by looking at the sub-dictionaries automatically selected in the coding. The collaborative filtering in C-HiLasso takes advantage of the temporal/spatial redundancy in the mixed signals, letting collections of samples collaborate in identifying the classes, while allowing individual samples to have different internal sparse representations. This collaboration is critical to further stabilize the sparse representation of signals, in particular the class/sub-dictionary selection. The internal sparsity inside the sub-dictionaries, as naturally incorporated by the hierarchical aspects of C-HiLasso, is critical to make the model consistent with the essence of the sub-dictionaries that have been trained for sparse representation of each individual class. We present applications from speaker and instrument identification and texture separation. In the case of audio signals, we use sparse modeling to describe the short-term power spectrum envelopes of harmonic sounds. The proposed pitch independent method automatically detects the number of sources on a recording.
Collaborative Sources Identification in Mixed Signals via Hierarchical Sparse Modeling
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In this paper we propose a vision system that performs image Super Resolution (SR) with selectivity. Conventional SR techniques, either by multi-image fusion or example-based construction, have failed to capitalize on the intrinsic structural and semantic context in the image, and performed "blind" resolution recovery to the entire image area. By comparison, we advocate example-based selective SR whereby selectivity is exemplified in three aspects: region selectivity (SR only at object regions), source selectivity (object SR with trained object dictionaries), and refinement selectivity (object boundaries refinement using matting). The proposed system takes over-segmented low-resolution images as inputs, assimilates recent learning techniques of sparse coding (SC) and grouped multi-task lasso (GMTL), and leads eventually to a framework for joint figure-ground separation and interest object SR. The efficiency of our framework is manifested in our experiments with subsets of the VOC2009 and MSRC datasets. We also demonstrate several interesting vision applications that can build on our system.
Selective Image Super-Resolution
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Calibration in a multi camera network has widely been studied for over several years starting from the earlier days of photogrammetry. Many authors have presented several calibration algorithms with their relative advantages and disadvantages. In a stereovision system, multiple view reconstruction is a challenging task. However, the total computational procedure in detail has not been presented before. Here in this work, we are dealing with the problem that, when a world coordinate point is fixed in space, image coordinates of that 3D point vary for different camera positions and orientations. In computer vision aspect, this situation is undesirable. That is, the system has to be designed in such a way that image coordinate of the world coordinate point will be fixed irrespective of the position & orientation of the cameras. We have done it in an elegant fashion. Firstly, camera parameters are calculated in its local coordinate system. Then, we use global coordinate data to transfer all local coordinate data of stereo cameras into same global coordinate system, so that we can register everything into this global coordinate system. After all the transformations, when the image coordinate of the world coordinate point is calculated, it gives same coordinate value for all camera positions & orientations. That is, the whole system is calibrated.
Multiple View Reconstruction of Calibrated Images using Singular Value Decomposition
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Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, computerized analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. One of the most important steps in dermoscopy image analysis is the automated detection of lesion borders. Methods: In this article, we present a systematic overview of the recent border detection methods in the literature paying particular attention to computational issues and evaluation aspects. Conclusion: Common problems with the existing approaches include the acquisition, size, and diagnostic distribution of the test image set, the evaluation of the results, and the inadequate description of the employed methods. Border determination by dermatologists appears to depend upon higher-level knowledge, therefore it is likely that the incorporation of domain knowledge in automated methods will enable them to perform better, especially in sets of images with a variety of diagnoses.
Lesion Border Detection in Dermoscopy Images
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The problem of identifying the 3D pose of a known object from a given 2D image has important applications in Computer Vision ranging from robotic vision to image analysis. Our proposed method of registering a 3D model of a known object on a given 2D photo of the object has numerous advantages over existing methods: It does neither require prior training nor learning, nor knowledge of the camera parameters, nor explicit point correspondences or matching features between image and model. Unlike techniques that estimate a partial 3D pose (as in an overhead view of traffic or machine parts on a conveyor belt), our method estimates the complete 3D pose of the object, and works on a single static image from a given view, and under varying and unknown lighting conditions. For this purpose we derive a novel illumination-invariant distance measure between 2D photo and projected 3D model, which is then minimised to find the best pose parameters. Results for vehicle pose detection are presented.
Featureless 2D-3D Pose Estimation by Minimising an Illumination-Invariant Loss
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In this paper, a new directionally adaptive, learning based, single image super resolution method using multiple direction wavelet transform, called Directionlets is presented. This method uses directionlets to effectively capture directional features and to extract edge information along different directions of a set of available high resolution images .This information is used as the training set for super resolving a low resolution input image and the Directionlet coefficients at finer scales of its high-resolution image are learned locally from this training set and the inverse Directionlet transform recovers the super-resolved high resolution image. The simulation results showed that the proposed approach outperforms standard interpolation techniques like Cubic spline interpolation as well as standard Wavelet-based learning, both visually and in terms of the mean squared error (mse) values. This method gives good result with aliased images also.
Single Frame Image super Resolution using Learned Directionlets
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Combining the properties of monovariate internal functions as proposed in Kolmogorov superimposition theorem, in tandem with the bounds wielded by the multivariate formulation of Chebyshev inequality, a hybrid model is presented, that decomposes images into homogeneous probabilistically bounded multivariate surfaces. Given an image, the model shows a novel way of working on reduced image representation while processing and capturing the interaction among the multidimensional information that describes the content of the same. Further, it tackles the practical issues of preventing leakage by bounding the growth of surface and reducing the problem sample size. The model if used, also sheds light on how the Chebyshev parameter relates to the number of pixels and the dimensionality of the feature space that associates with a pixel. Initial segmentation results on the Berkeley image segmentation benchmark indicate the effectiveness of the proposed decomposition algorithm.
Bounded Multivariate Surfaces On Monovariate Internal Functions
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A scattering vector is a local descriptor including multiscale and multi-direction co-occurrence information. It is computed with a cascade of wavelet decompositions and complex modulus. This scattering representation is locally translation invariant and linearizes deformations. A supervised classification algorithm is computed with a PCA model selection on scattering vectors. State of the art results are obtained for handwritten digit recognition and texture classification.
Classification with Scattering Operators
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Classification is one of the most important tasks of machine learning. Although the most well studied model is the two-class problem, in many scenarios there is the opportunity to label critical items for manual revision, instead of trying to automatically classify every item. In this paper we adapt a paradigm initially proposed for the classification of ordinal data to address the classification problem with reject option. The technique reduces the problem of classifying with reject option to the standard two-class problem. The introduced method is then mapped into support vector machines and neural networks. Finally, the framework is extended to multiclass ordinal data with reject option. An experimental study with synthetic and real data sets, verifies the usefulness of the proposed approach.
The Data Replication Method for the Classification with Reject Option
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In this paper a fuzzy clustering model for fuzzy data with outliers is proposed. The model is based on Wasserstein distance between interval valued data which is generalized to fuzzy data. In addition, Keller's approach is used to identify outliers and reduce their influences. We have also defined a transformation to change our distance to the Euclidean distance. With the help of this approach, the problem of fuzzy clustering of fuzzy data is reduced to fuzzy clustering of crisp data. In order to show the performance of the proposed clustering algorithm, two simulation experiments are discussed.
A Fuzzy Clustering Model for Fuzzy Data with Outliers
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In this paper we propose a new wavelet transform applicable to functions defined on graphs, high dimensional data and networks. The proposed method generalizes the Haar-like transform proposed in [1], and it is defined via a hierarchical tree, which is assumed to capture the geometry and structure of the input data. It is applied to the data using a modified version of the common one-dimensional (1D) wavelet filtering and decimation scheme, which can employ different wavelet filters. In each level of this wavelet decomposition scheme, a permutation derived from the tree is applied to the approximation coefficients, before they are filtered. We propose a tree construction method that results in an efficient representation of the input function in the transform domain. We show that the proposed transform is more efficient than both the 1D and two-dimensional (2D) separable wavelet transforms in representing images. We also explore the application of the proposed transform to image denoising, and show that combined with a subimage averaging scheme, it achieves denoising results which are similar to those obtained with the K-SVD algorithm.
Generalized Tree-Based Wavelet Transform
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The goal of this paper is the development of a novel approach for the problem of Noise Removal, based on the theory of Reproducing Kernels Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). The problem is cast as an optimization task in a RKHS, by taking advantage of the celebrated semiparametric Representer Theorem. Examples verify that in the presence of gaussian noise the proposed method performs relatively well compared to wavelet based technics and outperforms them significantly in the presence of impulse or mixed noise. A more detailed version of this work has been published in the IEEE Trans. Im. Proc. : P. Bouboulis, K. Slavakis and S. Theodoridis, Adaptive Kernel-based Image Denoising employing Semi-Parametric Regularization, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol 19(6), 2010, 1465 - 1479.
Edge Preserving Image Denoising in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces
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This paper introduces a new method for learning and inferring sparse representations of depth (disparity) maps. The proposed algorithm relaxes the usual assumption of the stationary noise model in sparse coding. This enables learning from data corrupted with spatially varying noise or uncertainty, typically obtained by laser range scanners or structured light depth cameras. Sparse representations are learned from the Middlebury database disparity maps and then exploited in a two-layer graphical model for inferring depth from stereo, by including a sparsity prior on the learned features. Since they capture higher-order dependencies in the depth structure, these priors can complement smoothness priors commonly used in depth inference based on Markov Random Field (MRF) models. Inference on the proposed graph is achieved using an alternating iterative optimization technique, where the first layer is solved using an existing MRF-based stereo matching algorithm, then held fixed as the second layer is solved using the proposed non-stationary sparse coding algorithm. This leads to a general method for improving solutions of state of the art MRF-based depth estimation algorithms. Our experimental results first show that depth inference using learned representations leads to state of the art denoising of depth maps obtained from laser range scanners and a time of flight camera. Furthermore, we show that adding sparse priors improves the results of two depth estimation methods: the classical graph cut algorithm by Boykov et al. and the more recent algorithm of Woodford et al.
Learning sparse representations of depth
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We present a method for segmenting an arbitrary number of moving objects in image sequences using the geometry of 6 points in 2D to infer motion consistency. The method has been evaluated on the Hopkins 155 database and surpasses current state-of-the-art methods such as SSC, both in terms of overall performance on two and three motions but also in terms of maximum errors. The method works by finding initial clusters in the spatial domain, and then classifying each remaining point as belonging to the cluster that minimizes a motion consistency score. In contrast to most other motion segmentation methods that are based on an affine camera model, the proposed method is fully projective.
Sparse motion segmentation using multiple six-point consistencies
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We revisit the problem of model-based object recognition for intensity images and attempt to address some of the shortcomings of existing Bayesian methods, such as unsuitable priors and the treatment of residuals with a non-robust error norm. We do so by using a refor- mulation of the Huber metric and carefully chosen prior distributions. Our proposed method is invariant to 2-dimensional affine transforma- tions and, because it is relatively easy to train and use, it is suited for general object matching problems.
Affine Invariant, Model-Based Object Recognition Using Robust Metrics and Bayesian Statistics
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The $\ell_1$ tracker obtains robustness by seeking a sparse representation of the tracking object via $\ell_1$ norm minimization \cite{Xue_ICCV_09_Track}. However, the high computational complexity involved in the $ \ell_1 $ tracker restricts its further applications in real time processing scenario. Hence we propose a Real Time Compressed Sensing Tracking (RTCST) by exploiting the signal recovery power of Compressed Sensing (CS). Dimensionality reduction and a customized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm are adopted to accelerate the CS tracking. As a result, our algorithm achieves a real-time speed that is up to $6,000$ times faster than that of the $\ell_1$ tracker. Meanwhile, RTCST still produces competitive (sometimes even superior) tracking accuracy comparing to the existing $\ell_1$ tracker. Furthermore, for a stationary camera, a further refined tracker is designed by integrating a CS-based background model (CSBM). This CSBM-equipped tracker coined as RTCST-B, outperforms most state-of-the-arts with respect to both accuracy and robustness. Finally, our experimental results on various video sequences, which are verified by a new metric---Tracking Success Probability (TSP), show the excellence of the proposed algorithms.
Real-time Visual Tracking Using Sparse Representation
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In this paper, we show how to efficiently and effectively extract a class of "low-rank textures" in a 3D scene from 2D images despite significant corruptions and warping. The low-rank textures capture geometrically meaningful structures in an image, which encompass conventional local features such as edges and corners as well as all kinds of regular, symmetric patterns ubiquitous in urban environments and man-made objects. Our approach to finding these low-rank textures leverages the recent breakthroughs in convex optimization that enable robust recovery of a high-dimensional low-rank matrix despite gross sparse errors. In the case of planar regions with significant affine or projective deformation, our method can accurately recover both the intrinsic low-rank texture and the precise domain transformation, and hence the 3D geometry and appearance of the planar regions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that this new technique works effectively for many regular and near-regular patterns or objects that are approximately low-rank, such as symmetrical patterns, building facades, printed texts, and human faces.
TILT: Transform Invariant Low-rank Textures
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This chapter presents a framework for detecting fake regions by using various methods including watermarking technique and blind approaches. In particular, we describe current categories on blind approaches which can be divided into five: pixel-based techniques, format-based techniques, camera-based techniques, physically-based techniques and geometric-based techniques. Then we take a second look on the geometric-based techniques and further categorize them in detail. In the following section, the state-of-the-art methods involved in the geometric technique are elaborated.
Detecting Image Forgeries using Geometric Cues
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Maximally stable component detection is a very popular method for feature analysis in images, mainly due to its low computation cost and high repeatability. With the recent advance of feature-based methods in geometric shape analysis, there is significant interest in finding analogous approaches in the 3D world. In this paper, we formulate a diffusion-geometric framework for stable component detection in non-rigid 3D shapes, which can be used for geometric feature detection and description. A quantitative evaluation of our method on the SHREC'10 feature detection benchmark shows its potential as a source of high-quality features.
Diffusion-geometric maximally stable component detection in deformable shapes
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We introduce an (equi-)affine invariant diffusion geometry by which surfaces that go through squeeze and shear transformations can still be properly analyzed. The definition of an affine invariant metric enables us to construct an invariant Laplacian from which local and global geometric structures are extracted. Applications of the proposed framework demonstrate its power in generalizing and enriching the existing set of tools for shape analysis.
Affine-invariant diffusion geometry for the analysis of deformable 3D shapes
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Natural objects can be subject to various transformations yet still preserve properties that we refer to as invariants. Here, we use definitions of affine invariant arclength for surfaces in R^3 in order to extend the set of existing non-rigid shape analysis tools. In fact, we show that by re-defining the surface metric as its equi-affine version, the surface with its modified metric tensor can be treated as a canonical Euclidean object on which most classical Euclidean processing and analysis tools can be applied. The new definition of a metric is used to extend the fast marching method technique for computing geodesic distances on surfaces, where now, the distances are defined with respect to an affine invariant arclength. Applications of the proposed framework demonstrate its invariance, efficiency, and accuracy in shape analysis.
Affine-invariant geodesic geometry of deformable 3D shapes
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This work presents a framework for tracking head movements and capturing the movements of the mouth and both the eyebrows in real-time. We present a head tracker which is a combination of a optical flow and a template based tracker. The estimation of the optical flow head tracker is used as starting point for the template tracker which fine-tunes the head estimation. This approach together with re-updating the optical flow points prevents the head tracker from drifting. This combination together with our switching scheme, makes our tracker very robust against fast movement and motion-blur. We also propose a way to reduce the influence of partial occlusion of the head. In both the optical flow and the template based tracker we identify and exclude occluded points.
A Framework for Real-Time Face and Facial Feature Tracking using Optical Flow Pre-estimation and Template Tracking
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Accumulating evidence has shown that iron is involved in the mechanism underlying many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. Abnormal (higher) iron accumulation has been detected in the brains of most neurodegenerative patients, especially in the basal ganglia region. Presence of iron leads to changes in MR signal in both magnitude and phase. Accordingly, tissues with high iron concentration appear hypo-intense (darker than usual) in MR contrasts. In this report, we proposed an improved binary hypointensity description and a novel nonbinary hypointensity description based on principle components analysis. Moreover, Kendall's rank correlation coefficient was used to compare the complementary and redundant information provided by the two methods in order to better understand the individual descriptions of iron accumulation in the brain.
Binary and nonbinary description of hypointensity in human brain MR images
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Two types of combining strategies were evaluated namely combining skin features and combining skin classifiers. Several combining rules were applied where the outputs of the skin classifiers are combined using binary operators such as the AND and the OR operators, "Voting", "Sum of Weights" and a new neural network. Three chrominance components from the YCbCr colour space that gave the highest correct detection on their single feature MLP were selected as the combining parameters. A major issue in designing a MLP neural network is to determine the optimal number of hidden units given a set of training patterns. Therefore, a "coarse to fine search" method to find the number of neurons in the hidden layer is proposed. The strategy of combining Cb/Cr and Cr features improved the correct detection by 3.01% compared to the best single feature MLP given by Cb-Cr. The strategy of combining the outputs of three skin classifiers using the "Sum of Weights" rule further improved the correct detection by 4.38% compared to the best single feature MLP.
Combining Neural Networks for Skin Detection
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Due to huge deformation in the camera captured images, variety in nature of the business cards and the computational constraints of the mobile devices, design of an efficient Business Card Reader (BCR) is challenging to the researchers. Extraction of text regions and segmenting them into characters is one of such challenges. In this paper, we have presented an efficient character segmentation technique for business card images captured by a cell-phone camera, designed in our present work towards developing an efficient BCR. At first, text regions are extracted from the card images and then the skewed ones are corrected using a computationally efficient skew correction technique. At last, these skew corrected text regions are segmented into lines and characters based on horizontal and vertical histogram. Experiments show that the present technique is efficient and applicable for mobile devices, and the mean segmentation accuracy of 97.48% is achieved with 3 mega-pixel (500-600 dpi) images. It takes only 1.1 seconds for segmentation including all the preprocessing steps on a moderately powerful notebook (DualCore T2370, 1.73 GHz, 1GB RAM, 1MB L2 Cache).
Segmentation of Camera Captured Business Card Images for Mobile Devices
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Various applications of car plate recognition systems have been developed using various kinds of methods and techniques by researchers all over the world. The applications developed were only suitable for specific country due to its standard specification endorsed by the transport department of particular countries. The Road Transport Department of Malaysia also has endorsed a specification for car plates that includes the font and size of characters that must be followed by car owners. However, there are cases where this specification is not followed. Several applications have been developed in Malaysia to overcome this problem. However, there is still problem in achieving 100% recognition accuracy. This paper is mainly focused on conducting an experiment using chain codes technique to perform recognition for different types of fonts used in Malaysian car plates.
Application of Freeman Chain Codes: An Alternative Recognition Technique for Malaysian Car Plates
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A symmetrical model of color vision, the decoding model as a new version of zone model, was introduced. The model adopts new continuous-valued logic and works in a way very similar to the way a 3-8 decoder in a numerical circuit works. By the decoding model, Young and Helmholtz's tri-pigment theory and Hering's opponent theory are unified more naturally; opponent process, color evolution, and color blindness are illustrated more concisely. According to the decoding model, we can obtain a transform from RGB system to HSV system, which is formally identical to the popular transform for computer graphics provided by Smith (1978). Advantages, problems, and physiological tests of the decoding model are also discussed.
Illustrating Color Evolution and Color Blindness by the Decoding Model of Color Vision
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In this work, the possibilities for segmentation of cells from their background and each other in digital image were tested, combined and improoved. Lot of images with young, adult and mixture cells were able to prove the quality of described algorithms. Proper segmentation is one of the main task of image analysis and steps order differ from work to work, depending on input images. Reply for biologicaly given question was looking for in this work, including filtration, details emphasizing, segmentation and sphericity computing. Order of algorithms and way to searching for them was also described. Some questions and ideas for further work were mentioned in the conclusion part.
Automatic segmentation of HeLa cell images
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English Character Recognition (CR) has been extensively studied in the last half century and progressed to a level, sufficient to produce technology driven applications. But same is not the case for Indian languages which are complicated in terms of structure and computations. Rapidly growing computational power may enable the implementation of Indic CR methodologies. Digital document processing is gaining popularity for application to office and library automation, bank and postal services, publishing houses and communication technology. Devnagari being the national language of India, spoken by more than 500 million people, should be given special attention so that document retrieval and analysis of rich ancient and modern Indian literature can be effectively done. This article is intended to serve as a guide and update for the readers, working in the Devnagari Optical Character Recognition (DOCR) area. An overview of DOCR systems is presented and the available DOCR techniques are reviewed. The current status of DOCR is discussed and directions for future research are suggested.
A Review of Research on Devnagari Character Recognition
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In this paper, we explore the use of the diffusion geometry framework for the fusion of geometric and photometric information in local and global shape descriptors. Our construction is based on the definition of a diffusion process on the shape manifold embedded into a high-dimensional space where the embedding coordinates represent the photometric information. Experimental results show that such data fusion is useful in coping with different challenges of shape analysis where pure geometric and pure photometric methods fail.
Diffusion framework for geometric and photometric data fusion in non-rigid shape analysis
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The richness of natural images makes the quest for optimal representations in image processing and computer vision challenging. The latter observation has not prevented the design of image representations, which trade off between efficiency and complexity, while achieving accurate rendering of smooth regions as well as reproducing faithful contours and textures. The most recent ones, proposed in the past decade, share an hybrid heritage highlighting the multiscale and oriented nature of edges and patterns in images. This paper presents a panorama of the aforementioned literature on decompositions in multiscale, multi-orientation bases or dictionaries. They typically exhibit redundancy to improve sparsity in the transformed domain and sometimes its invariance with respect to simple geometric deformations (translation, rotation). Oriented multiscale dictionaries extend traditional wavelet processing and may offer rotation invariance. Highly redundant dictionaries require specific algorithms to simplify the search for an efficient (sparse) representation. We also discuss the extension of multiscale geometric decompositions to non-Euclidean domains such as the sphere or arbitrary meshed surfaces. The etymology of panorama suggests an overview, based on a choice of partially overlapping "pictures". We hope that this paper will contribute to the appreciation and apprehension of a stream of current research directions in image understanding.
A Panorama on Multiscale Geometric Representations, Intertwining Spatial, Directional and Frequency Selectivity
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This paper proposes the problem of modeling video sequences of dynamic swarms (DS). We define DS as a large layout of stochastically repetitive spatial configurations of dynamic objects (swarm elements) whose motions exhibit local spatiotemporal interdependency and stationarity, i.e., the motions are similar in any small spatiotemporal neighborhood. Examples of DS abound in nature, e.g., herds of animals and flocks of birds. To capture the local spatiotemporal properties of the DS, we present a probabilistic model that learns both the spatial layout of swarm elements and their joint dynamics that are modeled as linear transformations. To this end, a spatiotemporal neighborhood is associated with each swarm element, in which local stationarity is enforced both spatially and temporally. We assume that the prior on the swarm dynamics is distributed according to an MRF in both space and time. Embedding this model in a MAP framework, we iterate between learning the spatial layout of the swarm and its dynamics. We learn the swarm transformations using ICM, which iterates between estimating these transformations and updating their distribution in the spatiotemporal neighborhoods. We demonstrate the validity of our method by conducting experiments on real video sequences. Real sequences of birds, geese, robot swarms, and pedestrians evaluate the applicability of our model to real world data.
Modeling Dynamic Swarms
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There is an increasing use of some imperceivable and redundant local features for face recognition. While only a relatively small fraction of them is relevant to the final recognition task, the feature selection is a crucial and necessary step to select the most discriminant ones to obtain a compact face representation. In this paper, we investigate the sparsity-enforced regularization-based feature selection methods and propose a multi-task feature selection method for building person specific models for face verification. We assume that the person specific models share a common subset of features and novelly reformulated the common subset selection problem as a simultaneous sparse approximation problem. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to apply the sparsity-enforced regularization methods for person specific face verification. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified with the challenging LFW face databases.
Feature selection via simultaneous sparse approximation for person specific face verification
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Feature-based approaches have recently become very popular in computer vision and image analysis applications, and are becoming a promising direction in shape retrieval. SHREC'11 robust feature detection and description benchmark simulates the feature detection and description stages of feature-based shape retrieval algorithms. The benchmark tests the performance of shape feature detectors and descriptors under a wide variety of transformations. The benchmark allows evaluating how algorithms cope with certain classes of transformations and strength of the transformations that can be dealt with. The present paper is a report of the SHREC'11 robust feature detection and description benchmark results.
SHREC 2011: robust feature detection and description benchmark
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Due to the factors like processing power limitations and channel capabilities images are often down sampled and transmitted at low bit rates resulting in a low resolution compressed image. High resolution images can be reconstructed from several blurred, noisy and down sampled low resolution images using a computational process know as super resolution reconstruction. Super-resolution is the process of combining multiple aliased low-quality images to produce a high resolution, high-quality image. The problem of recovering a high resolution image progressively from a sequence of low resolution compressed images is considered. In this paper we propose a novel DCT based progressive image display algorithm by stressing on the encoding and decoding process. At the encoder we consider a set of low resolution images which are corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise and motion blur. The low resolution images are compressed using 8 by 8 blocks DCT and noise is filtered using our proposed novel zonal filter. Multiframe fusion is performed in order to obtain a single noise free image. At the decoder the image is reconstructed progressively by transmitting the coarser image first followed by the detail image. And finally a super resolution image is reconstructed by applying our proposed novel adaptive interpolation technique. We have performed both objective and subjective analysis of the reconstructed image, and the resultant image has better super resolution factor, and a higher ISNR and PSNR. A comparative study done with Iterative Back Projection (IBP) and Projection on to Convex Sets (POCS),Papoulis Grechberg, FFT based Super resolution Reconstruction shows that our method has out performed the previous contributions.
A novel super resolution reconstruction of low reoslution images progressively using dct and zonal filter based denoising
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In this paper we present a novel approach for automatic recognition of ring worm skin disease based on LBP (Local Binary Pattern) feature extracted from the affected skin images. The proposed method is evaluated by extensive experiments on the skin images collected from internet. The dataset is tested using three different classifiers i.e. Bayesian, MLP and SVM. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology efficiently discriminates between a ring worm skin and a normal skin. It is a low cost technique and does not require any special imaging devices.
Automatic Detection of Ringworm using Local Binary Pattern (LBP)
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Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) allows estimating the position, orientation and dimension of bundles of nerve pathways. This non-invasive imaging technique takes advantage of the diffusion of water molecules and determines the diffusion coefficients for every voxel of the data set. The identification of the diffusion coefficients and the derivation of information about fiber bundles is of major interest for planning and performing neurosurgical interventions. To minimize the risk of neural deficits during brain surgery as tumor resection (e.g. glioma), the segmentation and integration of the results in the operating room is of prime importance. In this contribution, a robust and efficient graph-based approach for segmentating tubular fiber bundles in the human brain is presented. To define a cost function, the fractional anisotropy (FA) is used, derived from the DTI data, but this value may differ from patient to patient. Besides manually definining seed regions describing the structure of interest, additionally a manual definition of the cost function by the user is necessary. To improve the approach the contribution introduces a solution for automatically determining the cost function by using different 3D masks for each individual data set.
A Semi-Automatic Graph-Based Approach for Determining the Boundary of Eloquent Fiber Bundles in the Human Brain
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This short article presents a class of projection-based solution algorithms to the problem considered in the pioneering work on compressed sensing - perfect reconstruction of a phantom image from 22 radial lines in the frequency domain. Under the framework of projection-based image reconstruction, we will show experimentally that several old and new tools of nonlinear filtering (including Perona-Malik diffusion, nonlinear diffusion, Translation-Invariant thresholding and SA-DCT thresholding) all lead to perfect reconstruction of the phantom image.
All Roads Lead To Rome
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Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) provides the possibility of estimating the location and course of eloquent structures in the human brain. Knowledge about this is of high importance for preoperative planning of neurosurgical interventions and for intraoperative guidance by neuronavigation in order to minimize postoperative neurological deficits. Therefore, the segmentation of these structures as closed, three-dimensional object is necessary. In this contribution, two methods for fiber bundle segmentation between two defined regions are compared using software phantoms (abstract model and anatomical phantom modeling the right corticospinal tract). One method uses evaluation points from sampled rays as candidates for boundary points, the other method sets up a directed and weighted (depending on a scalar measure) graph and performs a min-cut for optimal segmentation results. Comparison is done by using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), a measure for spatial overlap of different segmentation results.
Ray-Based and Graph-Based Methods for Fiber Bundle Boundary Estimation
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In this paper, a new method for handwritten signature identification based on rotated complex wavelet filters is proposed. We have proposed to use the rotated complex wavelet filters (RCWF) and dual tree complex wavelet transform(DTCWT) together to derive signature feature extraction, which captures information in twelve different directions. In identification phase, Canberra distance measure is used. The proposed method is compared with discrete wavelet transform (DWT). From experimental results it is found that signature identification rate of proposed method is superior over DWT
Off-Line Handwritten Signature Identification Using Rotated Complex Wavelet Filters
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In the 21st century, Aerial and satellite images are information rich. They are also complex to analyze. For GIS systems, many features require fast and reliable extraction of open space area from high resolution satellite imagery. In this paper we will study efficient and reliable automatic extraction algorithm to find out the open space area from the high resolution urban satellite imagery. This automatic extraction algorithm uses some filters and segmentations and grouping is applying on satellite images. And the result images may use to calculate the total available open space area and the built up area. It may also use to compare the difference between present and past open space area using historical urban satellite images of that same projection
Automatic Extraction of Open Space Area from High Resolution Urban Satellite Imagery
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In this paper, we study efficient and reliable automatic extraction algorithm to find out the open space area from the high resolution urban satellite imagery, and to detect changes from the extracted open space area during the period 2003, 2006 and 2008. This automatic extraction and change detection algorithm uses some filters, segmentation and grouping that are applied on satellite images. The resultant images may be used to calculate the total available open space area and the built up area. It may also be used to compare the difference between present and past open space area using historical urban satellite images of that same projection, which is an important geo spatial data management application.
Automatic Open Space Area Extraction and Change Detection from High Resolution Urban Satellite Images
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Historical documents such as old books and manuscripts have a high aesthetic value and highly appreciated. Unfortunately, there are some documents cannot be read due to quality problems like faded paper, ink expand, uneven colour tone, torn paper and other elements disruption such as the existence of small spots. The study aims to produce a copy of manuscript that shows clear wordings so they can easily be read and the copy can also be displayed for visitors. 16 samples of Jawi historical manuscript with different quality problems were obtained from The Royal Museum of Pahang, Malaysia. We applied three binarization techniques; Otsu's method represents global threshold technique; Sauvola and Niblack method which are categorized as local threshold techniques. We compared the binarized images with the original manuscript to be visually inspected by the museum's curator. The unclear features were marked and analyzed. Most of the examined images show that with optimal parameters and effective pre processing technique, local thresholding methods are work well compare with the other one. Niblack's and Sauvola's techniques seem to be the suitable approaches for these types of images. Most of binarized images with these two methods show improvement for readability and character recognition. For this research, even the differences of image result were hard to be distinguished by human capabilities, after comparing the time cost and overall achievement rate of recognized symbols, Niblack's method is performing better than Sauvola's. We could improve the post processing step by adding edge detection techniques and further enhanced by an innovative image refinement technique and a formulation of a class proper method.
Application of Threshold Techniques for Readability Improvement of Jawi Historical Manuscript Images
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Discontinuity preserving smoothing is a fundamentally important procedure that is useful in a wide variety of image processing contexts. It is directly useful for noise reduction, and frequently used as an intermediate step in higher level algorithms. For example, it can be particularly useful in edge detection and segmentation. Three well known algorithms for discontinuity preserving smoothing are nonlinear anisotropic diffusion, bilateral filtering, and mean shift filtering. Although slight differences make them each better suited to different tasks, all are designed to preserve discontinuities while smoothing. However, none of them satisfy this goal perfectly: they each have exception cases in which smoothing may occur across hard edges. The principal contribution of this paper is the identification of a property we call edge awareness that should be satisfied by any discontinuity preserving smoothing algorithm. This constraint can be incorporated into existing algorithms to improve quality, and usually has negligible changes in runtime performance and/or complexity. We present modifications necessary to augment diffusion and mean shift, as well as a new formulation of the bilateral filter that unifies the spatial and range spaces to achieve edge awareness.
Improved Edge Awareness in Discontinuity Preserving Smoothing
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The fundamental matrix and trifocal tensor are convenient algebraic representations of the epipolar geometry of two and three view configurations, respectively. The estimation of these entities is central to most reconstruction algorithms, and a solid understanding of their properties and constraints is therefore very important. The fundamental matrix has 1 internal constraint which is well understood, whereas the trifocal tensor has 8 independent algebraic constraints. The internal tensor constraints can be represented in many ways, although there is only one minimal and sufficient set of 8 constraints known. In this paper, we derive a second set of minimal and sufficient constraints that is simpler. We also show how this can be used in a new parameterization of the trifocal tensor. We hope that this increased understanding of the internal constraints may lead to improved algorithms for estimating the trifocal tensor, although the primary contribution is an improved theoretical understanding.
Internal Constraints of the Trifocal Tensor
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This report presents the results and details of a content-based image retrieval project using the Top-surf descriptor. The experimental results are preliminary, however, it shows the capability of deducing objects from parts of the objects or from the objects that are similar. This paper uses a dataset consisting of 1200 images of which 800 images are equally divided into 8 categories, namely airplane, beach, motorbike, forest, elephants, horses, bus and building, while the other 400 images are randomly picked from the Internet. The best results achieved are from building category.
Image Retrieval Method Using Top-surf Descriptor
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Bag-of-words model is implemented and tried on 10-class visual concept detection problem. The experimental results show that "DURF+ERT+SVM" outperforms "SIFT+ERT+SVM" both in detection performance and computation efficiency. Besides, combining DURF and SIFT results in even better detection performance. Real-time object detection using SIFT and RANSAC is also tried on simple objects, e.g. drink can, and good result is achieved.
Visual Concept Detection and Real Time Object Detection
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Facial expressions convey non-verbal cues, which play an important role in interpersonal relations. Automatic recognition of human face based on facial expression can be an important component of natural human-machine interface. It may also be used in behavioural science. Although human can recognize the face practically without any effort, but reliable face recognition by machine is a challenge. This paper presents a new approach for recognizing the face of a person considering the expressions of the same human face at different instances of time. This methodology is developed combining Eigenface method for feature extraction and modified k-Means clustering for identification of the human face. This method endowed the face recognition without using the conventional distance measure classifiers. Simulation results show that proposed face recognition using perception of k-Means clustering is useful for face images with different facial expressions.
A Statistical Nonparametric Approach of Face Recognition: Combination of Eigenface & Modified k-Means Clustering
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A new method is proposed to get image features' geometric information. Using Gaussian as an input signal, a theoretical optimal solution to calculate feature's affine shape is proposed. Based on analytic result of a feature model, the method is different from conventional iterative approaches. From the model, feature's parameters such as position, orientation, background luminance, contrast, area and aspect ratio can be extracted. Tested with synthesized and benchmark data, the method achieves or outperforms existing approaches in term of accuracy, speed and stability. The method can detect small, long or thin objects precisely, and works well under general conditions, such as for low contrast, blurred or noisy images.
Gaussian Affine Feature Detector
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Design of a fuzzy rule based classifier is proposed. The performance of the classifier for multispectral satellite image classification is improved using Dempster- Shafer theory of evidence that exploits information of the neighboring pixels. The classifiers are tested rigorously with two known images and their performance are found to be better than the results available in the literature. We also demonstrate the improvement of performance while using D-S theory along with fuzzy rule based classifiers over the basic fuzzy rule based classifiers for all the test cases.
Fuzzy Rules and Evidence Theory for Satellite Image Analysis
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We present a novel method that allows for measuring the quality of diffusion-weighted MR images dependent on the image resolution and the image noise. For this purpose, we introduce a new thresholding technique so that noise and the signal can automatically be estimated from a single data set. Thus, no user interaction as well as no double acquisition technique, which requires a time-consuming proper geometrical registration, is needed. As a coarser image resolution or slice thickness leads to a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), our benchmark determines a resolution-independent quality measure so that images with different resolutions can be adequately compared. To evaluate our method, a set of diffusion-weighted images from different vendors is used. It is shown that the quality can efficiently be determined and that the automatically computed SNR is comparable to the SNR which is measured manually in a manually selected region of interest.
Benchmarking the Quality of Diffusion-Weighted Images
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In this paper, a new method for offline handwritten signature retrieval is based on curvelet transform is proposed. Many applications in image processing require similarity retrieval of an image from a large collection of images. In such cases, image indexing becomes important for efficient organization and retrieval of images. This paper addresses this issue in the context of a database of handwritten signature images and describes a system for similarity retrieval. The proposed system uses a curvelet based texture features extraction. The performance of the system has been tested with an image database of 180 signatures. The results obtained indicate that the proposed system is able to identify signatures with great with accuracy even when a part of a signature is missing.
Off-Line Handwritten Signature Retrieval using Curvelet Transforms
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Template matching is one of the most prevalent pattern recognition methods worldwide. It has found uses in most visual concept detection fields. In this work, we investigate methods for improving template matching by adjusting the weights of different regions of the template. We compare several weight maps and test the methods using the FERET face test set in the context of human eye detection.
Template-based matching using weight maps
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The main goal of the GEOMIR2K9 project is to create a software program that is able to find similar scenic images clustered by geographical location and sorted by similarity based only on their visual content. The user should be able to input a query image, based on this given query image the program should find relevant visual content and present this to the user in a meaningful way. Technically the goal for the GEOMIR2K9 project is twofold. The first of these two goals is to create a basic low level visual information retrieval system. This includes feature extraction, post processing of the feature data and classification/ clustering based on similarity with a strong focus on scenic images. The second goal of this project is to provide the user with a novel and suitable interface and visualization method so that the user may interact with the retrieved images in a natural and meaningful way.
GEOMIR2K9 - A Similar Scene Finder
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