text
stringlengths
17
3.36M
source
stringlengths
3
333
__index_level_0__
int64
0
518k
Numerous approaches in image processing and computer vision are making use of super-pixels as a pre-processing step. Among the different methods producing such over-segmentation of an image, the graph-based approach of Felzenszwalb and Huttenlocher is broadly employed. One of its interesting properties is that the regions are computed in a greedy manner in quasi-linear time. The algorithm may be trivially extended to video segmentation by considering a video as a 3D volume, however, this can not be the case for causal segmentation, when subsequent frames are unknown. We propose an efficient video segmentation approach that computes temporally consistent pixels in a causal manner, filling the need for causal and real time applications.
Causal graph-based video segmentation
3,700
Some types of medical and topographic imaging device produce images in which the pixel values are "phase-wrapped", i.e. measured modulus a known scalar. Phase unwrapping can be viewed as the problem of inferring the number of shifts between each and every pair of neighboring pixels, subject to an a priori preference for smooth surfaces, and subject to a zero curl constraint, which requires that the shifts must sum to 0 around every loop. We formulate phase unwrapping as a mean field inference problem in a Markov network, where the prior favors the zero curl constraint. We compare our mean field technique with the least squares method on a synthetic 100x100 image, and give results on a 512x512 synthetic aperture radar image from Sandia National Laboratories.<Long Text>
A Factorized Variational Technique for Phase Unwrapping in Markov Random Fields
3,701
We present the clustering learning technique applied to multi-layer feedforward deep neural networks. We show that this unsupervised learning technique can compute network filters with only a few minutes and a much reduced set of parameters. The goal of this paper is to promote the technique for general-purpose robotic vision systems. We report its use in static image datasets and object tracking datasets. We show that networks trained with clustering learning can outperform large networks trained for many hours on complex datasets.
Clustering Learning for Robotic Vision
3,702
Both pixel-based scale saliency (PSS) and basis project methods focus on multiscale analysis of data content and structure. Their theoretical relations and practical combination are previously discussed. However, no models have ever been proposed for calculating scale saliency on basis-projected descriptors since then. This paper extend those ideas into mathematical models and implement them in the wavelet-based scale saliency (WSS). While PSS uses pixel-value descriptors, WSS treats wavelet sub-bands as basis descriptors. The paper discusses different wavelet descriptors: discrete wavelet transform (DWT), wavelet packet transform (DWPT), quaternion wavelet transform (QWT) and best basis quaternion wavelet packet transform (QWPTBB). WSS saliency maps of different descriptors are generated and compared against other saliency methods by both quantitative and quanlitative methods. Quantitative results, ROC curves, AUC values and NSS values are collected from simulations on Bruce and Kootstra image databases with human eye-tracking data as ground-truth. Furthermore, qualitative visual results of saliency maps are analyzed and compared against each other as well as eye-tracking data inclusive in the databases.
Wavelet-based Scale Saliency
3,703
This paper presents a basic enhancement to the DeSTIN deep learning architecture by replacing the explicitly calculated transition tables that are used to capture temporal features with a simpler, more scalable mechanism. This mechanism uses feedback of state information to cluster over a space comprised of both the spatial input and the current state. The resulting architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the MNIST classification benchmark.
Recurrent Online Clustering as a Spatio-Temporal Feature Extractor in DeSTIN
3,704
We describe a method for cell-division detection based on a geometric-driven descriptor that can be represented as a 5-layers processing network, based mainly on wavelet filtering and a test for mirror symmetry between pairs of pixels. After the centroids of the descriptors are computed for a sequence of frames, the two-steps piecewise constant function that best fits the sequence of centroids determines the frame where the division occurs.
A Geometric Descriptor for Cell-Division Detection
3,705
This paper describes serial and parallel compositional models of multiple objects with part sharing. Objects are built by part-subpart compositions and expressed in terms of a hierarchical dictionary of object parts. These parts are represented on lattices of decreasing sizes which yield an executive summary description. We describe inference and learning algorithms for these models. We analyze the complexity of this model in terms of computation time (for serial computers) and numbers of nodes (e.g., "neurons") for parallel computers. In particular, we compute the complexity gains by part sharing and its dependence on how the dictionary scales with the level of the hierarchy. We explore three regimes of scaling behavior where the dictionary size (i) increases exponentially with the level, (ii) is determined by an unsupervised compositional learning algorithm applied to real data, (iii) decreases exponentially with scale. This analysis shows that in some regimes the use of shared parts enables algorithms which can perform inference in time linear in the number of levels for an exponential number of objects. In other regimes part sharing has little advantage for serial computers but can give linear processing on parallel computers.
Complexity of Representation and Inference in Compositional Models with Part Sharing
3,706
This work addresses multi-class segmentation of indoor scenes with RGB-D inputs. While this area of research has gained much attention recently, most works still rely on hand-crafted features. In contrast, we apply a multiscale convolutional network to learn features directly from the images and the depth information. We obtain state-of-the-art on the NYU-v2 depth dataset with an accuracy of 64.5%. We illustrate the labeling of indoor scenes in videos sequences that could be processed in real-time using appropriate hardware such as an FPGA.
Indoor Semantic Segmentation using depth information
3,707
Hyper-parameter selection remains a daunting task when building a pattern recognition architecture which performs well, particularly in recently constructed visual pipeline models for feature extraction. We re-formulate pooling in an existing pipeline as a function of adjustable pooling map weight parameters and propose the use of supervised error signals from gradient descent to tune the established maps within the model. This technique allows us to learn what would otherwise be a design choice within the model and specialize the maps to aggregate areas of invariance for the task presented. Preliminary results show moderate potential gains in classification accuracy and highlight areas of importance within the intermediate feature representation space.
Gradient Driven Learning for Pooling in Visual Pipeline Feature Extraction Models
3,708
The bottom-up saliency, an early stage of humans' visual attention, can be considered as a binary classification problem between center and surround classes. Discriminant power of features for the classification is measured as mutual information between features and two classes distribution. The estimated discrepancy of two feature classes very much depends on considered scale levels; then, multi-scale structure and discriminant power are integrated by employing discrete wavelet features and Hidden markov tree (HMT). With wavelet coefficients and Hidden Markov Tree parameters, quad-tree like label structures are constructed and utilized in maximum a posterior probability (MAP) of hidden class variables at corresponding dyadic sub-squares. Then, saliency value for each dyadic square at each scale level is computed with discriminant power principle and the MAP. Finally, across multiple scales is integrated the final saliency map by an information maximization rule. Both standard quantitative tools such as NSS, LCC, AUC and qualitative assessments are used for evaluating the proposed multiscale discriminant saliency method (MDIS) against the well-know information-based saliency method AIM on its Bruce Database wity eye-tracking data. Simulation results are presented and analyzed to verify the validity of MDIS as well as point out its disadvantages for further research direction.
Multiscale Discriminant Saliency for Visual Attention
3,709
In this paper we address the problem of offline Arabic handwriting word recognition. Off-line recognition of handwritten words is a difficult task due to the high variability and uncertainty of human writing. The majority of the recent systems are constrained by the size of the lexicon to deal with and the number of writers. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-writers Arabic handwritten words recognition using multiple Bayesian networks. First, we cut the image in several blocks. For each block, we compute a vector of descriptors. Then, we use K-means to cluster the low-level features including Zernik and Hu moments. Finally, we apply four variants of Bayesian networks classifiers (Na\"ive Bayes, Tree Augmented Na\"ive Bayes (TAN), Forest Augmented Na\"ive Bayes (FAN) and DBN (dynamic bayesian network) to classify the whole image of tunisian city name. The results demonstrate FAN and DBN outperform good recognition rates
Multiple models of Bayesian networks applied to offline recognition of Arabic handwritten city names
3,710
The need for an automatic lip-reading system is ever increasing. Infact, today, extraction and reliable analysis of facial movements make up an important part in many multimedia systems such as videoconference, low communication systems, lip-reading systems. In addition, visual information is imperative among people with special needs. We can imagine, for example, a dependent person ordering a machine with an easy lip movement or by a simple syllable pronunciation. Moreover, people with hearing problems compensate for their special needs by lip-reading as well as listening to the person with whome they are talking.
Lip Localization and Viseme Classification for Visual Speech Recognition
3,711
Segmentation of an object from a video is a challenging task in multimedia applications. Depending on the application, automatic or interactive methods are desired; however, regardless of the application type, efficient computation of video object segmentation is crucial for time-critical applications; specifically, mobile and interactive applications require near real-time efficiencies. In this paper, we address the problem of video segmentation from the perspective of efficiency. We initially redefine the problem of video object segmentation as the propagation of MRF energies along the temporal domain. For this purpose, a novel and efficient method is proposed to propagate MRF energies throughout the frames via bilateral filters without using any global texture, color or shape model. Recently presented bi-exponential filter is utilized for efficiency, whereas a novel technique is also developed to dynamically solve graph-cuts for varying, non-lattice graphs in general linear filtering scenario. These improvements are experimented for both automatic and interactive video segmentation scenarios. Moreover, in addition to the efficiency, segmentation quality is also tested both quantitatively and qualitatively. Indeed, for some challenging examples, significant time efficiency is observed without loss of segmentation quality.
Efficient MRF Energy Propagation for Video Segmentation via Bilateral Filters
3,712
Localization of chess-board vertices is a common task in computer vision, underpinning many applications, but relatively little work focusses on designing a specific feature detector that is fast, accurate and robust. In this paper the `Chess-board Extraction by Subtraction and Summation' (ChESS) feature detector, designed to exclusively respond to chess-board vertices, is presented. The method proposed is robust against noise, poor lighting and poor contrast, requires no prior knowledge of the extent of the chess-board pattern, is computationally very efficient, and provides a strength measure of detected features. Such a detector has significant application both in the key field of camera calibration, as well as in Structured Light 3D reconstruction. Evidence is presented showing its robustness, accuracy, and efficiency in comparison to other commonly used detectors both under simulation and in experimental 3D reconstruction of flat plate and cylindrical objects
ChESS - Quick and Robust Detection of Chess-board Features
3,713
We examine in this paper the problem of image registration from the new perspective where images are given by sparse approximations in parametric dictionaries of geometric functions. We propose a registration algorithm that looks for an estimate of the global transformation between sparse images by examining the set of relative geometrical transformations between the respective features. We propose a theoretical analysis of our registration algorithm and we derive performance guarantees based on two novel important properties of redundant dictionaries, namely the robust linear independence and the transformation inconsistency. We propose several illustrations and insights about the importance of these dictionary properties and show that common properties such as coherence or restricted isometry property fail to provide sufficient information in registration problems. We finally show with illustrative experiments on simple visual objects and handwritten digits images that our algorithm outperforms baseline competitor methods in terms of transformation-invariant distance computation and classification.
Image registration with sparse approximations in parametric dictionaries
3,714
Face recognition (FR) is an important task in pattern recognition and computer vision. Sparse representation (SR) has been demonstrated to be a powerful framework for FR. In general, an SR algorithm treats each face in a training dataset as a basis function, and tries to find a sparse representation of a test face under these basis functions. The sparse representation coefficients then provide a recognition hint. Early SR algorithms are based on a basic sparse model. Recently, it has been found that algorithms based on a block sparse model can achieve better recognition rates. Based on this model, in this study we use block sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) to find a sparse representation of a test face for recognition. BSBL is a recently proposed framework, which has many advantages over existing block-sparse-model based algorithms. Experimental results on the Extended Yale B, the AR and the CMU PIE face databases show that using BSBL can achieve better recognition rates and higher robustness than state-of-the-art algorithms in most cases.
Robust Face Recognition via Block Sparse Bayesian Learning
3,715
The bottom-up saliency, an early stage of humans' visual attention, can be considered as a binary classification problem between centre and surround classes. Discriminant power of features for the classification is measured as mutual information between distributions of image features and corresponding classes . As the estimated discrepancy very much depends on considered scale level, multi-scale structure and discriminant power are integrated by employing discrete wavelet features and Hidden Markov Tree (HMT). With wavelet coefficients and Hidden Markov Tree parameters, quad-tree like label structures are constructed and utilized in maximum a posterior probability (MAP) of hidden class variables at corresponding dyadic sub-squares. Then, a saliency value for each square block at each scale level is computed with discriminant power principle. Finally, across multiple scales is integrated the final saliency map by an information maximization rule. Both standard quantitative tools such as NSS, LCC, AUC and qualitative assessments are used for evaluating the proposed multi-scale discriminant saliency (MDIS) method against the well-know information based approach AIM on its released image collection with eye-tracking data. Simulation results are presented and analysed to verify the validity of MDIS as well as point out its limitation for further research direction.
Multi-scale Discriminant Saliency with Wavelet-based Hidden Markov Tree Modelling
3,716
This paper formulates bottom-up visual saliency as center surround conditional entropy and presents a fast and efficient technique for the computation of such a saliency map. It is shown that the new saliency formulation is consistent with self-information based saliency, decision-theoretic saliency and Bayesian definition of surprises but also faces the same significant computational challenge of estimating probability density in very high dimensional spaces with limited samples. We have developed a fast and efficient nonparametric method to make the practical implementation of these types of saliency maps possible. By aligning pixels from the center and surround regions and treating their location coordinates as random variables, we use a k-d partitioning method to efficiently estimating the center surround conditional entropy. We present experimental results on two publicly available eye tracking still image databases and show that the new technique is competitive with state of the art bottom-up saliency computational methods. We have also extended the technique to compute spatiotemporal visual saliency of video and evaluate the bottom-up spatiotemporal saliency against eye tracking data on a video taken onboard a moving vehicle with the driver's eye being tracked by a head mounted eye-tracker.
Fast non parametric entropy estimation for spatial-temporal saliency method
3,717
Technological advances in sensor manufacture, communication, and computing are stimulating the development of new applications that are transforming traditional vision systems into pervasive intelligent camera networks. The analysis of visual cues in multi-camera networks enables a wide range of applications, from smart home and office automation to large area surveillance and traffic surveillance. While dense camera networks - in which most cameras have large overlapping fields of view - are well studied, we are mainly concerned with sparse camera networks. A sparse camera network undertakes large area surveillance using as few cameras as possible, and most cameras have non-overlapping fields of view with one another. The task is challenging due to the lack of knowledge about the topological structure of the network, variations in the appearance and motion of specific tracking targets in different views, and the difficulties of understanding composite events in the network. In this review paper, we present a comprehensive survey of recent research results to address the problems of intra-camera tracking, topological structure learning, target appearance modeling, and global activity understanding in sparse camera networks. A number of current open research issues are discussed.
Sparse Camera Network for Visual Surveillance -- A Comprehensive Survey
3,718
For nonrigid image registration, matching the particular structures (or the outliers) that have missing correspondence and/or local large deformations, can be more difficult than matching the common structures with small deformations in the two images. Most existing works depend heavily on the outlier segmentation to remove the outlier effect in the registration. Moreover, these works do not handle simultaneously the missing correspondences and local large deformations. In this paper, we defined the nonrigid image registration as a local adaptive kernel regression which locally reconstruct the moving image's dense deformation vectors from the sparse deformation vectors in the multi-resolution block matching. The kernel function of the kernel regression adapts its shape and orientation to the reference image's structure to gather more deformation vector samples of the same structure for the iterative regression computation, whereby the moving image's local deformations could be compliant with the reference image's local structures. To estimate the local deformations around the outliers, we use joint saliency map that highlights the corresponding saliency structures (called Joint Saliency Structures, JSSs) in the two images to guide the dense deformation reconstruction by emphasizing those JSSs' sparse deformation vectors in the kernel regression. The experimental results demonstrate that by using local JSS adaptive kernel regression, the proposed method achieves almost the best performance in alignment of all challenging image pairs with outlier structures compared with other five state-of-the-art nonrigid registration algorithms.
Local Structure Matching Driven by Joint-Saliency-Structure Adaptive Kernel Regression
3,719
Bottom-up saliency, an early human visual processing, behaves like binary classification of interest and null hypothesis. Its discriminant power, mutual information of image features and class distribution, is closely related to saliency value by the well-known centre-surround theory. As classification accuracy very much depends on window sizes, the discriminant saliency (power) varies according to sampling scales. Discriminating power estimation in multi-scales framework needs integrating with wavelet transformation and then estimating statistical discrepancy of two consecutive scales (centre-surround windows) by Hidden Markov Tree (HMT) model. Finally, multi-scale discriminant saliency (MDIS) maps are combined by the maximum information rule to synthesize a final saliency map. All MDIS maps are evaluated with standard quantitative tools (NSS,LCC,AUC) on N.Bruce's database with ground truth data as eye-tracking locations ; as well assessed qualitatively by visual examination of individual cases. For evaluating MDIS against well-known AIM saliency method, simulations are needed and described in details with several interesting conclusions, drawn for further research directions.
Multi-scale Visual Attention & Saliency Modelling with Decision Theory
3,720
Image denoising is one of the fundamental problems in image processing. In this paper, a novel approach to suppress noise from the image is conducted by applying the interquartile range (IQR) which is one of the statistical methods used to detect outlier effect from a dataset. A window of size kXk was implemented to support IQR filter. Each pixel outside the IQR range of the kXk window is treated as noisy pixel. The estimation of the noisy pixels was obtained by local averaging. The essential advantage of applying IQR filter is to preserve edge sharpness better of the original image. A variety of test images have been used to support the proposed filter and PSNR was calculated and compared with median filter. The experimental results on standard test images demonstrate this filter is simpler and better performing than median filter.
Image Denoising Using Interquartile Range Filter with Local Averaging
3,721
Image interpolation has been used spaciously by customary interpolation techniques. Recently, Kriging technique has been widely implemented in simulation area and geostatistics for prediction. In this article, Kriging technique was used instead of the classical interpolation methods to predict the unknown points in the digital image array. The efficiency of the proposed technique was proven using the PSNR and compared with the traditional interpolation techniques. The results showed that Kriging technique is almost accurate as cubic interpolation and in some images Kriging has higher accuracy. A miscellaneous test images have been used to consolidate the proposed technique.
Image Interpolation Using Kriging Technique for Spatial Data
3,722
Image thresholding has played an important role in image segmentation. This paper presents a hybrid approach for image segmentation based on the thresholding by fuzzy c-means (THFCM) algorithm for image segmentation. The goal of the proposed approach is to find a discerner cluster able to find an automatic threshold. The algorithm is formulated by applying the standard FCM clustering algorithm to the frequencies (y-values) on the smoothed histogram. Hence, the frequencies of an image can be used instead of the conventional whole data of image. The cluster that has the highest peak which represents the maximum frequency in the image histogram will play as an excellent role in determining a discerner cluster to the grey level image. Then, the pixels belong to the discerner cluster represent an object in the gray level histogram while the other clusters represent a background. Experimental results with standard test images have been obtained through the proposed approach (THFCM).
Hybrid Image Segmentation using Discerner Cluster in FCM and Histogram Thresholding
3,723
Image denoising is a critical issue in the field of digital image processing. This paper proposes a novel Salt & Pepper noise suppression by developing a Kriging Interpolation Filter (KIF) for image denoising. Gray-level images degraded with Salt & Pepper noise have been considered. A sequential search for noise detection was made using kXk window size to determine non-noisy pixels only. The non-noisy pixels are passed into Kriging interpolation method to predict their absent neighbor pixels that were noisy pixels at the first phase. The utilization of Kriging interpolation filter proves that it is very impressive to suppress high noise density. It has been found that Kriging Interpolation filter achieves noise reduction without loss of edges and detailed information. Comparisons with existing algorithms are done using quality metrics like PSNR and MSE to assess the proposed filter.
Kriging Interpolation Filter to Reduce High Density Salt and Pepper Noise
3,724
We present a fast algorithm for training MaxPooling Convolutional Networks to segment images. This type of network yields record-breaking performance in a variety of tasks, but is normally trained on a computationally expensive patch-by-patch basis. Our new method processes each training image in a single pass, which is vastly more efficient. We validate the approach in different scenarios and report a 1500-fold speed-up. In an application to automated steel defect detection and segmentation, we obtain excellent performance with short training times.
A Fast Learning Algorithm for Image Segmentation with Max-Pooling Convolutional Networks
3,725
An increasing number of methods for background subtraction use Robust PCA to identify sparse foreground objects. While many algorithms use the L1-norm as a convex relaxation of the ideal sparsifying function, we approach the problem with a smoothed Lp-norm and present pROST, a method for robust online subspace tracking. The algorithm is based on alternating minimization on manifolds. Implemented on a graphics processing unit it achieves realtime performance. Experimental results on a state-of-the-art benchmark for background subtraction on real-world video data indicate that the method succeeds at a broad variety of background subtraction scenarios, and it outperforms competing approaches when video quality is deteriorated by camera jitter.
pROST : A Smoothed Lp-norm Robust Online Subspace Tracking Method for Realtime Background Subtraction in Video
3,726
The limitations of conventional imaging techniques have hitherto precluded a thorough and formal investigation of the complex morphology of the left ventricular (LV) endocardial surface and its relation to the severity of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). Recent developments in high-resolution Multirow-Detector Computed Tomography (MDCT) scanner technology have enabled the imaging of LV endocardial surface morphology in a single heart beat. Analysis of high-resolution Computed Tomography (CT) images from a 320-MDCT scanner allows the study of the relationship between percent Diameter Stenosis (DS) of the major coronary arteries and localization of the cardiac segments affected by coronary arterial stenosis. In this paper a novel approach for the analysis using a combination of rigid transformation-invariant shape descriptors and a more generalized isometry-invariant Bag-of-Features (BoF) descriptor, is proposed and implemented. The proposed approach is shown to be successful in identifying, localizing and quantifying the incidence and extent of CAD and thus, is seen to have a potentially significant clinical impact. Specifically, the association between the incidence and extent of CAD, determined via the percent DS measurements of the major coronary arteries, and the alterations in the endocardial surface morphology is formally quantified. A multivariate regression test performed on a strict leave-one-out basis are shown to exhibit a distinct pattern in terms of the correlation coefficient within the cardiac segments where the incidence of coronary arterial stenosis is localized.
Morphological Analusis Of The Left Ventricular Eendocardial Surface Using A Bag-Of-Features Descriptor
3,727
We present a performance analysis for image registration with gradient descent methods. We consider a typical multiscale registration setting where the global 2-D translation between a pair of images is estimated by smoothing the images and minimizing the distance between them with gradient descent. Our study particularly concentrates on the effect of noise and low-pass filtering on the alignment accuracy. We adopt an analytic representation for images and analyze the well-behavedness of the image distance function by estimating the neighborhood of translations for which it is free of undesired local minima. This corresponds to the neighborhood of translation vectors that are correctly computable with a simple gradient descent minimization. We show that the area of this neighborhood increases at least quadratically with the smoothing filter size, which justifies the use of a smoothing step in image registration with local optimizers such as gradient descent. We then examine the effect of noise on the alignment accuracy and derive an upper bound for the alignment error in terms of the noise properties and filter size. Our main finding is that the error increases at a rate that is at least linear with respect to the filter size. Therefore, smoothing improves the well-behavedness of the distance function; however, this comes at the cost of amplifying the alignment error in noisy settings. Our results provide a mathematical insight about why hierarchical techniques are effective in image registration, suggesting that the multiscale coarse-to-fine alignment strategy of these techniques is very suitable from the perspective of the trade-off between the well-behavedness of the objective function and the registration accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study for descent-based image registration.
Analysis of Descent-Based Image Registration
3,728
In photography, low depth of field (DOF) is an important technique to emphasize the object of interest (OOI) within an image. Thus, low DOF images are widely used in the application area of macro, portrait or sports photography. When viewing a low DOF image, the viewer implicitly concentrates on the regions that are sharper regions of the image and thus segments the image into regions of interest and non regions of interest which has a major impact on the perception of the image. Thus, a robust algorithm for the fully automatic detection of the OOI in low DOF images provides valuable information for subsequent image processing and image retrieval. In this paper we propose a robust and parameterless algorithm for the fully automatic segmentation of low DOF images. We compare our method with three similar methods and show the superior robustness even though our algorithm does not require any parameters to be set by hand. The experiments are conducted on a real world data set with high and low DOF images.
Robust Image Segmentation in Low Depth Of Field Images
3,729
Iris recognition, a relatively new biometric technology, has great advantages, such as variability, stability and security, thus is the most promising for high security environment. Iris recognition is proposed in this report. We describe some methods, the first one is based on grey level histogram to extract the pupil, the second is based on elliptic and parabolic HOUGH transformation to determinate the edge of iris, upper and lower eyelids, the third we used 2D Gabor Wavelets to encode the iris and finally we used the Hamming distance for authentication.
A new scheme of signature extraction for iris authentication
3,730
Recognition is the fundamental task of visual cognition, yet how to formalize the general recognition problem for computer vision remains an open issue. The problem is sometimes reduced to the simplest case of recognizing matching pairs, often structured to allow for metric constraints. However, visual recognition is broader than just pair matching -- especially when we consider multi-class training data and large sets of features in a learning context. What we learn and how we learn it has important implications for effective algorithms. In this paper, we reconsider the assumption of recognition as a pair matching test, and introduce a new formal definition that captures the broader context of the problem. Through a meta-analysis and an experimental assessment of the top algorithms on popular data sets, we gain a sense of how often metric properties are violated by good recognition algorithms. By studying these violations, useful insights come to light: we make the case that locally metric algorithms should leverage outside information to solve the general recognition problem.
Good Recognition is Non-Metric
3,731
Object detection and recognition are important problems in computer vision. Since these problems are meta-heuristic, despite a lot of research, practically usable, intelligent, real-time, and dynamic object detection/recognition methods are still unavailable. We propose a new object detection/recognition method, which improves over the existing methods in every stage of the object detection/recognition process. In addition to the usual features, we propose to use geometric shapes, like linear cues, ellipses and quadrangles, as additional features. The full potential of geometric cues is exploited by using them to extract other features in a robust, computationally efficient, and less meta-heuristic manner. We also propose a new hierarchical codebook, which provides good generalization and discriminative properties. The codebook enables fast multi-path inference mechanisms based on propagation of conditional likelihoods, that make it robust to occlusion and noise. It has the capability of dynamic learning. We also propose a new learning method that has generative and discriminative learning capabilities, does not need large and fully supervised training dataset, and is capable of online learning. The preliminary work of detecting geometric shapes in real images has been completed. This preliminary work is the focus of this report. Future path for realizing the proposed object detection/recognition method is also discussed in brief.
Object Detection in Real Images
3,732
Shape is one of the main features in content based image retrieval (CBIR). This paper proposes a new shape signature. In this technique, features of each shape are extracted based on four sides of the rectangle that covers the shape. The proposed technique is Fourier based and it is invariant to translation, scaling and rotation. The retrieval performance between some commonly used Fourier based signatures and the proposed four sides distance (FSD) signature has been tested using MPEG-7 database. Experimental results are shown that the FSD signature has better performance compared with those signatures.
Four Side Distance: A New Fourier Shape Signature
3,733
In this paper, we derive new shape descriptors based on a directional characterization. The main idea is to study the behavior of the shape neighborhood under family of transformations. We obtain a description invariant with respect to rotation, reflection, translation and scaling. A well-defined metric is then proposed on the associated feature space. We show the continuity of this metric. Some results on shape retrieval are provided on two databases to show the accuracy of the proposed shape metric.
Shape Characterization via Boundary Distortion
3,734
Human labeled datasets, along with their corresponding evaluation algorithms, play an important role in boundary detection. We here present a psychophysical experiment that addresses the reliability of such benchmarks. To find better remedies to evaluate the performance of any boundary detection algorithm, we propose a computational framework to remove inappropriate human labels and estimate the intrinsic properties of boundaries.
A Meta-Theory of Boundary Detection Benchmarks
3,735
Face recognition from image or video is a popular topic in biometrics research. Many public places usually have surveillance cameras for video capture and these cameras have their significant value for security purpose. It is widely acknowledged that the face recognition have played an important role in surveillance system as it doesn't need the object's cooperation. The actual advantages of face based identification over other biometrics are uniqueness and acceptance. As human face is a dynamic object having high degree of variability in its appearance, that makes face detection a difficult problem in computer vision. In this field, accuracy and speed of identification is a main issue. The goal of this paper is to evaluate various face detection and recognition methods, provide complete solution for image based face detection and recognition with higher accuracy, better response rate as an initial step for video surveillance. Solution is proposed based on performed tests on various face rich databases in terms of subjects, pose, emotions, race and light.
Image-based Face Detection and Recognition: "State of the Art"
3,736
Sparse representations with learned dictionaries have been successful in several image analysis applications. In this paper, we propose and analyze the framework of ensemble sparse models, and demonstrate their utility in image restoration and unsupervised clustering. The proposed ensemble model approximates the data as a linear combination of approximations from multiple \textit{weak} sparse models. Theoretical analysis of the ensemble model reveals that even in the worst-case, the ensemble can perform better than any of its constituent individual models. The dictionaries corresponding to the individual sparse models are obtained using either random example selection or boosted approaches. Boosted approaches learn one dictionary per round such that the dictionary learned in a particular round is optimized for the training examples having high reconstruction error in the previous round. Results with compressed recovery show that the ensemble representations lead to a better performance compared to using a single dictionary obtained with the conventional alternating minimization approach. The proposed ensemble models are also used for single image superresolution, and we show that they perform comparably to the recent approaches. In unsupervised clustering, experiments show that the proposed model performs better than baseline approaches in several standard datasets.
Ensemble Sparse Models for Image Analysis
3,737
In this paper, we propose a method to apply the popular cascade classifier into face recognition to improve the computational efficiency while keeping high recognition rate. In large scale face recognition systems, because the probability of feature templates coming from different subjects is very high, most of the matching pairs will be rejected by the early stages of the cascade. Therefore, the cascade can improve the matching speed significantly. On the other hand, using the nested structure of the cascade, we could drop some stages at the end of feature to reduce the memory and bandwidth usage in some resources intensive system while not sacrificing the performance too much. The cascade is learned by two steps. Firstly, some kind of prepared features are grouped into several nested stages. And then, the threshold of each stage is learned to achieve user defined verification rate (VR). In the paper, we take a landmark based Gabor+LDA face recognition system as baseline to illustrate the process and advantages of the proposed method. However, the use of this method is very generic and not limited in face recognition, which can be easily generalized to other biometrics as a post-processing module. Experiments on the FERET database show the good performance of our baseline and an experiment on a self-collected large scale database illustrates that the cascade can improve the matching speed significantly.
Fast Matching by 2 Lines of Code for Large Scale Face Recognition Systems
3,738
Joint saliency map (JSM) [1] was developed to assign high joint saliency values to the corresponding saliency structures (called Joint Saliency Structures, JSSs) but zero or low joint saliency values to the outliers (or mismatches) that are introduced by missing correspondence or local large deformations between the reference and moving images to be registered. JSM guides the local structure matching in nonrigid registration by emphasizing these JSSs' sparse deformation vectors in adaptive kernel regression of hierarchical sparse deformation vectors for iterative dense deformation reconstruction. By designing an effective superpixel-based local structure scale estimator to compute the reference structure's structure scale, we further propose to determine the scale (the width) of kernels in the adaptive kernel regression through combining the structure scales to JSM-based scales of mismatch between the local saliency structures. Therefore, we can adaptively select the sample size of sparse deformation vectors to reconstruct the dense deformation vectors for accurately matching the every local structures in the two images. The experimental results demonstrate better accuracy of our method in aligning two images with missing correspondence and local large deformation than the state-of-the-art methods.
Scale Selection of Adaptive Kernel Regression by Joint Saliency Map for Nonrigid Image Registration
3,739
In complex visual recognition tasks it is typical to adopt multiple descriptors, that describe different aspects of the images, for obtaining an improved recognition performance. Descriptors that have diverse forms can be fused into a unified feature space in a principled manner using kernel methods. Sparse models that generalize well to the test data can be learned in the unified kernel space, and appropriate constraints can be incorporated for application in supervised and unsupervised learning. In this paper, we propose to perform sparse coding and dictionary learning in the multiple kernel space, where the weights of the ensemble kernel are tuned based on graph-embedding principles such that class discrimination is maximized. In our proposed algorithm, dictionaries are inferred using multiple levels of 1-D subspace clustering in the kernel space, and the sparse codes are obtained using a simple levelwise pursuit scheme. Empirical results for object recognition and image clustering show that our algorithm outperforms existing sparse coding based approaches, and compares favorably to other state-of-the-art methods.
Multiple Kernel Sparse Representations for Supervised and Unsupervised Learning
3,740
Driven by the significant advancements in technology and social issues such as security management, there is a strong need for Smart Surveillance System in our society today. One of the key features of a Smart Surveillance System is efficient human detection and counting such that the system can decide and label events on its own. In this paper we propose a new, novel and robust model, The Omega Model, for detecting and counting human beings present in the scene. The proposed model employs a set of four distinct descriptors for identifying the unique features of the head, neck and shoulder regions of a person. This unique head neck shoulder signature given by the Omega Model exploits the challenges such as inter person variations in size and shape of peoples head, neck and shoulder regions to achieve robust detection of human beings even under partial occlusion, dynamically changing background and varying illumination conditions. After experimentation we observe and analyze the influences of each of the four descriptors on the system performance and computation speed and conclude that a weight based decision making system produces the best results. Evaluation results on a number of images indicate the validation of our method in actual situation.
Omega Model for Human Detection and Counting for application in Smart Surveillance System
3,741
Sign Language Recognition is one of the most growing fields of research today. Many new techniques have been developed recently in these fields. Here in this paper, we have proposed a system using Eigen value weighted Euclidean distance as a classification technique for recognition of various Sign Languages of India. The system comprises of four parts: Skin Filtering, Hand Cropping, Feature Extraction and Classification. Twenty four signs were considered in this paper, each having ten samples, thus a total of two hundred forty images was considered for which recognition rate obtained was 97 percent.
Indian Sign Language Recognition Using Eigen Value Weighted Euclidean Distance Based Classification Technique
3,742
In this paper, an Eigenvector based system has been presented to recognize facial expressions from digital facial images. In the approach, firstly the images were acquired and cropping of five significant portions from the image was performed to extract and store the Eigenvectors specific to the expressions. The Eigenvectors for the test images were also computed, and finally the input facial image was recognized when similarity was obtained by calculating the minimum Euclidean distance between the test image and the different expressions.
Recognition of Facial Expression Using Eigenvector Based Distributed Features and Euclidean Distance Based Decision Making Technique
3,743
Medical image segmentation is referred to the segmentation of known anatomic structures from different medical images. Normally, the medical data researches are more complicated and an exclusive structures. This computer aided diagnosis is used for assisting doctors in evaluating medical imagery or in recognizing abnormal findings in a medical image. To integrate the specialized knowledge for medical data processing is helpful to form a real useful healthcare decision making system. This paper studies the different symmetry based distances applied in clustering algorithms and analyzes symmetry approach for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan image segmentation. Unlike CT and MRI, the PET scan identifies the structure of blood flow to and from organs. PET scan also helps in early diagnosis of cancer and heart, brain and gastro intestinal ailments and to detect the progress of treatment. In this paper, the scope diagnostic task expands for PET image in various brain functions.
Automatic symmetry based cluster approach for anomalous brain identification in PET scan image : An Analysis
3,744
Recognition of epileptic focal point is the important diagnosis when screening the epilepsy patients for latent surgical cures. The accurate localization is challenging one because of the low spatial resolution images with more noisy data. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has now replaced the issues and caring a high resolution. This paper focuses the research of automated localization of epileptic seizures in brain functional images using symmetry based cluster approach. This approach presents a fully automated symmetry based brain abnormality detection method for PET sequences. PET images are spatially normalized to Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard and then it has been trained using symmetry based cluster approach using Medical Image Processing, Analysis & Visualization (MIPAV) tool. The performance evolution is considered by the metric like accuracy of diagnosis. The obtained result is surely assists the surgeon for the automated identification of seizures focus.
Symmetry Based Cluster Approach for Automatic Recognition of the Epileptic Focus in Brain Using PET Scan Image : An Analysis
3,745
Nuclear image has emerged as a promising research work in medical field. Images from different modality meet its own challenge. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) image may help to precisely localize disease to assist in planning the right treatment for each case and saving valuable time. In this paper, a novel approach of Spatial Fuzzy C Means (PET SFCM) clustering algorithm is introduced on PET scan image datasets. The proposed algorithm is incorporated the spatial neighborhood information with traditional FCM and updating the objective function of each cluster. This algorithm is implemented and tested on huge data collection of patients with brain neuro degenerative disorder such as Alzheimers disease. It has demonstrated its effectiveness by testing it for real world patient data sets. Experimental results are compared with conventional FCM and K Means clustering algorithm. The performance of the PET SFCM provides satisfactory results compared with other two algorithms
Spatial Fuzzy C Means PET Image Segmentation of Neurodegenerative Disorder
3,746
Volumetric change in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) over time is a critical factor in treatment decisions. Typically, the tumor volume is computed on a slice-by-slice basis using MRI scans obtained at regular intervals. (3D)Slicer - a free platform for biomedical research - provides an alternative to this manual slice-by-slice segmentation process, which is significantly faster and requires less user interaction. In this study, 4 physicians segmented GBMs in 10 patients, once using the competitive region-growing based GrowCut segmentation module of Slicer, and once purely by drawing boundaries completely manually on a slice-by-slice basis. Furthermore, we provide a variability analysis for three physicians for 12 GBMs. The time required for GrowCut segmentation was on an average 61% of the time required for a pure manual segmentation. A comparison of Slicer-based segmentation with manual slice-by-slice segmentation resulted in a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 88.43 +/- 5.23% and a Hausdorff Distance of 2.32 +/- 5.23 mm.
GBM Volumetry using the 3D Slicer Medical Image Computing Platform
3,747
In the field of face recognition, Sparse Representation (SR) has received considerable attention during the past few years. Most of the relevant literature focuses on holistic descriptors in closed-set identification applications. The underlying assumption in SR-based methods is that each class in the gallery has sufficient samples and the query lies on the subspace spanned by the gallery of the same class. Unfortunately, such assumption is easily violated in the more challenging face verification scenario, where an algorithm is required to determine if two faces (where one or both have not been seen before) belong to the same person. In this paper, we first discuss why previous attempts with SR might not be applicable to verification problems. We then propose an alternative approach to face verification via SR. Specifically, we propose to use explicit SR encoding on local image patches rather than the entire face. The obtained sparse signals are pooled via averaging to form multiple region descriptors, which are then concatenated to form an overall face descriptor. Due to the deliberate loss spatial relations within each region (caused by averaging), the resulting descriptor is robust to misalignment & various image deformations. Within the proposed framework, we evaluate several SR encoding techniques: l1-minimisation, Sparse Autoencoder Neural Network (SANN), and an implicit probabilistic technique based on Gaussian Mixture Models. Thorough experiments on AR, FERET, exYaleB, BANCA and ChokePoint datasets show that the proposed local SR approach obtains considerably better and more robust performance than several previous state-of-the-art holistic SR methods, in both verification and closed-set identification problems. The experiments also show that l1-minimisation based encoding has a considerably higher computational than the other techniques, but leads to higher recognition rates.
On Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Encoding: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
3,748
This paper presents a new approach for the automatic license plate recognition, which includes the SIFT algorithm in step to locate the plate in the input image. In this new approach, besides the comparison of the features obtained with the SIFT algorithm, the correspondence between the spatial orientations and the positioning associated with the keypoints is also observed. Afterwards, an algorithm is used for the character recognition of the plates, very fast, which makes it possible its application in real time. The results obtained with the proposed approach presented very good success rates, so much for locating the characters in the input image, as for their recognition.
ALPRS - A New Approach for License Plate Recognition using the Sift Algorithm
3,749
Energies with high-order non-submodular interactions have been shown to be very useful in vision due to their high modeling power. Optimization of such energies, however, is generally NP-hard. A naive approach that works for small problem instances is exhaustive search, that is, enumeration of all possible labelings of the underlying graph. We propose a general minimization approach for large graphs based on enumeration of labelings of certain small patches. This partial enumeration technique reduces complex high-order energy formulations to pairwise Constraint Satisfaction Problems with unary costs (uCSP), which can be efficiently solved using standard methods like TRW-S. Our approach outperforms a number of existing state-of-the-art algorithms on well known difficult problems (e.g. curvature regularization, stereo, deconvolution); it gives near global minimum and better speed. Our main application of interest is curvature regularization. In the context of segmentation, our partial enumeration technique allows to evaluate curvature directly on small patches using a novel integral geometry approach.
Simplifying Energy Optimization using Partial Enumeration
3,750
This paper is devoted to improve automatic emotion recognition from speech by incorporating rhythm and temporal features. Research on automatic emotion recognition so far has mostly been based on applying features like MFCCs, pitch and energy or intensity. The idea focuses on borrowing rhythm features from linguistic and phonetic analysis and applying them to the speech signal on the basis of acoustic knowledge only. In addition to this we exploit a set of temporal and loudness features. A segmentation unit is employed in starting to separate the voiced/unvoiced and silence parts and features are explored on different segments. Thereafter different classifiers are used for classification. After selecting the top features using an IGR filter we are able to achieve a recognition rate of 80.60 % on the Berlin Emotion Database for the speaker dependent framework.
Improving Automatic Emotion Recognition from speech using Rhythm and Temporal feature
3,751
Signal space models in both phase-encode, and frequency-encode directions are presented for extrapolation of 2D partial kspace. Using the boxcar representation of low-resolution spatial data, and a geometrical representation of signal space vectors in both positive and negative phase-encode directions, a robust predictor is constructed using a series of signal space projections. Compared to some of the existing phase-correction methods that require acquisition of a pre-determined set of fractional kspace lines, the proposed predictor is found to be more efficient, due to its capability of exhibiting an equivalent degree of performance using only half the number of fractional lines. Robust filtering of noisy data is achieved using a second signal space model in the frequency-encode direction, bypassing the requirement of a prior highpass filtering operation. The signal space is constructed from Fourier Transformed samples of each row in the low-resolution image. A set of FIR filters are estimated by fitting a least squares model to this signal space. Partial kspace extrapolation using the FIR filters is shown to result in artifact-free reconstruction, particularly in respect of Gibbs ringing and streaking type artifacts.
Least-Squares FIR Models of Low-Resolution MR data for Efficient Phase-Error Compensation with Simultaneous Artefact Removal
3,752
We present an edge preserving and denoising filter for enhancing the features in images, which contain an ROI having a narrow spatial extent. Typical examples include angiograms, or ROI spatially distributed in multiple locations and contained within an outlying region, such as in multiple-sclerosis. The filtering involves determination of multiplicative weights in the spatial domain using an extended set of neighborhood directions. Equivalently, the filtering operation may be interpreted as a combination of directional filters in the frequency domain, with selective weighting for spatial frequencies contained within each direction. The advantages of the proposed filter in comparison to specialized non-linear filters, which operate on diffusion principle, are illustrated using numerical phantom data. The performance evaluation is carried out on simulated images from BrainWeb database for multiple-sclerosis, acute ischemic stroke using clinically acquired FLAIR images and MR angiograms.
Voxel-wise Weighted MR Image Enhancement using an Extended Neighborhood Filter
3,753
For the purposes of foreground estimation, the true background model is unavailable in many practical circumstances and needs to be estimated from cluttered image sequences. We propose a sequential technique for static background estimation in such conditions, with low computational and memory requirements. Image sequences are analysed on a block-by-block basis. For each block location a representative set is maintained which contains distinct blocks obtained along its temporal line. The background estimation is carried out in a Markov Random Field framework, where the optimal labelling solution is computed using iterated conditional modes. The clique potentials are computed based on the combined frequency response of the candidate block and its neighbourhood. It is assumed that the most appropriate block results in the smoothest response, indirectly enforcing the spatial continuity of structures within a scene. Experiments on real-life surveillance videos demonstrate that the proposed method obtains considerably better background estimates (both qualitatively and quantitatively) than median filtering and the recently proposed "intervals of stable intensity" method. Further experiments on the Wallflower dataset suggest that the combination of the proposed method with a foreground segmentation algorithm results in improved foreground segmentation.
A Low-Complexity Algorithm for Static Background Estimation from Cluttered Image Sequences in Surveillance Contexts
3,754
Many standard approaches for geometric model fitting are based on pre-matched image features. Typically, such pre-matching uses only feature appearances (e.g. SIFT) and a large number of non-unique features must be discarded in order to control the false positive rate. In contrast, we solve feature matching and multi-model fitting problems in a joint optimization framework. This paper proposes several fit-&-match energy formulations based on a generalization of the assignment problem. We developed an efficient solver based on min-cost-max-flow algorithm that finds near optimal solutions. Our approach significantly increases the number of detected matches. In practice, energy-based joint fitting & matching allows to increase the distance between view-points previously restricted by robustness of local SIFT-matching and to improve the model fitting accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art multi-model fitting techniques.
Joint optimization of fitting & matching in multi-view reconstruction
3,755
In this paper, we propose sparse coding-based approaches for segmentation of tumor regions from MR images. Sparse coding with data-adapted dictionaries has been successfully employed in several image recovery and vision problems. The proposed approaches obtain sparse codes for each pixel in brain magnetic resonance images considering their intensity values and location information. Since it is trivial to obtain pixel-wise sparse codes, and combining multiple features in the sparse coding setup is not straightforward, we propose to perform sparse coding in a high-dimensional feature space where non-linear similarities can be effectively modeled. We use the training data from expert-segmented images to obtain kernel dictionaries with the kernel K-lines clustering procedure. For a test image, sparse codes are computed with these kernel dictionaries, and they are used to identify the tumor regions. This approach is completely automated, and does not require user intervention to initialize the tumor regions in a test image. Furthermore, a low complexity segmentation approach based on kernel sparse codes, which allows the user to initialize the tumor region, is also presented. Results obtained with both the proposed approaches are validated against manual segmentation by an expert radiologist, and the proposed methods lead to accurate tumor identification.
Kernel Sparse Models for Automated Tumor Segmentation
3,756
In this paper we study the bilateral filter proposed by Tomasi and Manduchi, as a spectral domain transform defined on a weighted graph. The nodes of this graph represent the pixels in the image and a graph signal defined on the nodes represents the intensity values. Edge weights in the graph correspond to the bilateral filter coefficients and hence are data adaptive. Spectrum of a graph is defined in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix. We use this spectral interpretation to generalize the bilateral filter and propose more flexible and application specific spectral designs of bilateral-like filters. We show that these spectral filters can be implemented with k-iterative bilateral filtering operations and do not require expensive diagonalization of the Laplacian matrix.
Bilateral Filter: Graph Spectral Interpretation and Extensions
3,757
This paper presents a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to identify the script of handwritten words of Roman, Devanagari, Kannada and Telugu scripts. It emphasizes the significance of directional energies for identification of script of the word. It is robust to varied image sizes and different styles of writing. A GMM is modeled using a set of six novel features derived from directional energy distributions of the underlying image. The standard deviation of directional energy distributions are computed by decomposing an image matrix into right and left diagonals. Furthermore, deviation of horizontal and vertical distributions of energies is also built-in to GMM. A dataset of 400 images out of 800 (200 of each script) are used for training GMM and the remaining is for testing. An exhaustive experimentation is carried out at bi-script, tri-script and multi-script level and achieved script identification accuracies in percentage as 98.7, 98.16 and 96.91 respectively.
Gaussian Mixture Model for Handwritten Script Identification
3,758
In contrast to comparing faces via single exemplars, matching sets of face images increases robustness and discrimination performance. Recent image set matching approaches typically measure similarities between subspaces or manifolds, while representing faces in a rigid and holistic manner. Such representations are easily affected by variations in terms of alignment, illumination, pose and expression. While local feature based representations are considerably more robust to such variations, they have received little attention within the image set matching area. We propose a novel image set matching technique, comprised of three aspects: (i) robust descriptors of face regions based on local features, partly inspired by the hierarchy in the human visual system, (ii) use of several subspace and exemplar metrics to compare corresponding face regions, (iii) jointly learning which regions are the most discriminative while finding the optimal mixing weights for combining metrics. Face recognition experiments on LFW, PIE and MOBIO face datasets show that the proposed algorithm obtains considerably better performance than several recent state-of-the-art techniques, such as Local Principal Angle and the Kernel Affine Hull Method.
Combined Learning of Salient Local Descriptors and Distance Metrics for Image Set Face Verification
3,759
We consider object detection using a generic model for natural shapes. A common approach for object recognition involves matching object models directly to images. Another approach involves building intermediate representations via a generic grouping processes. We argue that these two processes (model-based recognition and grouping) may use similar computational mechanisms. By defining a generic model for shapes we can use model-based techniques to implement a mid-level vision grouping process.
A Stochastic Grammar for Natural Shapes
3,760
In this paper, we use statistical texture features for handwritten and printed text classification. We primarily aim for word level classification in south Indian scripts. Words are first extracted from the scanned document. For each extracted word, statistical texture features are computed such as mean, standard deviation, smoothness, moment, uniformity, entropy and local range including local entropy. These feature vectors are then used to classify words via k-NN classifier. We have validated the approach over several different datasets. Scripts like Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi i.e., Devanagari are primarily employed where an average classification rate of 99.26% is achieved. In addition, to provide an extensibility of the approach, we address Roman script by using publicly available dataset and interesting results are reported.
Statistical Texture Features based Handwritten and Printed Text Classification in South Indian Documents
3,761
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for texture analysis based on artificial crawler model. Our method assumes that each agent can interact with the environment and each other. The evolution process converges to an equilibrium state according to the set of rules. For each textured image, the feature vector is composed by signatures of the live agents curve at each time. Experimental results revealed that combining the minimum and maximum signatures into one increase the classification rate. In addition, we pioneer the use of autonomous agents for characterizing silk fibroin scaffolds. The results strongly suggest that our approach can be successfully employed for texture analysis.
Material quality assessment of silk nanofibers based on swarm intelligence
3,762
Background subtraction is a fundamental low-level processing task in numerous computer vision applications. The vast majority of algorithms process images on a pixel-by-pixel basis, where an independent decision is made for each pixel. A general limitation of such processing is that rich contextual information is not taken into account. We propose a block-based method capable of dealing with noise, illumination variations and dynamic backgrounds, while still obtaining smooth contours of foreground objects. Specifically, image sequences are analysed on an overlapping block-by-block basis. A low-dimensional texture descriptor obtained from each block is passed through an adaptive classifier cascade, where each stage handles a distinct problem. A probabilistic foreground mask generation approach then exploits block overlaps to integrate interim block-level decisions into final pixel-level foreground segmentation. Unlike many pixel-based methods, ad-hoc post-processing of foreground masks is not required. Experiments on the difficult Wallflower and I2R datasets show that the proposed approach obtains on average better results (both qualitatively and quantitatively) than several prominent methods. We furthermore propose the use of tracking performance as an unbiased approach for assessing the practical usefulness of foreground segmentation methods, and show that the proposed approach leads to considerable improvements in tracking accuracy on the CAVIAR dataset.
Improved Foreground Detection via Block-based Classifier Cascade with Probabilistic Decision Integration
3,763
The aim of the paper is to separate handwritten and printed text from a real document embedded with noise, graphics including annotations. Relying on run-length smoothing algorithm (RLSA), the extracted pseudo-lines and pseudo-words are used as basic blocks for classification. To handle this, a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) with Gaussian kernel performs a first labelling of each pseudo-word including the study of local neighbourhood. It then propagates the context between neighbours so that we can correct possible labelling errors. Considering running time complexity issue, we propose linear complexity methods where we use k-NN with constraint. When using a kd-tree, it is almost linearly proportional to the number of pseudo-words. The performance of our system is close to 90%, even when very small learning dataset where samples are basically composed of complex administrative documents.
Handwritten and Printed Text Separation in Real Document
3,764
Visual object tracking is a significant computer vision task which can be applied to many domains such as visual surveillance, human computer interaction, and video compression. In the literature, researchers have proposed a variety of 2D appearance models. To help readers swiftly learn the recent advances in 2D appearance models for visual object tracking, we contribute this survey, which provides a detailed review of the existing 2D appearance models. In particular, this survey takes a module-based architecture that enables readers to easily grasp the key points of visual object tracking. In this survey, we first decompose the problem of appearance modeling into two different processing stages: visual representation and statistical modeling. Then, different 2D appearance models are categorized and discussed with respect to their composition modules. Finally, we address several issues of interest as well as the remaining challenges for future research on this topic. The contributions of this survey are four-fold. First, we review the literature of visual representations according to their feature-construction mechanisms (i.e., local and global). Second, the existing statistical modeling schemes for tracking-by-detection are reviewed according to their model-construction mechanisms: generative, discriminative, and hybrid generative-discriminative. Third, each type of visual representations or statistical modeling techniques is analyzed and discussed from a theoretical or practical viewpoint. Fourth, the existing benchmark resources (e.g., source code and video datasets) are examined in this survey.
A Survey of Appearance Models in Visual Object Tracking
3,765
Handwriting recognition refers to the identification of written characters. Handwriting recognition has become an acute research area in recent years for the ease of access of computer science. In this paper primarily discussed On-line and Off-line handwriting recognition methods for Arabic words which are often used among then across the Middle East and North Africa People. Arabic word online handwriting recognition is a very challenging task due to its cursive nature. Because of the characteristic of the whole body of the Arabic script, namely connectivity between the characters, thereby the segmentation of An Arabic script is very difficult. In this paper we introduced an Arabic script multiple classifier system for recognizing notes written on a Starboard. This Arabic script multiple classifier system combines one off-line and on-line handwriting recognition systems. The Arabic script recognizers are all based on Hidden Markov Models but vary in the way of preprocessing and normalization. To combine the Arabic script output sequences of the recognizers, we incrementally align the word sequences using a norm string matching algorithm. The Arabic script combination we could increase the system performance over the excellent character recognizer by about 3%. The proposed technique is also the necessary step towards character recognition, person identification, personality determination where input data is processed from all perspectives.
The State of the Art Recognize in Arabic Script through Combination of Online and Offline
3,766
A variety of operations of cellular automata on gray images is presented. All operations are of a wave-front nature finishing in a stable state. They are used to extract shape descripting gray objects robust to a variety of pattern distortions. Topographic terms are used: "lakes", "dales", "dales of dales". It is shown how mutual object relations like "above" can be presented in terms of gray image analysis and how it can be used for character classification and for gray pattern decomposition. Algorithms can be realized with a parallel asynchronous architecture. Keywords: Pattern Recognition, Mathematical Morphology, Cellular Automata, Wave-front Algorithms, Gray Image Analysis, Topographical Shape Descriptors, Asynchronous Parallel Processors, Holes, Cavities, Concavities, Graphs.
Asynchronous Cellular Operations on Gray Images Extracting Topographic Shape Features and Their Relations
3,767
We proposed an algorithm for solving Hamilton-Jacobi equation associated to an optimal trajectory problem for a vehicle moving inside the pre-specified domain with the speed depending upon the direction of the motion and current position of the vehicle. The dynamics of the vehicle is defined by an ordinary differential equation, the right hand of which is given by product of control(a time dependent fuction) and a function dependent on trajectory and control. At some unspecified terminal time, the vehicle reaches the boundary of the pre-specified domain and incurs a terminal cost. We also associate the traveling cost with a type of integral to the trajectory followed by vehicle. We are interested in a numerical method for finding a trajectory that minimizes the sum of the traveling cost and terminal cost. We developed an algorithm solving the value function for general trajectory optimization problem. Our algorithm is closely related to the Tsitsiklis's Fast Marching Method and J. A. Sethian's OUM and SLF-LLL[1-4] and is a generalization of them. On the basis of these results, We applied our algorithm to the image processing such as fingerprint verification.
On Constructing the Value Function for Optimal Trajectory Problem and its Application to Image Processing
3,768
This paper describes a novel method for partitioning image into meaningful segments. The proposed method employs watershed transform, a well-known image segmentation technique. Along with that, it uses various auxiliary schemes such as Binary Gradient Masking, dilation which segment the image in proper way. The algorithm proposed in this paper considers all these methods in effective way and takes little time. It is organized in such a manner so that it operates on input image adaptively. Its robustness and efficiency makes it more convenient and suitable for all types of images.
A Robust Rapid Approach to Image Segmentation with Optimal Thresholding and Watershed Transform
3,769
Brain shift, i.e. the change in configuration of the brain after opening the dura mater, is a key problem in neuronavigation. We present an approach to co-register intra-operative microscope images with pre-operative MRI to adapt and optimize intra-operative neuronavigation. The tools are a robust classification of sulci on MRI extracted cortical surfaces, guided user marking of most prominent sulci on a microscope image, and the actual variational registration method with a fidelity energy for 3D deformations of the cortical surface combined with a higher order, linear elastica type prior energy. Furthermore, the actual registration is validated on an artificial testbed with known ground truth deformation and on real data of a neuro clinical patient.
Cortical Surface Co-Registration based on MRI Images and Photos
3,770
Cascade classifiers are one of the most important contributions to real-time object detection. Nonetheless, there are many challenging problems arising in training cascade detectors. One common issue is that the node classifier is trained with a symmetric classifier. Having a low misclassification error rate does not guarantee an optimal node learning goal in cascade classifiers, i.e., an extremely high detection rate with a moderate false positive rate. In this work, we present a new approach to train an effective node classifier in a cascade detector. The algorithm is based on two key observations: 1) Redundant weak classifiers can be safely discarded; 2) The final detector should satisfy the asymmetric learning objective of the cascade architecture. To achieve this, we separate the classifier training into two steps: finding a pool of discriminative weak classifiers/features and training the final classifier by pruning weak classifiers which contribute little to the asymmetric learning criterion (asymmetric classifier construction). Our model reduction approach helps accelerate the learning time while achieving the pre-determined learning objective. Experimental results on both face and car data sets verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. On the FDDB face data sets, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates the advantage of our approach.
Asymmetric Pruning for Learning Cascade Detectors
3,771
Many interpolation methods have been developed for high visual quality, but fail for inability to preserve image structures. Edges carry heavy structural information for detection, determination and classification. Edge-adaptive interpolation approaches become a center of focus. In this paper, performance of four edge-directed interpolation methods comparing with two traditional methods is evaluated on two groups of images. These methods include new edge-directed interpolation (NEDI), edge-guided image interpolation (EGII), iterative curvature-based interpolation (ICBI), directional cubic convolution interpolation (DCCI) and two traditional approaches, bi-linear and bi-cubic. Meanwhile, no parameters are mentioned to measure edge-preserving ability of edge-adaptive interpolation approaches and we proposed two. One evaluates accuracy and the other measures robustness of edge-preservation ability. Performance evaluation is based on six parameters. Objective assessment and visual analysis are illustrated and conclusions are drawn from theoretical backgrounds and practical results.
Performance Evaluation of Edge-Directed Interpolation Methods for Images
3,772
Remote sensing techniques are widely used for land cover classification and urban analysis. The availability of high resolution remote sensing imagery limits the level of classification accuracy attainable from pixel-based approach. In this paper object-based classification scheme based on a hierarchical support vector machine is introduced. By combining spatial and spectral information, the amount of overlap between classes can be decreased; thereby yielding higher classification accuracy and more accurate land cover maps. We have adopted certain automatic approaches based on the advanced techniques as Cellular automata and Genetic Algorithm for kernel and tuning parameter selection. Performance evaluation of the proposed methodology in comparison with the existing approaches is performed with reference to the Bhopal city study area.
An N-dimensional approach towards object based classification of remotely sensed imagery
3,773
Automatic feature extraction domain has witnessed the application of many intelligent methodologies over past decade; however detection accuracy of these approaches were limited as object geometry and contextual knowledge were not given enough consideration. In this paper, we propose a frame work for accurate detection of features along with automatic interpolation, and interpretation by modeling feature shape as well as contextual knowledge using advanced techniques such as SVRF, Cellular Neural Network, Core set, and MACA. Developed methodology has been compared with contemporary methods using different statistical measures. Investigations over various satellite images revealed that considerable success was achieved with the CNN approach. CNN has been effective in modeling different complex features effectively and complexity of the approach has been considerably reduced using corset optimization. The system has dynamically used spectral and spatial information for representing contextual knowledge using CNN-prolog approach. System has been also proved to be effective in providing intelligent interpolation and interpretation of random features.
An intelligent approach towards automatic shape modeling and object extraction from satellite images using cellular automata based algorithm
3,774
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability preference of these versions to specific operations. Methodologies were implemented in Matlab and were enhanced with entropy variations. Evaluation of various implementations was based on different statistical parameters with reference to the study area The popular available versions like Tsalli's, Shanon's, and Renyi's entropies were analysed in context of various remote sensing operations namely thresholding, clustering and registration.
A Comparative Analysis on the Applicability of Entropy in remote sensing
3,775
Image registration is the process of transforming different sets of data into one coordinate system and is required for various remote sensing applications like change detection, image fusion, and other related areas. The effect of increased relief displacement, requirement of more control points, and increased data volume are the challenges associated with the registration of high resolution image data. The objective of this research work is to study the most efficient techniques and to investigate the extent of improvement achievable by enhancing them with Wavelet transform. The SIFT feature based method uses the Eigen value for extracting thousands of key points based on scale invariant features and these feature points when further enhanced by the wavelet transform yields the best results.
An investigation towards wavelet based optimization of automatic image registration techniques
3,776
Methodological contributions: This paper introduces a family of kernels for analyzing (anatomical) trees endowed with vector valued measurements made along the tree. While state-of-the-art graph and tree kernels use combinatorial tree/graph structure with discrete node and edge labels, the kernels presented in this paper can include geometric information such as branch shape, branch radius or other vector valued properties. In addition to being flexible in their ability to model different types of attributes, the presented kernels are computationally efficient and some of them can easily be computed for large datasets (N of the order 10.000) of trees with 30-600 branches. Combining the kernels with standard machine learning tools enables us to analyze the relation between disease and anatomical tree structure and geometry. Experimental results: The kernels are used to compare airway trees segmented from low-dose CT, endowed with branch shape descriptors and airway wall area percentage measurements made along the tree. Using kernelized hypothesis testing we show that the geometric airway trees are significantly differently distributed in patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) than in healthy individuals. The geometric tree kernels also give a significant increase in the classification accuracy of COPD from geometric tree structure endowed with airway wall thickness measurements in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, giving further insight into the relationship between airway wall thickness and COPD. Software: Software for computing kernels and statistical tests is available at http://image.diku.dk/aasa/software.php.
Geometric tree kernels: Classification of COPD from airway tree geometry
3,777
This work presents an automatic human gender and age group recognition system based on human facial images. It makes an extensive experiment with row pixel intensity valued features and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficient features with Principal Component Analysis and k-Nearest Neighbor classification to identify the best recognition approach. The final results show approaches using DCT coefficient outperform their counter parts resulting in a 99% correct gender recognition rate and 68% correct age group recognition rate (considering four distinct age groups) in unseen test images. Detailed experimental settings and obtained results are clearly presented and explained in this report.
Age group and gender recognition from human facial images
3,778
The two-dimensional Gabor function is adapted to natural image statistics, leading to a tractable probabilistic generative model that can be used to model simple-cell receptive-field profiles, or generate basis functions for sparse coding applications. Learning is found to be most pronounced in three Gabor-function parameters representing the size and spatial frequency of the two-dimensional Gabor function, and characterized by a non-uniform probability distribution with heavy tails. All three parameters are found to be strongly correlated: resulting in a basis of multiscale Gabor functions with similar aspect ratios, and size-dependent spatial frequencies. A key finding is that the distribution of receptive-field sizes is scale-invariant over a wide range of values, so there is no characteristic receptive-field size selected by natural image statistics. The Gabor-function aspect ratio is found to be approximately conserved by the learning rules and is therefore not well-determined by natural image statistics. This allows for three distinct solutions: a basis of Gabor functions with sharp orientation resolution at the expense of spatial-frequency resolution; a basis of Gabor functions with sharp spatial-frequency resolution at the expense of orientation resolution; or a basis with unit aspect ratio. Arbitrary mixtures of all three cases are also possible. Two parameters controlling the shape of the marginal distributions in a probabilistic generative model fully account for all three solutions. The best-performing probabilistic generative model for sparse coding applications is found to be a Gaussian copula with Pareto marginal probability density functions.
The two-dimensional Gabor function adapted to natural image statistics: A model of simple-cell receptive fields and sparse structure in images
3,779
Human eye can see and read what is written or displayed either in natural handwriting or in printed format. The same work in case the machine does is called handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition can be broken down into two categories: off-line and on-line. ...
Stroke-Based Cursive Character Recognition
3,780
We present an image representation method which is derived from analyzing Gaussian probability density function (\emph{pdf}) space using Lie group theory. In our proposed method, images are modeled by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) which are adapted from a globally trained GMM called universal background model (UBM). Then we vectorize the GMMs based on two facts: (1) components of image-specific GMMs are closely grouped together around their corresponding component of the UBM due to the characteristic of the UBM adaption procedure; (2) Gaussian \emph{pdf}s form a Lie group, which is a differentiable manifold rather than a vector space. We map each Gaussian component to the tangent vector space (named Lie algebra) of Lie group at the manifold position of UBM. The final feature vector, named Lie algebrized Gaussians (LAG) is then constructed by combining the Lie algebrized Gaussian components with mixture weights. We apply LAG features to scene category recognition problem and observe state-of-the-art performance on 15Scenes benchmark.
Lie Algebrized Gaussians for Image Representation
3,781
A new multiscale implementation of non-local means filtering for image denoising is proposed. The proposed algorithm also introduces a modification of similarity measure for patch comparison. The standard Euclidean norm is replaced by weighted Euclidean norm for patch based comparison. Assuming the patch as an oriented surface, notion of normal vector patch is being associated with each patch. The inner product of these normal vector patches is then used in weighted Euclidean distance of photometric patches as the weight factor. The algorithm involves two steps: The first step is multiscale implementation of an accelerated non-local means filtering in the stationary wavelet domain to obtain a refined version of the noisy patches for later comparison. This step is inspired by a preselection phase of finding similar patches in various non-local means approaches. The next step is to apply the modified non-local means filtering to the noisy image using the reference patches obtained in the first step. These refined patches contain less noise, and consequently the computation of normal vectors and partial derivatives is more accurate. Experimental results indicate equivalent or better performance of proposed algorithm as compared to various state of the art algorithms.
Multiscale Hybrid Non-local Means Filtering Using Modified Similarity Measure
3,782
A robust and efficient anomaly detection technique is proposed, capable of dealing with crowded scenes where traditional tracking based approaches tend to fail. Initial foreground segmentation of the input frames confines the analysis to foreground objects and effectively ignores irrelevant background dynamics. Input frames are split into non-overlapping cells, followed by extracting features based on motion, size and texture from each cell. Each feature type is independently analysed for the presence of an anomaly. Unlike most methods, a refined estimate of object motion is achieved by computing the optical flow of only the foreground pixels. The motion and size features are modelled by an approximated version of kernel density estimation, which is computationally efficient even for large training datasets. Texture features are modelled by an adaptively grown codebook, with the number of entries in the codebook selected in an online fashion. Experiments on the recently published UCSD Anomaly Detection dataset show that the proposed method obtains considerably better results than three recent approaches: MPPCA, social force, and mixture of dynamic textures (MDT). The proposed method is also several orders of magnitude faster than MDT, the next best performing method.
Improved Anomaly Detection in Crowded Scenes via Cell-based Analysis of Foreground Speed, Size and Texture
3,783
The study and development of software able to show the effect of aging of faces is one of the tasks of face recognition technologies. Some software solutions are used for investigations, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however some other applications can be proposed for the analysis of visual arts. Here we use a freely available software, which is providing interesting results, for the comparison of ancient marble busts. An analysis of Augustus busts is proposed.
A software for aging faces applied to ancient marble busts
3,784
Barten's model of spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function of human visual system is embedded in a multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer. This is done by 3D filtering of the stack of images with the spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function and feeding the result (i.e., the perceived image stack) to the multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer. The proposed procedure of considering spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function is generic in the sense that it can be used with observers other than multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer. Detection performance of the new observer in digital breast tomosynthesis is measured in a variety of browsing speeds, at two spatial sampling rates, using computer simulations. Our results show a peak in detection performance in mid browsing speeds. We compare our results to those of a human observer study reported earlier (I. Diaz et al. SPIE MI 2011). The effects of display luminance, contrast and spatial sampling rate, with and without considering foveal vision, are also studied. Reported simulations are conducted with real digital breast tomosynthesis image stacks, as well as stacks from an anthropomorphic software breast phantom (P. Bakic et al. Med Phys. 2011). Lesion cases are simulated by inserting single micro-calcifications or masses. Limitations of our methods and ways to improve them are discussed.
Integration of spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity with a multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer
3,785
This work proposes the combination of multiscale transform with fractal descriptors employed in the classification of gray-level texture images. We apply the space-scale transform (derivative + Gaussian filter) over the Bouligand-Minkowski fractal descriptors, followed by a threshold over the filter response, aiming at attenuating noise effects caused by the final part of this response. The method is tested in the classification of a well-known data set (Brodatz) and compared with other classical texture descriptor techniques. The results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach, achieving a higher success rate with a reduced amount of descriptors.
Multiscale Fractal Descriptors Applied to Texture Classification
3,786
In this paper, we consider the approximate weighted graph matching problem and introduce stable and informative first and second order compatibility terms suitable for inclusion into the popular integer quadratic program formulation. Our approach relies on a rigorous analysis of stability of spectral signatures based on the graph Laplacian. In the case of the first order term, we derive an objective function that measures both the stability and informativeness of a given spectral signature. By optimizing this objective, we design new spectral node signatures tuned to a specific graph to be matched. We also introduce the pairwise heat kernel distance as a stable second order compatibility term; we justify its plausibility by showing that in a certain limiting case it converges to the classical adjacency matrix-based second order compatibility function. We have tested our approach on a set of synthetic graphs, the widely-used CMU house sequence, and a set of real images. These experiments show the superior performance of our first and second order compatibility terms as compared with the commonly used ones.
Stable and Informative Spectral Signatures for Graph Matching
3,787
Some software solutions used to obtain the facial transformations can help investigating the artistic metamorphosis of the ancient portraits of the same person. An analysis with a freely available software of portraitures of Julius Caesar is proposed, showing his several "morphs". The software helps enhancing the mood the artist added to a portrait.
Facial transformations of ancient portraits: the face of Caesar
3,788
Extracting minutiae from fingerprint images is one of the most important steps in automatic fingerprint identification system. Because minutiae matching are certainly the most well-known and widely used method for fingerprint matching, minutiae are local discontinuities in the fingerprint pattern. In this paper a fingerprint matching algorithm is proposed using some specific feature of the minutiae points, also the acquired fingerprint image is considered by minimizing its size by generating a corresponding fingerprint template for a large fingerprint database. The results achieved are compared with those obtained through some other methods also shows some improvement in the minutiae detection process in terms of memory and time required.
Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Using Minutiae Matching Technique for the Large Fingerprint Database
3,789
Dimensionality reduction (DR) of image features plays an important role in image retrieval and classification tasks. Recently, two types of methods have been proposed to improve the both the accuracy and efficiency for the dimensionality reduction problem. One uses Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to describe the image distribution on the space of base matrix. Another one for dimension reduction trains a subspace projection matrix to project original data space into some low-dimensional subspaces which have deep architecture, so that the low-dimensional codes would be learned. At the same time, the graph based similarity learning algorithm which tries to exploit contextual information for improving the effectiveness of image rankings is also proposed for image class and retrieval problem. In this paper, after above two methods mentioned are utilized to reduce the high-dimensional features of images respectively, we learn the graph based similarity for the image classification problem. This paper compares the proposed approach with other approaches on an image database.
Image Classification by Feature Dimension Reduction and Graph based Ranking
3,790
We present a new approach to rigid-body motion segmentation from two views. We use a previously developed nonlinear embedding of two-view point correspondences into a 9-dimensional space and identify the different motions by segmenting lower-dimensional subspaces. In order to overcome nonuniform distributions along the subspaces, whose dimensions are unknown, we suggest the novel concept of global dimension and its minimization for clustering subspaces with some theoretical motivation. We propose a fast projected gradient algorithm for minimizing global dimension and thus segmenting motions from 2-views. We develop an outlier detection framework around the proposed method, and we present state-of-the-art results on outlier-free and outlier-corrupted two-view data for segmenting motion.
A New Approach To Two-View Motion Segmentation Using Global Dimension Minimization
3,791
Recognizing 3D objects in the presence of noise, varying mesh resolution, occlusion and clutter is a very challenging task. This paper presents a novel method named Rotational Projection Statistics (RoPS). It has three major modules: Local Reference Frame (LRF) definition, RoPS feature description and 3D object recognition. We propose a novel technique to define the LRF by calculating the scatter matrix of all points lying on the local surface. RoPS feature descriptors are obtained by rotationally projecting the neighboring points of a feature point onto 2D planes and calculating a set of statistics (including low-order central moments and entropy) of the distribution of these projected points. Using the proposed LRF and RoPS descriptor, we present a hierarchical 3D object recognition algorithm. The performance of the proposed LRF, RoPS descriptor and object recognition algorithm was rigorously tested on a number of popular and publicly available datasets. Our proposed techniques exhibited superior performance compared to existing techniques. We also showed that our method is robust with respect to noise and varying mesh resolution. Our RoPS based algorithm achieved recognition rates of 100%, 98.9%, 95.4% and 96.0% respectively when tested on the Bologna, UWA, Queen's and Ca' Foscari Venezia Datasets.
Rotational Projection Statistics for 3D Local Surface Description and Object Recognition
3,792
We describe a non-parametric, "example-based" method for estimating the depth of an object, viewed in a single photo. Our method consults a database of example 3D geometries, searching for those which look similar to the object in the photo. The known depths of the selected database objects act as shape priors which constrain the process of estimating the object's depth. We show how this process can be performed by optimizing a well defined target likelihood function, via a hard-EM procedure. We address the problem of representing the (possibly infinite) variability of viewing conditions with a finite (and often very small) example set, by proposing an on-the-fly example update scheme. We further demonstrate the importance of non-stationarity in avoiding misleading examples when estimating structured shapes. We evaluate our method and present both qualitative as well as quantitative results for challenging object classes. Finally, we show how this same technique may be readily applied to a number of related problems. These include the novel task of estimating the occluded depth of an object's backside and the task of tailoring custom fitting image-maps for input depths.
Single View Depth Estimation from Examples
3,793
Accurate detection of mitosis plays a critical role in breast cancer histopathology. Manual detection and counting of mitosis is tedious and subject to considerable inter- and intra-reader variations. Multispectral imaging is a recent medical imaging technology, proven successful in increasing the segmentation accuracy in other fields. This study aims at improving the accuracy of mitosis detection by developing a specific solution using multispectral and multifocal imaging of breast cancer histopathological data. We propose to enable clinical routine-compliant quality of mitosis discrimination from other objects. The proposed framework includes comprehensive analysis of spectral bands and z-stack focus planes, detection of expected mitotic regions (candidates) in selected focus planes and spectral bands, computation of multispectral spatial features for each candidate, selection of multispectral spatial features and a study of different state-of-the-art classification methods for candidates classification as mitotic or non mitotic figures. This framework has been evaluated on MITOS multispectral medical dataset and achieved 60% detection rate and 57% F-Measure. Our results indicate that multispectral spatial features have more information for mitosis classification in comparison with white spectral band features, being therefore a very promising exploration area to improve the quality of the diagnosis assistance in histopathology.
Multispectral Spatial Characterization: Application to Mitosis Detection in Breast Cancer Histopathology
3,794
Recovering shadows is an important step for many vision algorithms. Current approaches that work with time-lapse sequences are limited to simple thresholding heuristics. We show these approaches only work with very careful tuning of parameters, and do not work well for long-term time-lapse sequences taken over the span of many months. We introduce a parameter-free expectation maximization approach which simultaneously estimates shadows, albedo, surface normals, and skylight. This approach is more accurate than previous methods, works over both very short and very long sequences, and is robust to the effects of nonlinear camera response. Finally, we demonstrate that the shadow masks derived through this algorithm substantially improve the performance of sun-based photometric stereo compared to earlier shadow mask estimation.
Shadow Estimation Method for "The Episolar Constraint: Monocular Shape from Shadow Correspondence"
3,795
Some mixtures, such as colloids like milk, blood, and gelatin, have homogeneous appearance when viewed with the naked eye, however, to observe them at the nanoscale is possible to understand the heterogeneity of its components. The same phenomenon can occur in pattern recognition in which it is possible to see heterogeneous patterns in texture images. However, current methods of texture analysis can not adequately describe such heterogeneous patterns. Common methods used by researchers analyse the image information in a global way, taking all its features in an integrated manner. Furthermore, multi-scale analysis verifies the patterns at different scales, but still preserving the homogeneous analysis. On the other hand various methods use textons to represent the texture, breaking texture down into its smallest unit. To tackle this problem, we propose a method to identify texture patterns not small as textons at distinct scales enhancing the separability among different types of texture. We find sub patterns of texture according to the scale and then group similar patterns for a more refined analysis. Tests were performed in four static texture databases and one dynamic one. Results show that our method provides better classification rate compared with conventional approaches both in static and in dynamic texture.
Heterogeneous patterns enhancing static and dynamic texture classification
3,796
Hand Gesture is a popular way to interact or control machines and it has been implemented in many applications. The geometry of hand is such that it is hard to construct in virtual environment and control the joints but the functionality and DOF encourage researchers to make a hand like instrument. This paper presents a novel method for fingertips detection and centres of palms detection distinctly for both hands using MS KINECT in 3D from the input image. KINECT facilitates us by providing the depth information of foreground objects. The hands were segmented using the depth vector and centres of palms were detected using distance transformation on inverse image. This result would be used to feed the inputs to the robotic hands to emulate human hands operation.
Tracking of Fingertips and Centres of Palm using KINECT
3,797
In Computer Vision, colour-based spatial techniquesoften assume a static skin colour model. However, skin colour perceived by a camera can change when lighting changes. In common real environment multiple light sources impinge on the skin. Moreover, detection techniques may vary when the image under study is taken under different lighting condition than the one that was earlier under consideration. Therefore, for robust skin pixel detection, a dynamic skin colour model that can cope with the changes must be employed. This paper shows that skin pixel detection in a digital colour image can be significantly improved by employing automated colour space switching methods. In the root of the switching technique which is employed in this study, lies the statistical mean of value of the skin pixels in the image which in turn has been derived from the Value, measures as a third component of the HSV. The study is based on experimentations on a set of images where capture time conditions varying from highly illuminated to almost dark.
Automated Switching System for Skin Pixel Segmentation in Varied Lighting
3,798
Image sequences filtering have recently become a very important technical problem especially with the advent of new technology in multimedia and video systems applications. Often image sequences are corrupted by some amount of noise introduced by the image sensor and therefore inherently present in the imaging process. The main problem in the image sequences is how to deal with spatio-temporal and non stationary signals. In this paper, we propose a robust method for noise removal of image sequence based on coupled spatial and temporal anisotropic diffusion. The idea is to achieve an adaptive smoothing in both spatial and temporal directions, by solving a nonlinear diffusion equation. This allows removing noise while preserving all spatial and temporal discontinuities
Robust Noise Filtering in Image Sequences
3,799