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Given a collection $\{Z_1,Z_2,\ldots,Z_m\}$ of $n$-sided polygons in the plane and a query polygon $W$ we give algorithms to find all $Z_\ell$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ with $f$ an unknown similarity transformation in time independent of the size of the collection. If $f$ is a known affine transformation, we show how to find all $Z_\ell$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ in $O(n+\log(m))$ time. For a pair $W,W^\prime$ of polygons we can find all the pairs $Z_\ell,Z_{\ell^\prime}$ such that $W=f(Z_\ell)$ and $W^\prime=f(Z_{\ell^\prime})$ for an unknown affine transformation $f$ in $O(m+n)$ time. For the case of triangles we also give bounds for the problem of matching triangles with variable vertices, which is equivalent to affine matching triangles in noisy conditions.
Polygon Matching and Indexing Under Affine Transformations
3,800
Mobile object tracking has an important role in the computer vision applications. In this paper, we use a tracked target-based taxonomy to present the object tracking algorithms. The tracked targets are divided into three categories: points of interest, appearance and silhouette of mobile objects. Advantages and limitations of the tracking approaches are also analyzed to find the future directions in the object tracking domain.
Object Tracking in Videos: Approaches and Issues
3,801
High-resolution depth maps can be inferred from low-resolution depth measurements and an additional high-resolution intensity image of the same scene. To that end, we introduce a bimodal co-sparse analysis model, which is able to capture the interdependency of registered intensity and depth information. This model is based on the assumption that the co-supports of corresponding bimodal image structures are aligned when computed by a suitable pair of analysis operators. No analytic form of such operators exist and we propose a method for learning them from a set of registered training signals. This learning process is done offline and returns a bimodal analysis operator that is universally applicable to natural scenes. We use this to exploit the bimodal co-sparse analysis model as a prior for solving inverse problems, which leads to an efficient algorithm for depth map super-resolution.
A Joint Intensity and Depth Co-Sparse Analysis Model for Depth Map Super-Resolution
3,802
In this letter we propose to denoise digital color images via an improved geometric diffusion scheme. By introducing edges detected from all three color channels into the diffusion the proposed scheme avoids color smearing artifacts. Vector valued diffusion is used to control the smoothing and the geometry of color images are taken into consideration. Color edge strength function computed from different planes is introduced and it stops the diffusion spread across chromatic edges. Experimental results indicate that the scheme achieves good denoising with edge preservation when compared to other related schemes.
Color image denoising by chromatic edges based vector valued diffusion
3,803
The field of Numismatics provides the names and descriptions of the symbols minted on the ancient coins. Classification of the ancient coins aims at assigning a given coin to its issuer. Various issuers used various symbols for their coins. We propose to use these symbols for a framework that will coarsely classify the ancient coins. Bag of visual words (BoVWs) is a well established visual recognition technique applied to various problems in computer vision like object and scene recognition. Improvements have been made by incorporating the spatial information to this technique. We apply the BoVWs technique to our problem and use three symbols for coarse-grained classification. We use rectangular tiling, log-polar tiling and circular tiling to incorporate spatial information to BoVWs. Experimental results show that the circular tiling proves superior to the rest of the methods for our problem.
A Bag of Visual Words Approach for Symbols-Based Coarse-Grained Ancient Coin Classification
3,804
Crowd monitoring and analysis in mass events are highly important technologies to support the security of attending persons. Proposed methods based on terrestrial or airborne image/video data often fail in achieving sufficiently accurate results to guarantee a robust service. We present a novel framework for estimating human count, density and motion from video data based on custom tailored object detection techniques, a regression based density estimate and a total variation based optical flow extraction. From the gathered features we present a detailed accuracy analysis versus ground truth measurements. In addition, all information is projected into world coordinates to enable a direct integration with existing geo-information systems. The resulting human counts demonstrate a mean error of 4% to 9% and thus represent a most efficient measure that can be robustly applied in security critical services.
Counting people from above: Airborne video based crowd analysis
3,805
Parsing human poses in images is fundamental in extracting critical visual information for artificial intelligent agents. Our goal is to learn self-contained body part representations from images, which we call visual symbols, and their symbol-wise geometric contexts in this parsing process. Each symbol is individually learned by categorizing visual features leveraged by geometric information. In the categorization, we use Latent Support Vector Machine followed by an efficient cross validation procedure to learn visual symbols. Then, these symbols naturally define geometric contexts of body parts in a fine granularity. When the structure of the compositional parts is a tree, we derive an efficient approach to estimating human poses in images. Experiments on two large datasets suggest our approach outperforms state of the art methods.
Learning Visual Symbols for Parsing Human Poses in Images
3,806
This paper proposes a novel method which combines both median filter and simple standard deviation to accomplish an excellent edge detector for image processing. First of all, a denoising process must be applied on the grey scale image using median filter to identify pixels which are likely to be contaminated by noise. The benefit of this step is to smooth the image and get rid of the noisy pixels. After that, the simple statistical standard deviation could be computed for each 2X2 window size. If the value of the standard deviation inside the 2X2 window size is greater than a predefined threshold, then the upper left pixel in the 2?2 window represents an edge. The visual differences between the proposed edge detector and the standard known edge detectors have been shown to support the contribution in this paper.
Semi-Optimal Edge Detector based on Simple Standard Deviation with Adjusted Thresholding
3,807
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to make a novel spatial image transformation. The proposed approach aims to reduce the bit depth used for image storage. The basic technique for the proposed transformation is based of the modulus operator. The goal is to transform the whole image into multiples of predefined integer. The division of the whole image by that integer will guarantee that the new image surely less in size from the original image. The k-Modulus Method could not be used as a stand alone transform for image compression because of its high compression ratio. It could be used as a scheme embedded in other image processing fields especially compression. According to its high PSNR value, it could be amalgamated with other methods to facilitate the redundancy criterion.
k-Modulus Method for Image Transformation
3,808
This paper addresses the automatic recognition of handwritten temperature values in weather records. The localization of table cells is based on line detection using projection profiles. Further, a stroke-preserving line removal method which is based on gradient images is proposed. The presented digit recognition utilizes features which are extracted using a set of filters and a Support Vector Machine classifier. It was evaluated on the MNIST and the USPS dataset and our own database with about 17,000 RGB digit images. An accuracy of 99.36% per digit is achieved for the entire system using a set of 84 weather records.
Digit Recognition in Handwritten Weather Records
3,809
In this paper, we propose an algebraic approach to upgrade a projective reconstruction to a Euclidean one, and aim at computing the rectifying homography from a minimal number of 9 segments of known length. Constraints are derived from these segments which yield a set of polynomial equations that we solve by means of Gr\"obner bases. We explain how a solver for such a system of equations can be constructed from simplified template data. Moreover, we present experiments that demonstrate that the given problem can be solved in this way.
Euclidean Upgrade from a Minimal Number of Segments
3,810
In this paper we propose a global convex approach for image hallucination. Altering the idea of classical multi image super resolution (SU) systems to single image SU, we incorporate aligned images to hallucinate the output. Our work is based on the paper of Tappen et al. where they use a non-convex model for image hallucination. In comparison we formulate a convex primal optimization problem and derive a fast converging primal-dual algorithm with a global optimal solution. We use a database with face images to incorporate high-frequency details to the high-resolution output. We show that we can achieve state-of-the-art results by using a convex approach.
A Convex Approach for Image Hallucination
3,811
Standard OCR is a well-researched topic of computer vision and can be considered solved for machine-printed text. However, when applied to unconstrained images, the recognition rates drop drastically. Therefore, the employment of object recognition-based techniques has become state of the art in scene text recognition applications. This paper presents a scene text recognition method tailored to ancient coin legends and compares the results achieved in character and word recognition experiments to a standard OCR engine. The conducted experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the standard OCR engine on a set of 180 cropped coin legend words.
Reading Ancient Coin Legends: Object Recognition vs. OCR
3,812
We investigate possibilities to speed up iterative algorithms for non-blind image deconvolution. We focus on algorithms in which convolution with the point-spread function to be deconvolved is used in each iteration, and aim at accelerating these convolution operations as they are typically the most expensive part of the computation. We follow two approaches: First, for some practically important specific point-spread functions, algorithmically efficient sliding window or list processing techniques can be used. In some constellations this allows faster computation than via the Fourier domain. Second, as iterations progress, computation of convolutions can be restricted to subsets of pixels. For moderate thinning rates this can be done with almost no impact on the reconstruction quality. Both approaches are demonstrated in the context of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution but are not restricted to this method.
Algorithmic Optimisations for Iterative Deconvolution Methods
3,813
We introduce and we analyze a new dataset which resembles the input to biological vision systems much more than most previously published ones. Our analysis leaded to several important conclusions. First, it is possible to disambiguate over dozens of visual scenes (locations) encountered over the course of several weeks of a human life with accuracy of over 80%, and this opens up possibility for numerous novel vision applications, from early detection of dementia to everyday use of wearable camera streams for automatic reminders, and visual stream exchange. Second, our experimental results indicate that, generative models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation or Counting Grids, are more suitable to such types of data, as they are more robust to overtraining and comfortable with images at low resolution, blurred and characterized by relatively random clutter and a mix of objects.
In the sight of my wearable camera: Classifying my visual experience
3,814
Mutual information (MI) is a popular similarity measure for image registration, whereby good registration can be achieved by maximizing the compactness of the clusters in the joint histogram. However, MI is sensitive to the "outlier" objects that appear in one image but not the other, and also suffers from local and biased maxima. We propose a novel joint saliency map (JSM) to highlight the corresponding salient structures in the two images, and emphatically group those salient structures into the smoothed compact clusters in the weighted joint histogram. This strategy could solve both the outlier and the local maxima problems. Experimental results show that the JSM-MI based algorithm is not only accurate but also robust for registration of challenging image pairs with outliers.
Registration of Images with Outliers Using Joint Saliency Map
3,815
In this paper, a novel method for edge detection of microcalcification clusters in mammogram images is presented using the concept of Fractal Dimension and Hurst co-efficient that enables to locate the microcalcifications in the mammograms. This technique detects the edges accurately than the ones obtained by the conventional Sobel method. Generally, Sobel method detects the edges of the regions/objects in an image using the Fudge factor that assumes its value as 0.5, by default. In this proposed technique, the Fudge factor is suitably replaced with Hurst Co-efficient, which is computed as the difference of Fractal dimension and the topological dimension of a given input image. These two dimensions are image-dependent, and hence the respective Hurst co-efficient too varies with respect to images. Hence, the image-dependent Hurst co-efficient based Sobel method is proved to produce better results than the Fudge factor based Sobel method. The results of the proposed method substantiate the merit of the proposed technique.
Fractal-Based Detection of Microcalcification Clusters in Digital Mammograms
3,816
Digital images nowadays have various styles of appearance, in the aspects of color tones, contrast, vignetting, and etc. These 'picture styles' are directly related to the scene radiance, image pipeline of the camera, and post processing functions. Due to the complexity and nonlinearity of these causes, popular gradient-based image descriptors won't be invariant to different picture styles, which will decline the performance of object recognition. Given that images shared online or created by individual users are taken with a wide range of devices and may be processed by various post processing functions, to find a robust object recognition system is useful and challenging. In this paper, we present the first study on the influence of picture styles for object recognition, and propose an adaptive approach based on the kernel view of gradient descriptors and multiple kernel learning, without estimating or specifying the styles of images used in training and testing. We conduct experiments on Domain Adaptation data set and Oxford Flower data set. The experiments also include several variants of the flower data set by processing the images with popular photo effects. The results demonstrate that our proposed method improve from standard descriptors in all cases.
An Adaptive Descriptor Design for Object Recognition in the Wild
3,817
Image enhancement is an important image processing technique that processes images suitably for a specific application e.g. image editing. The conventional solutions of image enhancement are grouped into two categories which are spatial domain processing method and transform domain processing method such as contrast manipulation, histogram equalization, homomorphic filtering. This paper proposes a new image enhance method based on dictionary learning. Particularly, the proposed method adjusts the image by manipulating the rarity of dictionary atoms. Firstly, learn the dictionary through sparse coding algorithms on divided sub-image blocks. Secondly, compute the rarity of dictionary atoms on statistics of the corresponding sparse coefficients. Thirdly, adjust the rarity according to specific application and form a new dictionary. Finally, reconstruct the image using the updated dictionary and sparse coefficients. Compared with the traditional techniques, the proposed method enhances image based on the image content not on distribution of pixel grey value or frequency. The advantages of the proposed method lie in that it is in better correspondence with the response of the human visual system and more suitable for salient objects extraction. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image enhance method.
Dictionary learning based image enhancement for rarity detection
3,818
In this article a novel algorithm for color image segmentation has been developed. The proposed algorithm based on combining two existing methods in such a novel way to obtain a significant method to partition the color image into significant regions. On the first phase, the traditional Otsu method for gray channel image segmentation were applied for each of the R,G, and B channels separately to determine the suitable automatic threshold for each channel. After that, the new modified channels are integrated again to formulate a new color image. The resulted image suffers from some kind of distortion. To get rid of this distortion, the second phase is arise which is the median filter to smooth the image and increase the segmented regions. This process looks very significant by the ocular eye. Experimental results were presented on a variety of test images to support the proposed algorithm.
Hybridization of Otsu Method and Median Filter for Color Image Segmentation
3,819
The study of human factors in the frame of interaction studies has been relevant for usability engi-neering and ergonomics for decades. Today, with the advent of wearable eye-tracking and Google glasses, monitoring of human factors will soon become ubiquitous. This work describes a computer vision system that enables pervasive mapping and monitoring of human attention. The key contribu-tion is that our methodology enables full 3D recovery of the gaze pointer, human view frustum and associated human centred measurements directly into an automatically computed 3D model in real-time. We apply RGB-D SLAM and descriptor matching methodologies for the 3D modelling, locali-zation and fully automated annotation of ROIs (regions of interest) within the acquired 3D model. This innovative methodology will open new avenues for attention studies in real world environments, bringing new potential into automated processing for human factors technologies.
A Computer Vision System for Attention Mapping in SLAM based 3D Models
3,820
The potential of compressive sensing (CS) has spurred great interest in the research community and is a fast growing area of research. However, research translating CS theory into practical hardware and demonstrating clear and significant benefits with this hardware over current, conventional imaging techniques has been limited. This article helps researchers to find those niche applications where the CS approach provides substantial gain over conventional approaches by articulating lessons learned in finding one such application; sea skimming missile detection. As a proof of concept, it is demonstrated that a simplified CS missile detection architecture and algorithm provides comparable results to the conventional imaging approach but using a smaller FPA. The primary message is that all of the excitement surrounding CS is necessary and appropriate for encouraging our creativity but we all must also take off our "rose colored glasses" and critically judge our ideas, methods and results relative to conventional imaging approaches.
How to find real-world applications for compressive sensing
3,821
We present a novel segmentation algorithm based on a hierarchical representation of images. The main contribution of this work is to explore the capabilities of the A Contrario reasoning when applied to the segmentation problem, and to overcome the limitations of current algorithms within that framework. This exploratory approach has three main goals. Our first goal is to extend the search space of greedy merging algorithms to the set of all partitions spanned by a certain hierarchy, and to cast the segmentation as a selection problem within this space. In this way we increase the number of tested partitions and thus we potentially improve the segmentation results. In addition, this space is considerably smaller than the space of all possible partitions, thus we still keep the complexity controlled. Our second goal aims to improve the locality of region merging algorithms, which usually merge pairs of neighboring regions. In this work, we overcome this limitation by introducing a validation procedure for complete partitions, rather than for pairs of regions. The third goal is to perform an exhaustive experimental evaluation methodology in order to provide reproducible results. Finally, we embed the selection process on a statistical A Contrario framework which allows us to have only one free parameter related to the desired scale.
A Contrario Selection of Optimal Partitions for Image Segmentation
3,822
Ultrasound imaging is an incontestable vital tool for diagnosis, it provides in non-invasive manner the internal structure of the body to detect eventually diseases or abnormalities tissues. Unfortunately, the presence of speckle noise in these images affects edges and fine details which limit the contrast resolution and make diagnostic more difficult. In this paper, we propose a denoising approach which combines logarithmic transformation and a non linear diffusion tensor. Since speckle noise is multiplicative and nonwhite process, the logarithmic transformation is a reasonable choice to convert signaldependent or pure multiplicative noise to an additive one. The key idea from using diffusion tensor is to adapt the flow diffusion towards the local orientation by applying anisotropic diffusion along the coherent structure direction of interesting features in the image. To illustrate the effective performance of our algorithm, we present some experimental results on synthetically and real echographic images.
Speckle Noise Reduction in Medical Ultrasound Images
3,823
Fingerprint verification and identification algorithms based on minutiae features are used in many biometric systems today (e.g., governmental e-ID programs, border control, AFIS, personal authentication for portable devices). Researchers in industry/academia are now able to utilize many publicly available fingerprint databases (e.g., Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) & NIST databases) to compare/evaluate their feature extraction and/or matching algorithm performances against those of others. The results from these evaluations are typically utilized by decision makers responsible for implementing the cited biometric systems, in selecting/tuning specific sensors, feature extractors and matchers. In this study, for a subset of the cited public fingerprint databases, we report fingerprint minutiae matching results, which are based on (i) minutiae extracted automatically from fingerprint images, and (ii) minutiae extracted manually by human subjects. By doing so, we are able to (i) quantitatively judge the performance differences between these two cases, (ii) elaborate on performance upper bounds of minutiae matching, utilizing what can be termed as "ground truth" minutiae features, (iii) analyze minutiae matching performance, without coupling it with the minutiae extraction performance beforehand. Further, as we will freely distribute the minutiae templates, originating from this manual labeling study, in a standard minutiae template exchange format (ISO 19794-2), we believe that other researchers in the biometrics community will be able to utilize the associated results & templates to create their own evaluations pertaining to their fingerprint minutiae extractors/matchers.
Standard Fingerprint Databases: Manual Minutiae Labeling and Matcher Performance Analyses
3,824
We present the principle and the main steps of a new method for the visuo-spatial analysis of geometrical sketches recorded online. Visuo-spatial analysis is a necessary step for multi-level analysis. Multi-level analysis simultaneously allows classification, comparison or clustering of the constituent parts of a pattern according to their visuo-spatial properties, their procedural strategies, their structural or temporal parameters, or any combination of two or more of those parameters. The first results provided by this method concern the comparison of sketches to some perfect patterns of simple geometrical figures and the measure of dissimilarity between real sketches. The mean rates of good decision higher than 95% obtained are promising in both cases.
A Method for Visuo-Spatial Classification of Freehand Shapes Freely Sketched
3,825
Colorectal polyps are important precursors to colon cancer, a major health problem. Colon capsule endoscopy (CCE) is a safe and minimally invasive examination procedure, in which the images of the intestine are obtained via digital cameras on board of a small capsule ingested by a patient. The video sequence is then analyzed for the presence of polyps. We propose an algorithm that relieves the labor of a human operator analyzing the frames in the video sequence. The algorithm acts as a binary classifier, which labels the frame as either containing polyps or not, based on the geometrical analysis and the texture content of the frame. The geometrical analysis is based on a segmentation of an image with the help of a mid-pass filter. The features extracted by the segmentation procedure are classified according to an assumption that the polyps are characterized as protrusions that are mostly round in shape. Thus, we use a best fit ball radius as a decision parameter of a binary classifier. We present a statistical study of the performance of our approach on a data set containing over 18,900 frames from the endoscopic video sequences of five adult patients. The algorithm demonstrates a solid performance, achieving 47% sensitivity per frame and over 81% sensitivity per polyp at a specificity level of 90%. On average, with a video sequence length of 3747 frames, only 367 false positive frames need to be inspected by a human operator.
Automated polyp detection in colon capsule endoscopy
3,826
Removing or repairing the imperfections of a digital images or videos is a very active and attractive field of research belonging to the image inpainting technique. This later has a wide range of applications, such as removing scratches in old photographic image, removing text and logos or creating cartoon and artistic effects. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to repair a damaged image based on a non linear diffusion tensor. The idea is to track perfectly the local geometry of the damaged image and allowing diffusion only in the isophotes curves direction. To illustrate the effective performance of our method, we present some experimental results on test and real photographic color images
Repairing and Inpainting Damaged Images using Diffusion Tensor
3,827
Simple tree models for articulated objects prevails in the last decade. However, it is also believed that these simple tree models are not capable of capturing large variations in many scenarios, such as human pose estimation. This paper attempts to address three questions: 1) are simple tree models sufficient? more specifically, 2) how to use tree models effectively in human pose estimation? and 3) how shall we use combined parts together with single parts efficiently? Assuming we have a set of single parts and combined parts, and the goal is to estimate a joint distribution of their locations. We surprisingly find that no latent variables are introduced in the Leeds Sport Dataset (LSP) during learning latent trees for deformable model, which aims at approximating the joint distributions of body part locations using minimal tree structure. This suggests one can straightforwardly use a mixed representation of single and combined parts to approximate their joint distribution in a simple tree model. As such, one only needs to build Visual Categories of the combined parts, and then perform inference on the learned latent tree. Our method outperformed the state of the art on the LSP, both in the scenarios when the training images are from the same dataset and from the PARSE dataset. Experiments on animal images from the VOC challenge further support our findings.
Beyond Physical Connections: Tree Models in Human Pose Estimation
3,828
The paper investigates a hypothesis that our visual system groups visual cues based on how they form a surface, or more specifically triangulation derived from the visual cues. To test our hypothesis, we compare shape recognition with three different representations of visual cues: a set of isolated dots delineating the outline of the shape, a set of triangles obtained from Delaunay triangulation of the set of dots, and a subset of Delaunay triangles excluding those outside of the shape. Each participant was assigned to one particular representation type and increased the number of dots (and consequentially triangles) until the underlying shape could be identified. We compare the average number of dots needed for identification among three types of representations. Our hypothesis predicts that the results from the three representations will be similar. However, they show statistically significant differences. The paper also presents triangulation based algorithms for reconstruction and recognition of a shape from a set of isolated dots. Experiments showed that the algorithms were more effective and perceptually agreeable than similar contour based ones. From these experiments, we conclude that triangulation does affect our shape recognition. However, the surface based approach presents a number of computational advantages over the contour based one and should be studied further.
Shape Reconstruction and Recognition with Isolated Non-directional Cues
3,829
Object tracking quality usually depends on video context (e.g. object occlusion level, object density). In order to decrease this dependency, this paper presents a learning approach to adapt the tracker parameters to the context variations. In an offline phase, satisfactory tracking parameters are learned for video context clusters. In the online control phase, once a context change is detected, the tracking parameters are tuned using the learned values. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the recent trackers in state of the art. This paper brings two contributions: (1) a classification method of video sequences to learn offline tracking parameters, (2) a new method to tune online tracking parameters using tracking context.
Automatic Parameter Adaptation for Multi-object Tracking
3,830
In this paper we propose an easiest approach for facial expression recognition. Here we are using concept of SVM for Expression Classification. Main problem is sub divided in three main modules. First one is Face detection in which we are using skin filter and Face segmentation. We are given more stress on feature Extraction. This method is effective enough for application where fast execution is required. Second, Facial Feature Extraction which is essential part for expression recognition. In this module we used Edge Projection Analysis. Finally extracted features vector is passed towards SVM classifier for Expression Recognition. We are considering six basic Expressions (Anger, Fear, Disgust, Joy, Sadness, and Surprise)
Human Mood Detection For Human Computer Interaction
3,831
Image Processing, Optimization and Prediction of an Image play a key role in Computer Science. Image processing provides a way to analyze and identify an image .Many areas like medical image processing, Satellite images, natural images and artificial images requires lots of analysis and research on optimization. In Image Optimization and Prediction we are combining the features of Query Optimization, Image Processing and Prediction . Image optimization is used in Pattern analysis, object recognition, in medical Image processing to predict the type of diseases, in satellite images for predicting weather forecast, availability of water or mineral etc. Image Processing, Optimization and analysis is a wide open area for research .Lots of research has been conducted in the area of Image analysis and many techniques are available for image analysis but, a single technique is not yet identified for image analysis and prediction .our research is focused on identifying a global technique for image analysis and Prediction.
Image Optimization and Prediction
3,832
In recent years, a large number of binarization methods have been developed, with varying performance generalization and strength against different benchmarks. In this work, to leverage on these methods, an ensemble of experts (EoE) framework is introduced, to efficiently combine the outputs of various methods. The proposed framework offers a new selection process of the binarization methods, which are actually the experts in the ensemble, by introducing three concepts: confidentness, endorsement and schools of experts. The framework, which is highly objective, is built based on two general principles: (i) consolidation of saturated opinions and (ii) identification of schools of experts. After building the endorsement graph of the ensemble for an input document image based on the confidentness of the experts, the saturated opinions are consolidated, and then the schools of experts are identified by thresholding the consolidated endorsement graph. A variation of the framework, in which no selection is made, is also introduced that combines the outputs of all experts using endorsement-dependent weights. The EoE framework is evaluated on the set of participating methods in the H-DIBCO'12 contest and also on an ensemble generated from various instances of grid-based Sauvola method with promising performance.
Unsupervised ensemble of experts (EoE) framework for automatic binarization of document images
3,833
Wavelet domain inpainting refers to the process of recovering the missing coefficients during the image compression or transmission stage. Recently, an efficient algorithm framework which is called Bregmanized operator splitting (BOS) was proposed for solving the classical variational model of wavelet inpainting. However, it is still time-consuming to some extent due to the inner iteration. In this paper, a novel variational model is established to formulate this reconstruction problem from the view of image decomposition. Then an efficient iterative algorithm based on the split-Bregman method is adopted to calculate an optimal solution, and it is also proved to be convergent. Compared with the BOS algorithm the proposed algorithm avoids the inner iteration and hence is more simple. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is very efficient and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, especially in the computational time.
Novel variational model for inpainting in the wavelet domain
3,834
This paper proposes a semantic segmentation method for outdoor scenes captured by a surveillance camera. Our algorithm classifies each perceptually homogenous region as one of the predefined classes learned from a collection of manually labelled images. The proposed approach combines two different types of information. First, color segmentation is performed to divide the scene into perceptually similar regions. Then, the second step is based on SIFT keypoints and uses the bag of words representation of the regions for the classification. The prediction is done using a Na\"ive Bayesian Network as a generative classifier. Compared to existing techniques, our method provides more compact representations of scene contents and the segmentation result is more consistent with human perception due to the combination of the color information with the image keypoints. The experiments conducted on a publicly available data set demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.
A Bag of Words Approach for Semantic Segmentation of Monitored Scenes
3,835
The following work outlines an approach for automatic detection and recognition of periodic pulse train signals using a multi-stage process based on spectrogram edge detection, energy projection and classification. The method has been implemented to automatically detect and recognize pulse train songs of minke whales. While the long term goal of this work is to properly identify and detect minke songs from large multi-year datasets, this effort was developed using sounds off the coast of Massachusetts, in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The detection methodology is presented and evaluated on 232 continuous hours of acoustic recordings and a qualitative analysis of machine learning classifiers and their performance is described. The trained automatic detection and classification system is applied to 120 continuous hours, comprised of various challenges such as broadband and narrowband noises, low SNR, and other pulse train signatures. This automatic system achieves a TPR of 63% for FPR of 0.6% (or 0.87 FP/h), at a Precision (PPV) of 84% and an F1 score of 71%.
Bioacoustical Periodic Pulse Train Signal Detection and Classification using Spectrogram Intensity Binarization and Energy Projection
3,836
In this paper, we propose a method to improve sound classification performance by combining signal features, derived from the time-frequency spectrogram, with human perception. The method presented herein exploits an artificial neural network (ANN) and learns the signal features based on the human perception knowledge. The proposed method is applied to a large acoustic dataset containing 24 months of nearly continuous recordings. The results show a significant improvement in performance of the detection-classification system; yielding as much as 20% improvement in true positive rate for a given false positive rate.
Classification for Big Dataset of Bioacoustic Signals Based on Human Scoring System and Artificial Neural Network
3,837
In this paper, we develop a novel method based on machine-learning and image processing to identify North Atlantic right whale (NARW) up-calls in the presence of high levels of ambient and interfering noise. We apply a continuous region algorithm on the spectrogram to extract the regions of interest, and then use grid masking techniques to generate a small feature set that is then used in an artificial neural network classifier to identify the NARW up-calls. It is shown that the proposed technique is effective in detecting and capturing even very faint up-calls, in the presence of ambient and interfering noises. The method is evaluated on a dataset recorded in Massachusetts Bay, United States. The dataset includes 20000 sound clips for training, and 10000 sound clips for testing. The results show that the proposed technique can achieve an error rate of less than FPR = 4.5% for a 90% true positive rate.
Bioacoustic Signal Classification Based on Continuous Region Processing, Grid Masking and Artificial Neural Network
3,838
This paper focuses on improved edge model based on Curvelet coefficients analysis. Curvelet transform is a powerful tool for multiresolution representation of object with anisotropic edge. Curvelet coefficients contributions have been analyzed using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), commonly used to study local structure in images. The permutation of Curvelet coefficients from original image and edges image obtained from gradient operator is used to improve original edges. Experimental results show that this method brings out details on edges when the decomposition scale increases.
Analysis Of Interest Points Of Curvelet Coefficients Contributions Of Microscopic Images And Improvement Of Edges
3,839
The font recognition and character extraction is of immense importance as these are many scenarios where data are in such a form, which cannot be processed like in image form or as a hard copy. So the procedure developed in this paper is basically related to identifying the font (Times New Roman, Arial and Comic Sans MS) and afterwards recovering the text using simple correlation based method where the binary templates are correlated to the input image text characters. All of this extraction is done in the presence of a little noise as images may have noisy patterns due to photocopying. The significance of this method exists in extraction of data from various monitoring (Surveillance) camera footages or even more. The method is developed on Matlab\c{opyright} which takes input image and recovers text and font information from it in a text file.
Font Acknowledgment and Character Extraction of Digital and Scanned Images
3,840
In this letter, we investigate the shrinkage problem for the non-local means (NLM) image denoising. In particular, we derive the closed-form of the optimal blockwise shrinkage for NLM that minimizes the Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE). We also propose a constant complexity algorithm allowing fast blockwise shrinkage. Simulation results show that the proposed blockwise shrinkage method improves NLM performance in attaining higher peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM), and makes NLM more robust against parameter changes. Similar ideas can be applicable to other patchwise image denoising techniques.
Blockwise SURE Shrinkage for Non-Local Means
3,841
We describe a method for visual object detection based on an ensemble of optimized decision trees organized in a cascade of rejectors. The trees use pixel intensity comparisons in their internal nodes and this makes them able to process image regions very fast. Experimental analysis is provided through a face detection problem. The obtained results are encouraging and demonstrate that the method has practical value. Additionally, we analyse its sensitivity to noise and show how to perform fast rotation invariant object detection. Complete source code is provided at https://github.com/nenadmarkus/pico.
Object Detection with Pixel Intensity Comparisons Organized in Decision Trees
3,842
Most of the real world scenes have a very high dynamic range (HDR). The mobile phone cameras and the digital cameras available in markets are limited in their capability in both the range and spatial resolution. Same argument can be posed about the limited dynamic range display devices which also differ in the spatial resolution and aspect ratios. In this paper, we address the problem of displaying the high contrast low dynamic range (LDR) image of a HDR scene in a display device which has different spatial resolution compared to that of the capturing digital camera. The optimal solution proposed in this work can be employed with any camera which has the ability to shoot multiple differently exposed images of a scene. Further, the proposed solutions provide the flexibility in the depiction of entire contrast of the HDR scene as a LDR image with an user specified spatial resolution. This task is achieved through an optimized content aware retargeting framework which preserves salient features along with the algorithm to combine multi-exposure images. We show the proposed approach performs exceedingly well in the generation of high contrast LDR image of varying spatial resolution compared to an alternate approach.
Efficient Image Retargeting for High Dynamic Range Scenes
3,843
A novel method for segmenting bright objects from dark background for grayscale image is proposed. The concept of this method can be stated simply as: to pick out the local-thinnest bands on the grayscale grade-map. It turns out to be a threshold-based method with local adaptive thresholds, where each local threshold is determined by requiring the average normal-direction gradient on the object boundary to be local minimal. The method is highly automatic and the segmentation mimics a man's natural expectation even the object boundaries are fuzzy.
A novel automatic thresholding segmentation method with local adaptive thresholds
3,844
Radar images can reveal information about the shape of the surface terrain as well as its physical and biophysical properties. Radar images have long been used in geological studies to map structural features that are revealed by the shape of the landscape. Radar imagery also has applications in vegetation and crop type mapping, landscape ecology, hydrology, and volcanology. Image processing is using for detecting for objects in radar images. Edge detection; which is a method of determining the discontinuities in gray level images; is a very important initial step in Image processing. Many classical edge detectors have been developed over time. Some of the well-known edge detection operators based on the first derivative of the image are Roberts, Prewitt, Sobel which is traditionally implemented by convolving the image with masks. Also Gaussian distribution has been used to build masks for the first and second derivative. However, this distribution has limit to only symmetric shape. This paper will use to construct the masks, the Weibull distribution which was more general than Gaussian because it has symmetric and asymmetric shape. The constructed masks are applied to images and we obtained good results.
Edge Detection in Radar Images Using Weibull Distribution
3,845
Reconstruction closings have all properties of a physical flooding of a topographic surface. They are precious for simplifying gradient images or, filling unwanted catchment basins, on which a subsequent watershed transform extracts the targeted objects. Flooding a topographic surface may be modeled as flooding a node weighted graph (TG), with unweighted edges, the node weights representing the ground level. The progression of a flooding may also be modeled on the region adjacency graph (RAG) of a topographic surface. On a RAG each node represents a catchment basin and edges connect neighboring nodes. The edges are weighted by the altitude of the pass point between both adjacent regions. The graph is flooded from sources placed at the marker positions and each node is assigned to the source by which it has been flooded. The level of the flood is represented on the nodes on each type of graphs. The same flooding may thus be modeled on a TG or on a RAG. We characterize all valid floodings on both types of graphs, as they should verify the laws of hydrostatics. We then show that each flooding of a node weighted graph also is a flooding of an edge weighted graph with appropriate edge weights. The highest flooding under a ceiling function may be interpreted as the shortest distance to the root for the ultrametric flooding distance in an augmented graph. The ultrametric distance between two nodes is the minimal altitude of a flooding for which both nodes are flooded. This remark permits to flood edge or node weighted graphs by using shortest path algorithms. It appears that the collection of all lakes of a RAG has the structure of a dendrogram, on which the highest flooding under a ceiling function may be rapidly found.
Flooding edge or node weighted graphs
3,846
Multicuts enable to conveniently represent discrete graphical models for unsupervised and supervised image segmentation, in the case of local energy functions that exhibit symmetries. The basic Potts model and natural extensions thereof to higher-order models provide a prominent class of such objectives, that cover a broad range of segmentation problems relevant to image analysis and computer vision. We exhibit a way to systematically take into account such higher-order terms for computational inference. Furthermore, we present results of a comprehensive and competitive numerical evaluation of a variety of dedicated cutting-plane algorithms. Our approach enables the globally optimal evaluation of a significant subset of these models, without compromising runtime. Polynomially solvable relaxations are studied as well, along with advanced rounding schemes for post-processing.
Higher-order Segmentation via Multicuts
3,847
Video object segmentation is a challenging problem due to the presence of deformable, connected, and articulated objects, intra- and inter-object occlusions, object motion, and poor lighting. Some of these challenges call for object models that can locate a desired object and separate it from its surrounding background, even when both share similar colors and textures. In this work, we extend a fuzzy object model, named cloud system model (CSM), to handle video segmentation, and evaluate it for body pose estimation of toddlers at risk of autism. CSM has been successfully used to model the parts of the brain (cerebrum, left and right brain hemispheres, and cerebellum) in order to automatically locate and separate them from each other, the connected brain stem, and the background in 3D MR-images. In our case, the objects are articulated parts (2D projections) of the human body, which can deform, cause self-occlusions, and move along the video. The proposed CSM extension handles articulation by connecting the individual clouds, body parts, of the system using a 2D stickman model. The stickman representation naturally allows us to extract 2D body pose measures of arm asymmetry patterns during unsupported gait of toddlers, a possible behavioral marker of autism. The results show that our method can provide insightful knowledge to assist the specialist's observations during real in-clinic assessments.
Video Human Segmentation using Fuzzy Object Models and its Application to Body Pose Estimation of Toddlers for Behavior Studies
3,848
A novel locally statistical active contour model (ACM) for image segmentation in the presence of intensity inhomogeneity is presented in this paper. The inhomogeneous objects are modeled as Gaussian distributions of different means and variances, and a moving window is used to map the original image into another domain, where the intensity distributions of inhomogeneous objects are still Gaussian but are better separated. The means of the Gaussian distributions in the transformed domain can be adaptively estimated by multiplying a bias field with the original signal within the window. A statistical energy functional is then defined for each local region, which combines the bias field, the level set function, and the constant approximating the true signal of the corresponding object. Experiments on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm to state-of-the-art and representative methods.
A Local Active Contour Model for Image Segmentation with Intensity Inhomogeneity
3,849
In this paper, we propose a lensless compressive imaging architecture. The architecture consists of two components, an aperture assembly and a sensor. No lens is used. The aperture assembly consists of a two dimensional array of aperture elements. The transmittance of each aperture element is independently controllable. The sensor is a single detection element. A compressive sensing matrix is implemented by adjusting the transmittance of the individual aperture elements according to the values of the sensing matrix. The proposed architecture is simple and reliable because no lens is used. The architecture can be used for capturing images of visible and other spectra such as infrared, or millimeter waves, in surveillance applications for detecting anomalies or extracting features such as speed of moving objects. Multiple sensors may be used with a single aperture assembly to capture multi-view images simultaneously. A prototype was built by using a LCD panel and a photoelectric sensor for capturing images of visible spectrum.
Lensless Imaging by Compressive Sensing
3,850
Hyperspectral unmixing is one of the crucial steps for many hyperspectral applications. The problem of hyperspectral unmixing has proven to be a difficult task in unsupervised work settings where the endmembers and abundances are both unknown. What is more, this task becomes more challenging in the case that the spectral bands are degraded with noise. This paper presents a robust model for unsupervised hyperspectral unmixing. Specifically, our model is developed with the correntropy based metric where the non-negative constraints on both endmembers and abundances are imposed to keep physical significance. In addition, a sparsity prior is explicitly formulated to constrain the distribution of the abundances of each endmember. To solve our model, a half-quadratic optimization technique is developed to convert the original complex optimization problem into an iteratively re-weighted NMF with sparsity constraints. As a result, the optimization of our model can adaptively assign small weights to noisy bands and give more emphasis on noise-free bands. In addition, with sparsity constraints, our model can naturally generate sparse abundances. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in comparison to the related state-of-the-art unmixing models.
Robust Hyperspectral Unmixing with Correntropy based Metric
3,851
Hyperspectral images contain mixed pixels due to low spatial resolution of hyperspectral sensors. Mixed pixels are pixels containing more than one distinct material called endmembers. The presence percentages of endmembers in mixed pixels are called abundance fractions. Spectral unmixing problem refers to decomposing these pixels into a set of endmembers and abundance fractions. Due to nonnegativity constraint on abundance fractions, nonnegative matrix factorization methods (NMF) have been widely used for solving spectral unmixing problem. In this paper we have used graph regularized (GNMF) method with sparseness constraint to unmix hyperspectral data. This method applied on simulated data using AVIRIS Indian Pines dataset and USGS library and results are quantified based on AAD and SAD measures. Results in comparison with other methods show that the proposed method can unmix data more effectively.
Hyperspectral Data Unmixing Using GNMF Method and Sparseness Constraint
3,852
Image Segmentation is a technique of partitioning the original image into some distinct classes. Many possible solutions may be available for segmenting an image into a certain number of classes, each one having different quality of segmentation. In our proposed method, multilevel thresholding technique has been used for image segmentation. A new approach of Cuckoo Search (CS) is used for selection of optimal threshold value. In other words, the algorithm is used to achieve the best solution from the initial random threshold values or solutions and to evaluate the quality of a solution correlation function is used. Finally, MSE and PSNR are measured to understand the segmentation quality.
Multilevel Threshold Based Gray Scale Image Segmentation using Cuckoo Search
3,853
Compressed Sensing (CS) takes advantage of signal sparsity or compressibility and allows superb signal reconstruction from relatively few measurements. Based on CS theory, a suitable dictionary for sparse representation of the signal is required. In diffusion MRI (dMRI), CS methods were proposed to reconstruct diffusion-weighted signal and the Ensemble Average Propagator (EAP), and there are two kinds of Dictionary Learning (DL) methods: 1) Discrete Representation DL (DR-DL), and 2) Continuous Representation DL (CR-DL). DR-DL is susceptible to numerical inaccuracy owing to interpolation and regridding errors in a discretized q-space. In this paper, we propose a novel CR-DL approach, called Dictionary Learning - Spherical Polar Fourier Imaging (DL-SPFI) for effective compressed-sensing reconstruction of the q-space diffusion-weighted signal and the EAP. In DL-SPFI, an dictionary that sparsifies the signal is learned from the space of continuous Gaussian diffusion signals. The learned dictionary is then adaptively applied to different voxels using a weighted LASSO framework for robust signal reconstruction. The adaptive dictionary is proved to be optimal. Compared with the start-of-the-art CR-DL and DR-DL methods proposed by Merlet et al. and Bilgic et al., espectively, our work offers the following advantages. First, the learned dictionary is proved to be optimal for Gaussian diffusion signals. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first work to learn a voxel-adaptive dictionary. The importance of the adaptive dictionary in EAP reconstruction will be demonstrated theoretically and empirically. Third, optimization in DL-SPFI is only performed in a small subspace resided by the SPF coefficients, as opposed to the q-space approach utilized by Merlet et al. The experiment results demonstrate the advantages of DL-SPFI over the original SPF basis and Bilgic et al.'s method.
Regularized Spherical Polar Fourier Diffusion MRI with Optimal Dictionary Learning
3,854
Imaging has occupied a huge role in the management of patients, whether hospitalized or not. Depending on the patients clinical problem, a variety of imaging modalities were available for use. This gave birth of the annotation of medical image process. The annotation is intended to image analysis and solve the problem of semantic gap. The reason for image annotation is due to increase in acquisition of images. Physicians and radiologists feel better while using annotation techniques for faster remedy in surgery and medicine due to the following reasons: giving details to the patients, searching the present and past records from the larger databases, and giving solutions to them in a faster and more accurate way. However, classical conceptual modeling does not incorporate the specificity of medical domain specially the annotation of medical image. The design phase is the most important activity in the successful building of annotation process. For this reason, we focus in this paper on presenting the conceptual modeling of the annotation of medical image by defining a new profile using the StarUML extensibility mechanism.
Extending UML for Conceptual Modeling of Annotation of Medical Images
3,855
As an extension of projective homology, stereohomology is proposed via an extension of Desargues theorem and the extended Desargues configuration. Geometric transformations such as reflection, translation, central symmetry, central projection, parallel projection, shearing, central dilation, scaling, and so on are all included in stereohomology and represented as Householder-Chen elementary matrices. Hence all these geometric transformations are called elementary. This makes it possible to represent these elementary geometric transformations in homogeneous square matrices independent of a particular choice of coordinate system.
A Unified Framework of Elementary Geometric Transformation Representation
3,856
A set label disagreement function is defined over the number of variables that deviates from the dominant label. The dominant label is the value assumed by the largest number of variables within a set of binary variables. The submodularity of a certain family of set label disagreement function is discussed in this manuscript. Such disagreement function could be utilized as a cost function in combinatorial optimization approaches for problems defined over hypergraphs.
Submodularity of a Set Label Disagreement Function
3,857
Illumination variation remains a central challenge in object detection and recognition. Existing analyses of illumination variation typically pertain to convex, Lambertian objects, and guarantee quality of approximation in an average case sense. We show that it is possible to build V(vertex)-description convex cone models with worst-case performance guarantees, for non-convex Lambertian objects. Namely, a natural verification test based on the angle to the constructed cone guarantees to accept any image which is sufficiently well-approximated by an image of the object under some admissible lighting condition, and guarantees to reject any image that does not have a sufficiently good approximation. The cone models are generated by sampling point illuminations with sufficient density, which follows from a new perturbation bound for point images in the Lambertian model. As the number of point images required for guaranteed verification may be large, we introduce a new formulation for cone preserving dimensionality reduction, which leverages tools from sparse and low-rank decomposition to reduce the complexity, while controlling the approximation error with respect to the original cone.
Toward Guaranteed Illumination Models for Non-Convex Objects
3,858
Remote sensing has proven to be a powerful tool for the monitoring of the Earth surface to improve our perception of our surroundings has led to unprecedented developments in sensor and information technologies. However, technologies for effective use of the data and for extracting useful information from the data of Remote sensing are still very limited since no single sensor combines the optimal spectral, spatial and temporal resolution. This paper briefly reviews the limitations of satellite remote sensing. Also, reviews on the problems of image fusion techniques. The conclusion of this, According to literature, the remote sensing is still the lack of software tools for effective information extraction from remote sensing data. The trade-off in spectral and spatial resolution will remain and new advanced data fusion approaches are needed to make optimal use of remote sensors for extract the most useful information.
Major Limitations of Satellite images
3,859
Several remote sensing software packages are used to the explicit purpose of analyzing and visualizing remotely sensed data, with the developing of remote sensing sensor technologies from last ten years. Accord-ing to literature, the remote sensing is still the lack of software tools for effective information extraction from remote sensing data. So, this paper provides a state-of-art of multi-sensor image fusion technologies as well as review on the quality evaluation of the single image or fused images in the commercial remote sensing pack-ages. It also introduces program (ALwassaiProcess) developed for image fusion and classification.
Image Fusion Technologies In Commercial Remote Sensing Packages
3,860
The Braille system has been used by the visually impaired for reading and writing. Due to limited availability of the Braille text books an efficient usage of the books becomes a necessity. This paper proposes a method to convert a scanned Braille document to text which can be read out to many through the computer. The Braille documents are pre processed to enhance the dots and reduce the noise. The Braille cells are segmented and the dots from each cell is extracted and converted in to a number sequence. These are mapped to the appropriate alphabets of the language. The converted text is spoken out through a speech synthesizer. The paper also provides a mechanism to type the Braille characters through the number pad of the keyboard. The typed Braille character is mapped to the alphabet and spoken out. The Braille cell has a standard representation but the mapping differs for each language. In this paper mapping of English, Hindi and Tamil are considered.
Conversion of Braille to Text in English, Hindi and Tamil Languages
3,861
Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are among the most popular techniques for image labelling because of their flexibility in modelling dependencies between the labels and the image features. This paper proposes a novel CRF-framework for image labeling problems which is capable to classify partially occluded objects. Our approach is evaluated on aerial near-vertical images as well as on urban street-view images and compared with another methods.
A two-layer Conditional Random Field for the classification of partially occluded objects
3,862
Histogram Equalization (HE) has been an essential addition to the Image Enhancement world. Enhancement techniques like Classical Histogram Equalization (CHE), Adaptive Histogram Equalization (ADHE), Bi-Histogram Equalization (BHE) and Recursive Mean Separate Histogram Equalization (RMSHE) methods enhance contrast, however, brightness is not well preserved with these methods, which gives an unpleasant look to the final image obtained. Thus, we introduce a novel technique Multi-Decomposition Histogram Equalization (MDHE) to eliminate the drawbacks of the earlier methods. In MDHE, we have decomposed the input sixty-four parts, applied CHE in each of the sub-images and then finally interpolated them in correct order. The final image after MDHE results in contrast enhanced and brightness preserved image compared to all other techniques mentioned above. We have calculated the various parameters like PSNR, SNR, RMSE, MSE, etc. for every technique. Our results are well supported by bar graphs, histograms and the parameter calculations at the end.
Contrast Enhancement And Brightness Preservation Using Multi- Decomposition Histogram Equalization
3,863
Fiber tracking based on diffusion weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) allows for noninvasive reconstruction of fiber bundles in the human brain. In this chapter, we discuss sources of error and uncertainty in this technique, and review strategies that afford a more reliable interpretation of the results. This includes methods for computing and rendering probabilistic tractograms, which estimate precision in the face of measurement noise and artifacts. However, we also address aspects that have received less attention so far, such as model selection, partial voluming, and the impact of parameters, both in preprocessing and in fiber tracking itself. We conclude by giving impulses for future research.
Fuzzy Fibers: Uncertainty in dMRI Tractography
3,864
This study is a part of design of an audio system for in-house object detection system for visually impaired, low vision personnel by birth or by an accident or due to old age. The input of the system will be scene and output as audio. Alert facility is provided based on severity levels of the objects (snake, broke glass etc) and also during difficulties. The study proposed techniques to provide speedy detection of objects based on shapes and its scale. Features are extraction to have minimum spaces using dynamic scaling. From a scene, clusters of objects are formed based on the scale and shape. Searching is performed among the clusters initially based on the shape, scale, mean cluster value and index of object(s). The minimum operation to detect the possible shape of the object is performed. In case the object does not have a likely matching shape, scale etc, then the several operations required for an object detection will not perform; instead, it will declared as a new object. In such way, this study finds a speedy way of detecting objects.
Speedy Object Detection based on Shape
3,865
A non-iterative auto-calibration algorithm is presented. It deals with a minimal set of six scene points in three views taken by a camera with fixed but unknown intrinsic parameters. Calibration is based on the image correspondences only. The algorithm is implemented and validated on synthetic image data.
A Minimal Six-Point Auto-Calibration Algorithm
3,866
Image segmentation is a crucial step in a wide range of method image processing systems. It is useful in visualization of the different objects present in the image. In spite of the several methods available in the literature, image segmentation still a challenging problem in most of image processing applications. The challenge comes from the fuzziness of image objects and the overlapping of the different regions. Detection of edges in an image is a very important step towards understanding image features. There are large numbers of edge detection operators available, each designed to be sensitive to certain types of edges. The Quality of edge detection can be measured from several criteria objectively. Some criteria are proposed in terms of mathematical measurement, some of them are based on application and implementation requirements. Since edges often occur at image locations representing object boundaries, edge detection is extensively used in image segmentation when images are divided into areas corresponding to different objects. This can be used specifically for enhancing the tumor area in mammographic images. Different methods are available for edge detection like Roberts, Sobel, Prewitt, Canny, Log edge operators. In this paper a novel algorithms for edge detection has been proposed for mammographic images. Breast boundary, pectoral region and tumor location can be seen clearly by using this method. For comparison purpose Roberts, Sobel, Prewitt, Canny, Log edge operators are used and their results are displayed. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Mammogram Edge Detection Using Hybrid Soft Computing Methods
3,867
Feature means countenance, remote sensing scene objects with similar characteristics, associated to interesting scene elements in the image formation process. They are classified into three types in image processing, that is low, middle and high. Low level features are color, texture and middle level feature is shape and high level feature is semantic gap of objects. An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large image database. Content Based Image Retrieval is a technique which uses visual features of image such as color, shape, texture to search user required image from large image database according to user requests in the form of a query. MKNN is an enhancing method of KNN. The proposed KNN classification is called MKNN. MKNN contains two parts for processing, they are validity of the train samples and applying weighted KNN. The validity of each point is computed according to its neighbors. In our proposal, Modified K-Nearest Neighbor can be considered a kind of weighted KNN so that the query label is approximated by weighting the neighbors of the query.
Content Based Image Retrieval System using Feature Classification with Modified KNN Algorithm
3,868
Text in video is useful and important in indexing and retrieving the video documents efficiently and accurately. In this paper, we present a new method of text detection using a combined dictionary consisting of wavelets and a recently introduced transform called shearlets. Wavelets provide optimally sparse expansion for point-like structures and shearlets provide optimally sparse expansions for curve-like structures. By combining these two features we have computed a high frequency sub-band to brighten the text part. Then K-means clustering is used for obtaining text pixels from the Standard Deviation (SD) of combined coefficient of wavelets and shearlets as well as the union of wavelets and shearlets features. Text parts are obtained by grouping neighboring regions based on geometric properties of the classified output frame of unsupervised K-means classification. The proposed method tested on a standard as well as newly collected database shows to be superior to some existing methods.
Video Text Localization using Wavelet and Shearlet Transforms
3,869
This work proposes an agnostic inference strategy for material diagnostics, conceived within the context of laser-based non-destructive evaluation methods, which extract information about structural anomalies from the analysis of acoustic wavefields measured on the structure's surface by means of a scanning laser interferometer. The proposed approach couples spatiotemporal windowing with low rank plus outlier modeling, to identify a priori unknown deviations in the propagating wavefields caused by material inhomogeneities or defects, using virtually no knowledge of the structural and material properties of the medium. This characteristic makes the approach particularly suitable for diagnostics scenarios where the mechanical and material models are complex, unknown, or unreliable. We demonstrate our approach in a simulated environment using benchmark point and line defect localization problems based on propagating flexural waves in a thin plate.
Automated Defect Localization via Low Rank Plus Outlier Modeling of Propagating Wavefield Data
3,870
Shape based classification is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of computer vision. Shapes play a vital role in object recognition. The basic shapes in an image can occur in varying scale, position and orientation. And specially when detecting human, the task becomes more challenging owing to the largely varying size, shape, posture and clothing of human. So, in our work we detect human, based on the head-shoulder shape as it is the most unvarying part of human body. Here, firstly a new and a novel equation named as the Omega Equation that describes the shape of human head-shoulder is developed and based on this equation, a classifier is designed particularly for detecting human presence in a scene. The classifier detects human by analyzing some of the discriminative features of the values of the parameters obtained from the Omega equation. The proposed method has been tested on a variety of shape dataset taking into consideration the complexities of human head-shoulder shape. In all the experiments the proposed method demonstrated satisfactory results.
A Novel Equation based Classifier for Detecting Human in Images
3,871
Parameter tuning is a common issue for many tracking algorithms. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an online parameter tuning to adapt a tracking algorithm to various scene contexts. In an offline training phase, this approach learns how to tune the tracker parameters to cope with different contexts. In the online control phase, once the tracking quality is evaluated as not good enough, the proposed approach computes the current context and tunes the tracking parameters using the learned values. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of the tracking algorithm and outperforms recent state of the art trackers. This paper brings two contributions: (1) an online tracking evaluation, and (2) a method to adapt online tracking parameters to scene contexts.
Online Tracking Parameter Adaptation based on Evaluation
3,872
Since the early 2000s, computational visual saliency has been a very active research area. Each year, more and more new models are published in the main computer vision conferences. Nowadays, one of the big challenges is to find a way to fairly evaluate all of these models. In this paper, a new framework is proposed to assess models of visual saliency. This evaluation is divided into three experiments leading to the proposition of a new evaluation framework. Each experiment is based on a basic question: 1) there are two ground truths for saliency evaluation: what are the differences between eye fixations and manually segmented salient regions?, 2) the properties of the salient regions: for example, do large, medium and small salient regions present different difficulties for saliency models? and 3) the metrics used to assess saliency models: what advantages would there be to mix them with PCA? Statistical analysis is used here to answer each of these three questions.
A study of parameters affecting visual saliency assessment
3,873
In the last few decades, significant achievements have been attained in predicting where humans look at images through different computational models. However, how to determine contributions of different visual features to overall saliency still remains an open problem. To overcome this issue, a recent class of models formulates saliency estimation as a supervised learning problem and accordingly apply machine learning techniques. In this paper, we also address this challenging problem and propose to use multiple kernel learning (MKL) to combine information coming from different feature dimensions and to perform integration at an intermediate level. Besides, we suggest to use responses of a recently proposed filterbank of object detectors, known as Object-Bank, as additional semantic high-level features. Here we show that our MKL-based framework together with the proposed object-specific features provide state-of-the-art performance as compared to SVM or AdaBoost-based saliency models.
Visual saliency estimation by integrating features using multiple kernel learning
3,874
The human visual system employs a selective attention mechanism to understand the visual world in an eficient manner. In this paper, we show how computational models of this mechanism can be exploited for the computer vision application of scene recognition. First, we consider saliency weighting and saliency pruning, and provide a comparison of the performance of different attention models in these approaches in terms of classification accuracy. Pruning can achieve a high degree of computational savings without significantly sacrificing classification accuracy. In saliency weighting, however, we found that classification performance does not improve. In addition, we present a new method to incorporate salient and non-salient regions for improved classification accuracy. We treat the salient and non-salient regions separately and combine them using Multiple Kernel Learning. We evaluate our approach using the UIUC sports dataset and find that with a small training size, our method improves upon the classification accuracy of the baseline bag of features approach.
Is Bottom-Up Attention Useful for Scene Recognition?
3,875
Region-based artificial attention constitutes a framework for bio-inspired attentional processes on an intermediate abstraction level for the use in computer vision and mobile robotics. Segmentation algorithms produce regions of coherently colored pixels. These serve as proto-objects on which the attentional processes determine image portions of relevance. A single region---which not necessarily represents a full object---constitutes the focus of attention. For many post-attentional tasks, however, such as identifying or tracking objects, single segments are not sufficient. Here, we present a saliency-guided approach that groups regions that potentially belong to the same object based on proximity and similarity of motion. We compare our results to object selection by thresholding saliency maps and a further attention-guided strategy.
Saliency-Guided Perceptual Grouping Using Motion Cues in Region-Based Artificial Visual Attention
3,876
In video-surveillance, person re-identification is the task of recognising whether an individual has already been observed over a network of cameras. Typically, this is achieved by exploiting the clothing appearance, as classical biometric traits like the face are impractical in real-world video surveillance scenarios. Clothing appearance is represented by means of low-level \textit{local} and/or \textit{global} features of the image, usually extracted according to some part-based body model to treat different body parts (e.g. torso and legs) independently. This paper provides a comprehensive review of current approaches to build appearance descriptors for person re-identification. The most relevant techniques are described in detail, and categorised according to the body models and features used. The aim of this work is to provide a structured body of knowledge and a starting point for researchers willing to conduct novel investigations on this challenging topic.
Appearance Descriptors for Person Re-identification: a Comprehensive Review
3,877
Efficient security management has become an important parameter in todays world. As the problem is growing, there is an urgent need for the introduction of advanced technology and equipment to improve the state-of art of surveillance. In this paper we propose a model for real time background subtraction using AGMM. The proposed model is robust and adaptable to dynamic background, fast illumination changes, repetitive motion. Also we have incorporated a method for detecting shadows using the Horpresert color model. The proposed model can be employed for monitoring areas where movement or entry is highly restricted. So on detection of any unexpected events in the scene an alarm can be triggered and hence we can achieve real time surveillance even in the absence of constant human monitoring.
An Adaptive GMM Approach to Background Subtraction for Application in Real Time Surveillance
3,878
This volume contains the papers accepted at the 6th International Symposium on Attention in Cognitive Systems (ISACS 2013), held in Beijing, August 5, 2013. The aim of this symposium is to highlight the central role of attention on various kinds of performance in cognitive systems processing. It brings together researchers and developers from both academia and industry, from computer vision, robotics, perception psychology, psychophysics and neuroscience, in order to provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and communicate on computational models of attention, with the focus on interdependencies with visual cognition. Furthermore, it intends to investigate relevant objectives for performance comparison, to document and to investigate promising application domains, and to discuss visual attention with reference to other aspects of AI enabled systems.
6th International Symposium on Attention in Cognitive Systems 2013
3,879
In object segmentation by active contours, the initial contour is often required. Conventionally, the initial contour is provided by the user. This paper extends the conventional active contour model by incorporating feature matching in the formulation, which gives rise to a novel matching-constrained active contour. The numerical solution to the new optimization model provides an automated framework of object segmentation without user intervention. The main idea is to incorporate feature point matching as a constraint in active contour models. To this effect, we obtain a mathematical model of interior points to boundary contour such that matching of interior feature points gives contour alignment, and we formulate the matching score as a constraint to active contour model such that the feature matching of maximum score that gives the contour alignment provides the initial feasible solution to the constrained optimization model of segmentation. The constraint also ensures that the optimal contour does not deviate too much from the initial contour. Projected-gradient descent equations are derived to solve the constrained optimization. In the experiments, we show that our method is capable of achieving the automatic object segmentation, and it outperforms the related methods.
Matching-Constrained Active Contours
3,880
Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system has been developed for the early detection of breast cancer, one of the most deadly cancer for women. The benign of mammogram has different texture from malignant. There are fifty mammogram images used in this work which are divided for training and testing. Therefore, the selection of the right texture to determine the level of accuracy of CAD system is important. The first and second order statistics are the texture feature extraction methods which can be used on a mammogram. This work classifies texture descriptor into nine groups where the extraction of features is classified using backpropagation learning with two types of multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The best texture descriptor as selected when the value of regression 1 appears in both the MLP-1 and the MLP-2 with the number of epoches less than 1000. The results of testing show that the best selected texture descriptor is the second order (combination) using all direction (0, 45, 90 and 135) that have twenty four descriptors.
Selection Mammogram Texture Descriptors Based on Statistics Properties Backpropagation Structure
3,881
Automatic analysis of the enormous sets of images is a critical task in life sciences. This faces many challenges such as: algorithms are highly parameterized, significant human input is intertwined, and lacking a standard meta-visualization approach. This paper proposes an alternative iterative approach for optimizing input parameters, saving time by minimizing the user involvement, and allowing for understanding the workflow of algorithms and discovering new ones. The main focus is on developing an interactive visualization technique that enables users to analyze the relationships between sampled input parameters and corresponding output. This technique is implemented as a prototype called Veni Vidi Vici, or "I came, I saw, I conquered." This strategy is inspired by the mathematical formulas of numbering computable functions and is developed atop ImageJ, a scientific image processing program. A case study is presented to investigate the proposed framework. Finally, the paper explores some potential future issues in the application of the proposed approach in parameter space analysis in visualization.
Veni Vidi Vici, A Three-Phase Scenario For Parameter Space Analysis in Image Analysis and Visualization
3,882
Currently Mammography is a most effective imaging modality used by radiologists for the screening of breast cancer. Finding an accurate, robust and efficient breast region segmentation technique still remains a challenging problem in digital mammography. Extraction of the breast profile region and the removal of pectoral muscle are essential pre-processing steps in Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Primarily it allows the search for abnormalities to be limited to the region of the breast tissue without undue influence from the background of the mammogram. The presence of pectoral muscle in mammograms biases detection procedures, which recommends removing the pectoral muscle during mammogram image pre-processing. The presence of pectoral muscle in mammograms may disturb or influence the detection of breast cancer as the pectoral muscle and mammographic parenchymas appear similar. The goal of breast region extraction is reducing the image size without losing anatomic information, it improve the accuracy of the overall CAD system. The main objective of this study is to propose an automated method to identify the pectoral muscle in Medio-Lateral Oblique (MLO) view mammograms. In this paper, we proposed histogram based 8-neighborhood connected component labelling method for breast region extraction and removal of pectoral muscle. The proposed method is evaluated by using the mean values of accuracy and error. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed method identifies the breast region more accurately.
Automatic Mammogram image Breast Region Extraction and Removal of Pectoral Muscle
3,883
Energy minimization algorithms, such as graph cuts, enable the computation of the MAP solution under certain probabilistic models such as Markov random fields. However, for many computer vision problems, the MAP solution under the model is not the ground truth solution. In many problem scenarios, the system has access to certain statistics of the ground truth. For instance, in image segmentation, the area and boundary length of the object may be known. In these cases, we want to estimate the most probable solution that is consistent with such statistics, i.e., satisfies certain equality or inequality constraints. The above constrained energy minimization problem is NP-hard in general, and is usually solved using Linear Programming formulations, which relax the integrality constraints. This paper proposes a novel method that finds the discrete optimal solution of such problems by maximizing the corresponding Lagrangian dual. This method can be applied to any constrained energy minimization problem whose unconstrained version is polynomial time solvable, and can handle multiple, equality or inequality, and linear or non-linear constraints. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the foreground/background image segmentation problem, and show that it produces impressive segmentation results with less error, and runs more than 20 times faster than the state-of-the-art LP relaxation based approaches.
Efficient Energy Minimization for Enforcing Statistics
3,884
This work describes a computer vision system that enables pervasive mapping and monitoring of human attention. The key contribution is that our methodology enables full 3D recovery of the gaze pointer, human view frustum and associated human centered measurements directly into an automatically computed 3D model in real-time. We apply RGB-D SLAM and descriptor matching methodologies for the 3D modeling, localization and fully automated annotation of ROIs (regions of interest) within the acquired 3D model. This innovative methodology will open new avenues for attention studies in real world environments, bringing new potential into automated processing for human factors technologies.
An Integrated System for 3D Gaze Recovery and Semantic Analysis of Human Attention
3,885
In this paper, we address a problem of managing tagged images with hybrid summarization. We formulate this problem as finding a few image exemplars to represent the image set semantically and visually, and solve it in a hybrid way by exploiting both visual and textual information associated with images. We propose a novel approach, called homogeneous and heterogeneous message propagation ($\text{H}^\text{2}\text{MP}$). Similar to the affinity propagation (AP) approach, $\text{H}^\text{2}\text{MP}$ reduce the conventional \emph{vector} message propagation to \emph{scalar} message propagation to make the algorithm more efficient. Beyond AP that can only handle homogeneous data, $\text{H}^\text{2}\text{MP}$ generalizes it to exploit extra heterogeneous relations and the generalization is non-trivial as the reduction to scalar messages from vector messages is more challenging. The main advantages of our approach lie in 1) that $\text{H}^\text{2}\text{MP}$ exploits visual similarity and in addition the useful information from the associated tags, including the associations relation between images and tags and the relations within tags, and 2) that the summary is both visually and semantically satisfactory. In addition, our approach can also present a textual summary to a tagged image collection, which can be used to automatically generate a textual description. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the roposed approach.
Hybrid Affinity Propagation
3,886
Artificial visual attention systems aim to support technical systems in visual tasks by applying the concepts of selective attention observed in humans and other animals. Such systems are typically evaluated against ground truth obtained from human gaze-data or manually annotated test images. When applied to robotics, the systems are required to be adaptable to the target system. Here, we describe a flexible environment based on a robotic middleware layer allowing the development and testing of attention-guided vision systems. In such a framework, the systems can be tested with input from various sources, different attention algorithms at the core, and diverse subsequent tasks.
A Prototyping Environment for Integrated Artificial Attention Systems
3,887
In this paper, we consider the clustering problem on images where each image contains patches in people and location domains. We exploit the correlation between people and location domains, and proposed a semi-supervised co-clustering algorithm to cluster images. Our algorithm updates the correlation links at the runtime, and produces clustering in both domains simultaneously. We conduct experiments in a manually collected dataset and a Flickr dataset. The result shows that the such correlation improves the clustering performance.
Who and Where: People and Location Co-Clustering
3,888
We present a dictionary learning approach to compensate for the transformation of faces due to changes in view point, illumination, resolution, etc. The key idea of our approach is to force domain-invariant sparse coding, i.e., design a consistent sparse representation of the same face in different domains. In this way, classifiers trained on the sparse codes in the source domain consisting of frontal faces for example can be applied to the target domain (consisting of faces in different poses, illumination conditions, etc) without much loss in recognition accuracy. The approach is to first learn a domain base dictionary, and then describe each domain shift (identity, pose, illumination) using a sparse representation over the base dictionary. The dictionary adapted to each domain is expressed as sparse linear combinations of the base dictionary. In the context of face recognition, with the proposed compositional dictionary approach, a face image can be decomposed into sparse representations for a given subject, pose and illumination respectively. This approach has three advantages: first, the extracted sparse representation for a subject is consistent across domains and enables pose and illumination insensitive face recognition. Second, sparse representations for pose and illumination can subsequently be used to estimate the pose and illumination condition of a face image. Finally, by composing sparse representations for subject and the different domains, we can also perform pose alignment and illumination normalization. Extensive experiments using two public face datasets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for face recognition.
Compositional Dictionaries for Domain Adaptive Face Recognition
3,889
We propose a low-rank transformation-learning framework to robustify subspace clustering. Many high-dimensional data, such as face images and motion sequences, lie in a union of low-dimensional subspaces. The subspace clustering problem has been extensively studied in the literature to partition such high-dimensional data into clusters corresponding to their underlying low-dimensional subspaces. However, low-dimensional intrinsic structures are often violated for real-world observations, as they can be corrupted by errors or deviate from ideal models. We propose to address this by learning a linear transformation on subspaces using matrix rank, via its convex surrogate nuclear norm, as the optimization criteria. The learned linear transformation restores a low-rank structure for data from the same subspace, and, at the same time, forces a high-rank structure for data from different subspaces. In this way, we reduce variations within the subspaces, and increase separations between the subspaces for more accurate subspace clustering. This proposed learned robust subspace clustering framework significantly enhances the performance of existing subspace clustering methods. To exploit the low-rank structures of the transformed subspaces, we further introduce a subspace clustering technique, called Robust Sparse Subspace Clustering, which efficiently combines robust PCA with sparse modeling. We also discuss the online learning of the transformation, and learning of the transformation while simultaneously reducing the data dimensionality. Extensive experiments using public datasets are presented, showing that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art subspace clustering methods.
Learning Robust Subspace Clustering
3,890
We present a low-rank transformation approach to compensate for face variations due to changes in visual domains, such as pose and illumination. The key idea is to learn discriminative linear transformations for face images using matrix rank as the optimization criteria. The learned linear transformations restore a shared low-rank structure for faces from the same subject, and, at the same time, force a high-rank structure for faces from different subjects. In this way, among the transformed faces, we reduce variations caused by domain changes within the classes, and increase separations between the classes for better face recognition across domains. Extensive experiments using public datasets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for face recognition across domains. The potential of the approach for feature extraction in generic object recognition and coded aperture design are discussed as well.
Domain-invariant Face Recognition using Learned Low-rank Transformation
3,891
We present an approach for dictionary learning of action attributes via information maximization. We unify the class distribution and appearance information into an objective function for learning a sparse dictionary of action attributes. The objective function maximizes the mutual information between what has been learned and what remains to be learned in terms of appearance information and class distribution for each dictionary atom. We propose a Gaussian Process (GP) model for sparse representation to optimize the dictionary objective function. The sparse coding property allows a kernel with compact support in GP to realize a very efficient dictionary learning process. Hence we can describe an action video by a set of compact and discriminative action attributes. More importantly, we can recognize modeled action categories in a sparse feature space, which can be generalized to unseen and unmodeled action categories. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in action recognition and summarization.
Sparse Dictionary-based Attributes for Action Recognition and Summarization
3,892
In this paper we address the problem of multiple camera calibration in the presence of a homogeneous scene, and without the possibility of employing calibration object based methods. The proposed solution exploits salient features present in a larger field of view, but instead of employing active vision we replace the cameras with stereo rigs featuring a long focal analysis camera, as well as a short focal registration camera. Thus, we are able to propose an accurate solution which does not require intrinsic variation models as in the case of zooming cameras. Moreover, the availability of the two views simultaneously in each rig allows for pose re-estimation between rigs as often as necessary. The algorithm has been successfully validated in an indoor setting, as well as on a difficult scene featuring a highly dense pilgrim crowd in Makkah.
Hybrid Focal Stereo Networks for Pattern Analysis in Homogeneous Scenes
3,893
This paper describes a technique of real time head gesture recognition system. The method includes Gaussian mixture model (GMM) accompanied by optical flow algorithm which provided us the required information regarding head movement. The proposed model can be implemented in various control system. We are also presenting the result and implementation of both mentioned method.
Head Gesture Recognition using Optical Flow based Classification with Reinforcement of GMM based Background Subtraction
3,894
This paper proposes an image interpolation algorithm exploiting sparse representation for natural images. It involves three main steps: (a) obtaining an initial estimate of the high resolution image using linear methods like FIR filtering, (b) promoting sparsity in a selected dictionary through iterative thresholding, and (c) extracting high frequency information from the approximation to refine the initial estimate. For the sparse modeling, a shearlet dictionary is chosen to yield a multiscale directional representation. The proposed algorithm is compared to several state-of-the-art methods to assess its objective as well as subjective performance. Compared to the cubic spline interpolation method, an average PSNR gain of around 0.8 dB is observed over a dataset of 200 images.
Image interpolation using Shearlet based iterative refinement
3,895
Natural images are often affected by random noise and image denoising has long been a central topic in Computer Vision. Many algorithms have been introduced to remove the noise from the natural images, such as Gaussian, Wiener filtering and wavelet thresholding. However, many of these algorithms remove the fine edges and make them blur. Recently, many promising denoising algorithms have been introduced such as Non-local Means, Fields of Experts, and BM3D. In this paper, we explore Bayesian method of ensemble learning for image denoising. Ensemble methods seek to combine multiple different algorithms to retain the strengths of all methods and the weaknesses of none. Bayesian ensemble models are Non-local Means and Fields of Experts, the very successful recent algorithms. The Non-local Means presumes that the image contains an extensive amount of self-similarity. The approach of the Fields of Experts model extends traditional Markov Random Field model by learning potential functions over extended pixel neighborhoods. The two models are implemented and image denoising is performed on natural images. The experimental results obtained are used to compare with the single algorithm and discuss the ensemble learning and their approaches. Comparing to the results of Non-local Means and Fields of Experts, Ensemble learning showed improvement nearly 1dB.
Bayesian ensemble learning for image denoising
3,896
Over the last decade, a number of Computational Imaging (CI) systems have been proposed for tasks such as motion deblurring, defocus deblurring and multispectral imaging. These techniques increase the amount of light reaching the sensor via multiplexing and then undo the deleterious effects of multiplexing by appropriate reconstruction algorithms. Given the widespread appeal and the considerable enthusiasm generated by these techniques, a detailed performance analysis of the benefits conferred by this approach is important. Unfortunately, a detailed analysis of CI has proven to be a challenging problem because performance depends equally on three components: (1) the optical multiplexing, (2) the noise characteristics of the sensor, and (3) the reconstruction algorithm. A few recent papers have performed analysis taking multiplexing and noise characteristics into account. However, analysis of CI systems under state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms, most of which exploit signal prior models, has proven to be unwieldy. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis framework incorporating all three components. In order to perform this analysis, we model the signal priors using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). A GMM prior confers two unique characteristics. Firstly, GMM satisfies the universal approximation property which says that any prior density function can be approximated to any fidelity using a GMM with appropriate number of mixtures. Secondly, a GMM prior lends itself to analytical tractability allowing us to derive simple expressions for the `minimum mean square error' (MMSE), which we use as a metric to characterize the performance of CI systems. We use our framework to analyze several previously proposed CI techniques, giving conclusive answer to the question: `How much performance gain is due to use of a signal prior and how much is due to multiplexing?
A Framework for the Analysis of Computational Imaging Systems with Practical Applications
3,897
Early tumor detection is key in reducing the number of breast cancer death and screening mammography is one of the most widely available and reliable method for early detection. However, it is difficult for the radiologist to process with the same attention each case, due the large amount of images to be read. Computer aided detection (CADe) systems improve tumor detection rate; but the current efficiency of these systems is not yet adequate and the correct interpretation of CADe outputs requires expert human intervention. Computer aided diagnosis systems (CADx) are being designed to improve cancer diagnosis accuracy, but they have not been efficiently applied in breast cancer. CADx efficiency can be enhanced by considering the natural mirror symmetry between the right and left breast. The objective of this work is to evaluate co-registration algorithms for the accurate alignment of the left to right breast for CADx enhancement. A set of mammograms were artificially altered to create a ground truth set to evaluate the registration efficiency of DEMONs, and SPLINE deformable registration algorithms. The registration accuracy was evaluated using mean square errors, mutual information and correlation. The results on the 132 images proved that the SPLINE deformable registration over-perform the DEMONS on mammography images.
Local image registration a comparison for bilateral registration mammography
3,898
It is an important task to faithfully evaluate the perceptual quality of output images in many applications such as image compression, image restoration and multimedia streaming. A good image quality assessment (IQA) model should not only deliver high quality prediction accuracy but also be computationally efficient. The efficiency of IQA metrics is becoming particularly important due to the increasing proliferation of high-volume visual data in high-speed networks. We present a new effective and efficient IQA model, called gradient magnitude similarity deviation (GMSD). The image gradients are sensitive to image distortions, while different local structures in a distorted image suffer different degrees of degradations. This motivates us to explore the use of global variation of gradient based local quality map for overall image quality prediction. We find that the pixel-wise gradient magnitude similarity (GMS) between the reference and distorted images combined with a novel pooling strategy the standard deviation of the GMS map can predict accurately perceptual image quality. The resulting GMSD algorithm is much faster than most state-of-the-art IQA methods, and delivers highly competitive prediction accuracy.
Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index
3,899