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Mariella Dimiccoli. (2016). Figure-ground segregation: A fully nonlocal approach. VR - Vision Research, 126, 308–317.
Abstract: We present a computational model that computes and integrates in a nonlocal fashion several configural cues for automatic figure-ground segregation. Our working hypothesis is that the figural status of each pixel is a nonlocal function of several geometric shape properties and it can be estimated without explicitly relying on object boundaries. The methodology is grounded on two elements: multi-directional linear voting and nonlinear diffusion. A first estimation of the figural status of each pixel is obtained as a result of a voting process, in which several differently oriented line-shaped neighborhoods vote to express their belief about the figural status of the pixel. A nonlinear diffusion process is then applied to enforce the coherence of figural status estimates among perceptually homogeneous regions. Computer simulations fit human perception and match the experimental evidence that several cues cooperate in defining figure-ground segregation. The results of this work suggest that figure-ground segregation involves feedback from cells with larger receptive fields in higher visual cortical areas.
Keywords: Figure-ground segregation; Nonlocal approach; Directional linear voting; Nonlinear diffusion
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Tadashi Araki, Sumit K. Banchhor, Narendra D. Londhe, Nobutaka Ikeda, Petia Radeva, Devarshi Shukla, et al. (2016). Reliable and Accurate Calcium Volume Measurement in Coronary Artery Using Intravascular Ultrasound Videos. JMS - Journal of Medical Systems, 40(3), 51:1–51:20.
Abstract: Quantitative assessment of calcified atherosclerotic volume within the coronary artery wall is vital for cardiac interventional procedures. The goal of this study is to automatically measure the calcium volume, given the borders of coronary vessel wall for all the frames of the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) video. Three soft computing fuzzy classification techniques were adapted namely Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), K-means, and Hidden Markov Random Field (HMRF) for automated segmentation of calcium regions and volume computation. These methods were benchmarked against previously developed threshold-based method. IVUS image data sets (around 30,600 IVUS frames) from 15 patients were collected using 40 MHz IVUS catheter (Atlantis® SR Pro, Boston Scientific®, pullback speed of 0.5 mm/s). Calcium mean volume for FCM, K-means, HMRF and threshold-based method were 37.84 ± 17.38 mm3, 27.79 ± 10.94 mm3, 46.44 ± 19.13 mm3 and 35.92 ± 16.44 mm3 respectively. Cross-correlation, Jaccard Index and Dice Similarity were highest between FCM and threshold-based method: 0.99, 0.92 ± 0.02 and 0.95 + 0.02 respectively. Student’s t-test, z-test and Wilcoxon-test are also performed to demonstrate consistency, reliability and accuracy of the results. Given the vessel wall region, the system reliably and automatically measures the calcium volume in IVUS videos. Further, we validated our system against a trained expert using scoring: K-means showed the best performance with an accuracy of 92.80 %. Out procedure and protocol is along the line with method previously published clinically.
Keywords: Interventional cardiology; Atherosclerosis; Coronary arteries; IVUS; calcium volume; Soft computing; Performance Reliability; Accuracy
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Jean-Pascal Jacob, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Lionel Moisan. (2016). Active skeleton for bacteria modeling. CMBBE - Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging and Visualization, 5(4), 274–286.
Abstract: The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modeling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness, orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images, and a natural bacteria-centered coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimizing an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modeling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at this http URL
Keywords: Bacteria modelling; medial axis; active contours; active skeleton; shape contraints
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Ciprian Corneanu, Marc Oliu, Jeffrey F. Cohn, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28(8), 1548–1568.
Abstract: Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.
Keywords: Facial expression; affect; emotion recognition; RGB; 3D; thermal; multimodal
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Antonio Hernandez, Sergio Escalera, & Stan Sclaroff. (2016). Poselet-basedContextual Rescoring for Human Pose Estimation via Pictorial Structures. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 118(1), 49–64.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a contextual rescoring method for predicting the position of body parts in a human pose estimation framework. A set of poselets is incorporated in the model, and their detections are used to extract spatial and score-related features relative to other body part hypotheses. A method is proposed for the automatic discovery of a compact subset of poselets that covers the different poses in a set of validation images while maximizing precision. A rescoring mechanism is defined as a set-based boosting classifier that computes a new score for each body joint detection, given its relationship to detections of other body joints and mid-level parts in the image. This new score is incorporated in the pictorial structure model as an additional unary potential, following the recent work of Pishchulin et al. Experiments on two benchmarks show comparable results to Pishchulin et al. while reducing the size of the mid-level representation by an order of magnitude, reducing the execution time by 68 % accordingly.
Keywords: Contextual rescoring; Poselets; Human pose estimation
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