Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, F. Javier Sanchez, Frederic Perez, Marius G. Linguraru, et al. (2012). Computation and Evaluation of Medial Surfaces for Shape Representation of Abdominal Organs. In H. Yoshida et al (Ed.), Workshop on Computational and Clinical Applications in Abdominal Imaging (Vol. 7029, 223–230). LNCS. Berlin: Springer Link.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D
objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial
manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our
method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs,
exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
Keywords: medial manifolds, abdomen.
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Patricia Marquez, Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2012). A Complete Confidence Framework for Optical Flow. In Rita Cucchiara V. M. Andrea Fusiello (Ed.), 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations (Vol. 7584, pp. 124–133). LNCS. Florence, Italy, October 7-13, 2012: Springer-Verlag.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
Keywords: Optical flow, confidence measures, sparsification plots, error prediction plots
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, F. Javier Sanchez, Frederic Perez, & Marius G. Linguraru. (2011). Computation and Evaluation of Medial Surfaces for Shape Representation of Abdominal Organs. In In H. Yoshida et al (Ed.), Workshop on Computational and Clinical Applications in Abdominal Imaging (Vol. 7029, pp. 223–230). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
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Debora Gil, Sergio Vera, Agnes Borras, Albert Andaluz, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2017). Anatomical Medial Surfaces with Efficient Resolution of Branches Singularities. MIA - Medical Image Analysis, 35, 390–402.
Abstract: Medial surfaces are powerful tools for shape description, but their use has been limited due to the sensibility existing methods to branching artifacts. Medial branching artifacts are associated to perturbations of the object boundary rather than to geometric features. Such instability is a main obstacle for a con dent application in shape recognition and description. Medial branches correspond to singularities of the medial surface and, thus, they are problematic for existing morphological and energy-based algorithms. In this paper, we use algebraic geometry concepts in an energy-based approach to compute a medial surface presenting a stable branching topology. We also present an ecient GPU-CPU implementation using standard image processing tools. We show the method computational eciency and quality on a custom made synthetic database. Finally, we present some results on a medical imaging application for localization of abdominal pathologies.
Keywords: Medial Representations; Shape Recognition; Medial Branching Stability ; Singular Points
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Miquel Ferrer, Ernest Valveny, & F. Serratosa. (2009). Median graph: A new exact algorithm using a distance based on the maximum common subgraph. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 30(5), 579–588.
Abstract: Median graphs have been presented as a useful tool for capturing the essential information of a set of graphs. Nevertheless, computation of optimal solutions is a very hard problem. In this work we present a new and more efficient optimal algorithm for the median graph computation. With the use of a particular cost function that permits the definition of the graph edit distance in terms of the maximum common subgraph, and a prediction function in the backtracking algorithm, we reduce the size of the search space, avoiding the evaluation of a great amount of states and still obtaining the exact median. We present a set of experiments comparing our new algorithm against the previous existing exact algorithm using synthetic data. In addition, we present the first application of the exact median graph computation to real data and we compare the results against an approximate algorithm based on genetic search. These experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the previous existing exact algorithm and in addition show the potential applicability of the exact solutions to real problems.
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Manisha Das, Deep Gupta, Petia Radeva, & Ashwini M. Bakde. (2021). Optimized CT-MR neurological image fusion framework using biologically inspired spiking neural model in hybrid ℓ1 - ℓ0 layer decomposition domain. BSPC - Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 68, 102535.
Abstract: Medical image fusion plays an important role in the clinical diagnosis of several critical neurological diseases by merging complementary information available in multimodal images. In this paper, a novel CT-MR neurological image fusion framework is proposed using an optimized biologically inspired feedforward neural model in two-scale hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition domain using gray wolf optimization to preserve the structural as well as texture information present in source CT and MR images. Initially, the source images are subjected to two-scale ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition with optimized parameters, giving a scale-1 detail layer, a scale-2 detail layer and a scale-2 base layer. Two detail layers at scale-1 and 2 are fused using an optimized biologically inspired neural model and weighted average scheme based on local energy and modified spatial frequency to maximize the preservation of edges and local textures, respectively, while the scale-2 base layer gets fused using choose max rule to preserve the background information. To optimize the hyper-parameters of hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition and biologically inspired neural model, a fitness function is evaluated based on spatial frequency and edge index of the resultant fused image obtained by adding all the fused components. The fusion performance is analyzed by conducting extensive experiments on different CT-MR neurological images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides better-fused images and outperforms the other state-of-the-art fusion methods in both visual and quantitative assessments.
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Debora Gil. (2004). Geometric Differential Operators for Shape Modelling (Jordi Saludes i Closa, & Petia Radeva, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, Barcelona (Spain).
Abstract: Medical imaging feeds research in many computer vision and image processing fields: image filtering, segmentation, shape recovery, registration, retrieval and pattern matching. Because of their low contrast changes and large variety of artifacts and noise, medical imaging processing techniques relying on an analysis of the geometry of image level sets rather than on intensity values result in more robust treatment. From the starting point of treatment of intravascular images, this PhD thesis ad- dresses the design of differential image operators based on geometric principles for a robust shape modelling and restoration. Among all fields applying shape recovery, we approach filtering and segmentation of image objects. For a successful use in real images, the segmentation process should go through three stages: noise removing, shape modelling and shape recovery. This PhD addresses all three topics, but for the sake of algorithms as automated as possible, techniques for image processing will be designed to satisfy three main principles: a) convergence of the iterative schemes to non-trivial states avoiding image degeneration to a constant image and representing smooth models of the originals; b) smooth asymptotic behav- ior ensuring stabilization of the iterative process; c) fixed parameter values ensuring equal (domain free) performance of the algorithms whatever initial images/shapes. Our geometric approach to the generic equations that model the different processes approached enables defining techniques satisfying all the former requirements. First, we introduce a new curvature-based geometric flow for image filtering achieving a good compromise between noise removing and resemblance to original images. Sec- ond, we describe a new family of diffusion operators that restrict their scope to image level curves and serve to restore smooth closed models from unconnected sets of points. Finally, we design a regularization of snake (distance) maps that ensures its smooth convergence towards any closed shape. Experiments show that performance of the techniques proposed overpasses that of state-of-the-art algorithms.
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Jaume Garcia. (2004). Generalized Active Shape Models Applied to Cardiac Function Analysis. Master's thesis, , .
Abstract: Medical imaging is very useful in the assessment and treatment of many diseases. To deal with the great amount of data provided by imaging scanners and extract quantitative information that physicians can interpret, many analysis algorithms have been developed. Any process of analysis always consists of a first step of segmenting some particular structure. In medical imaging, structures are not always well defined and suffer from noise artifacts thus, ordinary segmentation methods are not well suited. The ones that seem to give better results are those based on deformable models. Nevertheless, despite their capability of mixing image features together with smoothness constraints that may compensate for image irregularities, these are naturally local methods, i. e., each node of the active contour evolve taking into account information about its neighbors and some other weak constraints about flexibility and smoothness, but not about the global shape that they should find. Due to the fact that structures to be segmented are the same for all cases but with some inter and intra-patient variation, the incorporation of a priori knowledge about shape in the segmentation method will provide robustness to it. Active Shape Models is an algorithm based on the creation of a shape model called Point Distribution Model. It performs a segmentation using only shapes similar than those previously learned from a training set that capture most of the variation presented by the structure. This algorithm works by updating shape nodes along a normal segment which often can be too restrictive. For this reason we propose a generalization of this algorithm that we call Generalized Active Shape Models and fully integrates the a priori knowledge given by the Point Distribution Model with deformable models or any other appropriate segmentation method. Two different applications to cardiac imaging of this generalized method are developed and promising results are shown.
Keywords: Cardiac Analysis; Deformable Models; Active Contour Models; Active Shape Models; Tagged MRI; HARP; Contrast Echocardiography.
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Carles Onielfa, Carles Casacuberta, & Sergio Escalera. (2022). Influence in Social Networks Through Visual Analysis of Image Memes. In Artificial Intelligence Research and Development (Vol. 356, pp. 71–80).
Abstract: Memes evolve and mutate through their diffusion in social media. They have the potential to propagate ideas and, by extension, products. Many studies have focused on memes, but none so far, to our knowledge, on the users that post them, their relationships, and the reach of their influence. In this article, we define a meme influence graph together with suitable metrics to visualize and quantify influence between users who post memes, and we also describe a process to implement our definitions using a new approach to meme detection based on text-to-image area ratio and contrast. After applying our method to a set of users of the social media platform Instagram, we conclude that our metrics add information to already existing user characteristics.
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Lu Yu, Vacit Oguz Yazici, Xialei Liu, Joost Van de Weijer, Yongmei Cheng, & Arnau Ramisa. (2019). Learning Metrics from Teachers: Compact Networks for Image Embedding. In 32nd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2907–2916).
Abstract: Metric learning networks are used to compute image embeddings, which are widely used in many applications such as image retrieval and face recognition. In this paper, we propose to use network distillation to efficiently compute image embeddings with small networks. Network distillation has been successfully applied to improve image classification, but has hardly been explored for metric learning. To do so, we propose two new loss functions that model the
communication of a deep teacher network to a small student network. We evaluate our system in several datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products and show that embeddings computed using small student networks perform significantly better than those computed using standard networks of similar size. Results on a very compact network (MobileNet-0.25), which can be
used on mobile devices, show that the proposed method can greatly improve Recall@1 results from 27.5% to 44.6%. Furthermore, we investigate various aspects of distillation for embeddings, including hint and attention layers, semisupervised learning and cross quality distillation.
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Idoia Ruiz. (2022). Deep Metric Learning for re-identification, tracking and hierarchical novelty detection (Joan Serrat, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: Metric learning refers to the problem in machine learning of learning a distance or similarity measurement to compare data. In particular, deep metric learning involves learning a representation, also referred to as embedding, such that in the embedding space data samples can be compared based on the distance, directly providing a similarity measure. This step is necessary to perform several tasks in computer vision. It allows to perform the classification of images, regions or pixels, re-identification, out-of-distribution detection, object tracking in image sequences and any other task that requires computing a similarity score for their solution. This thesis addresses three specific problems that share this common requirement. The first one is person re-identification. Essentially, it is an image retrieval task that aims at finding instances of the same person according to a similarity measure. We first compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency, classical metric learning to basic deep learning based methods for this problem. In this context, we also study network distillation as a strategy to optimize the trade-off between accuracy and speed at inference time. The second problem we contribute to is novelty detection in image classification. It consists in detecting samples of novel classes, i.e. never seen during training. However, standard novelty detection does not provide any information about the novel samples besides they are unknown. Aiming at more informative outputs, we take advantage from the hierarchical taxonomies that are intrinsic to the classes. We propose a metric learning based approach that leverages the hierarchical relationships among classes during training, being able to predict the parent class for a novel sample in such hierarchical taxonomy. Our third contribution is in multi-object tracking and segmentation. This joint task comprises classification, detection, instance segmentation and tracking. Tracking can be formulated as a retrieval problem to be addressed with metric learning approaches. We tackle the existing difficulty in academic research that is the lack of annotated benchmarks for this task. To this matter, we introduce the problem of weakly supervised multi-object tracking and segmentation, facing the challenge of not having available ground truth for instance segmentation. We propose a synergistic training strategy that benefits from the knowledge of the supervised tasks that are being learnt simultaneously.
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Wenwen Fu, Zhihong An, Wendong Huang, Haoran Sun, Wenjuan Gong, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2023). A Spatio-Temporal Spotting Network with Sliding Windows for Micro-Expression Detection. ELEC - Electronics, 12(18), 3947.
Abstract: Micro-expressions reveal underlying emotions and are widely applied in political psychology, lie detection, law enforcement and medical care. Micro-expression spotting aims to detect the temporal locations of facial expressions from video sequences and is a crucial task in micro-expression recognition. In this study, the problem of micro-expression spotting is formulated as micro-expression classification per frame. We propose an effective spotting model with sliding windows called the spatio-temporal spotting network. The method involves a sliding window detection mechanism, combines the spatial features from the local key frames and the global temporal features and performs micro-expression spotting. The experiments are conducted on the CAS(ME)2 database and the SAMM Long Videos database, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 30.58% for the CAS(ME)2 and 23.98% for the SAMM Long Videos according to overall F-scores.
Keywords: micro-expression spotting; sliding window; key frame extraction
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Xavier Otazu, & Arash Akbarinia. (2019). Modelling symmetry perception with banks of quadrature convolutional Gabor kernels. In 42nd edition of the European Conference on Visual Perception (p. 224).
Abstract: Mirror symmetry is a property most likely to be encountered in animals than in medium scale vegetation or inanimate objects in the natural world. This might be the reason why the human visual system has evolved to detect it quickly and robustly. Indeed, the perception of symmetry assists higher-level visual processing that are crucial for survival such as target recognition and identification irrespective of position and location. Although the task of detecting symmetrical objects seems effortless to us, it is very challenging for computers (to the extent that it has been proposed as a robust “captcha” by Funk & Liu in 2016). Indeed, the exact mechanism of symmetry detection in primates is not well understood: fMRI studies have shown that symmetrical shapes activate specific higher-level areas of the visual cortex (Sasaki et al.; 2005) and similarly, a large body of psychophysical experiments suggest that the symmetry perception is critically influenced by low-level mechanisms (Treder; 2010). In this work we attempt to find plausible low-level mechanisms that might form the basis for symmetry perception. Our simple model is made from banks of (i) odd-symmetric Gabors (resembling edge-detecting V1 neurons); and (ii) banks of larger odd- and even-symmetric Gabors (resembling higher visual cortex neurons), that pool signals from the 'edge image'. As reported previously (Akbarinia et al, ECVP2017), the convolution of the symmetrical lines with the two Gabor kernels of alternative phase produces a minimum in one and a maximum in the other (Osorio; 1996), and the rectification and combination of these signals create lines which hint of mirror symmetry in natural images. We improved the algorithm by combining these signals across several spatial scales. Our preliminary results suggest that such multiscale combination of convolutional operations might form the basis for much of the operation of the HVS in terms of symmetry detection and representation.
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Juan Ramon Terven Salinas, Bogdan Raducanu, Maria Elena Meza-de-Luna, & Joaquin Salas. (2015). Evaluating Real-Time Mirroring of Head Gestures using Smart Glasses. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 452–460).
Abstract: Mirroring occurs when one person tends to mimic the non-verbal communication of their counterparts. Even though mirroring is a complex phenomenon, in this study, we focus on the detection of head-nodding as a simple non-verbal communication cue due to its significance as a gesture displayed during social interactions. This paper introduces a computer vision-based method to detect mirroring through the analysis of head gestures using wearable cameras (smart glasses). In addition, we study how such a method can be used to explore perceived competence. The proposed method has been evaluated and the experiments demonstrate how static and wearable cameras seem to be equally effective to gather the information required for the analysis.
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Marçal Rusiñol, J. Chazalon, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2014). Normalisation et validation d'images de documents capturées en mobilité. In Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document (pp. 109–124).
Abstract: Mobile document image acquisition integrates many distortions which must be corrected or detected on the device, before the document becomes unavailable or paying data transmission fees. In this paper, we propose a system to correct perspective and illumination issues, and estimate the sharpness of the image for OCR recognition. The correction step relies on fast and accurate border detection followed by illumination normalization. Its evaluation on a private dataset shows a clear improvement on OCR accuracy. The quality assessment
step relies on a combination of focus measures. Its evaluation on a public dataset shows that this simple method compares well to state of the art, learning-based methods which cannot be embedded on a mobile, and outperforms metric-based methods.
Keywords: mobile document image acquisition; perspective correction; illumination correction; quality assessment; focus measure; OCR accuracy prediction
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