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Antonio Hernandez, Carlo Gatta, Sergio Escalera, Laura Igual, Victoria Martin-Yuste, Manel Sabate, et al. (2012). Accurate coronary centerline extraction, caliber estimation and catheter detection in angiographies. TITB - IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 16(6), 1332–1340.
Abstract: Segmentation of coronary arteries in X-Ray angiography is a fundamental tool to evaluate arterial diseases and choose proper coronary treatment. The accurate segmentation of coronary arteries has become an important topic for the registration of different modalities which allows physicians rapid access to different medical imaging information from Computed Tomography (CT) scans or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose an accurate fully automatic algorithm based on Graph-cuts for vessel centerline extraction, caliber estimation, and catheter detection. Vesselness, geodesic paths, and a new multi-scale edgeness map are combined to customize the Graph-cuts approach to the segmentation of tubular structures, by means of a global optimization of the Graph-cuts energy function. Moreover, a novel supervised learning methodology that integrates local and contextual information is proposed for automatic catheter detection. We evaluate the method performance on three datasets coming from different imaging systems. The method performs as good as the expert observer w.r.t. centerline detection and caliber estimation. Moreover, the method discriminates between arteries and catheter with an accuracy of 96.5%, sensitivity of 72%, and precision of 97.4%.
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Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. M. Ferre, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Fast Rigid Registration of Vascular Structures in IVUS Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 13(6), 106–1011.
Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) technology permits visualization of high-resolution images of internal vascular structures. IVUS is a unique image-guiding tool to display longitudinal view of the vessels, and estimate the length and size of vascular structures with the goal of accurate diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to pulsatile contraction and expansion of the heart, the captured images are affected by different motion artifacts that make visual inspection difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that aligns vascular structures and strongly reduces the saw-shaped oscillation, simplifying the inspection of longitudinal cuts; it reduces the motion artifacts caused by the displacement of the catheter in the short-axis plane and the catheter rotation due to vessel tortuosity. The algorithm prototype aligns 3.16 frames/s and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with similar computational cost. The speed of the algorithm is crucial since it allows to inspect the corrected sequence during patient intervention. Moreover, we improved an indirect methodology for IVUS rigid registration algorithm evaluation.
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David Rotger, Petia Radeva, & N. Bruining. (2010). Automatic Detection of Bioabsorbable Coronary Stents in IVUS Images using a Cascade of Classifiers. TITB - IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 14(2), 535 – 537.
Abstract: Bioabsorbable drug-eluting coronary stents present a very promising improvement to the common metallic ones solving some of the most important problems of stent implantation: the late restenosis. These stents made of poly-L-lactic acid cause a very subtle acoustic shadow (compared to the metallic ones) making difficult the automatic detection and measurements in images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a cascade of GentleBoost classifiers to detect the stent struts using structural features to code the information of the different subregions of the struts. A stochastic gradient descent method is applied to optimize the overall performance of the detector. Validation results of struts detection are very encouraging with an average F-measure of 81%.
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Yasuko Sugito, Javier Vazquez, Trevor Canham, & Marcelo Bertalmio. (2022). Image quality evaluation in professional HDR/WCG production questions the need for HDR metrics. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 31, 5163–5177.
Abstract: In the quality evaluation of high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) images, a number of works have concluded that native HDR metrics, such as HDR visual difference predictor (HDR-VDP), HDR video quality metric (HDR-VQM), or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based visibility metrics for HDR content, provide the best results. These metrics consider only the luminance component, but several color difference metrics have been specifically developed for, and validated with, HDR/WCG images. In this paper, we perform subjective evaluation experiments in a professional HDR/WCG production setting, under a real use case scenario. The results are quite relevant in that they show, firstly, that the performance of HDR metrics is worse than that of a classic, simple standard dynamic range (SDR) metric applied directly to the HDR content; and secondly, that the chrominance metrics specifically developed for HDR/WCG imaging have poor correlation with observer scores and are also outperformed by an SDR metric. Based on these findings, we show how a very simple framework for creating color HDR metrics, that uses only luminance SDR metrics, transfer functions, and classic color spaces, is able to consistently outperform, by a considerable margin, state-of-the-art HDR metrics on a varied set of HDR content, for both perceptual quantization (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) encoding, luminance and chroma distortions, and on different color spaces of common use.
Keywords: Measurement; Image color analysis; Image coding; Production; Dynamic range; Brightness; Extraterrestrial measurements
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2019). One-view occlusion detection for stereo matching with a fully connected CRF model. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 28(6), 2936–2947.
Abstract: In this paper, we extend the standard belief propagation (BP) sequential technique proposed in the tree-reweighted sequential method [15] to the fully connected CRF models with the geodesic distance affinity. The proposed method has been applied to the stereo matching problem. Also a new approach to the BP marginal solution is proposed that we call one-view occlusion detection (OVOD). In contrast to the standard winner takes all (WTA) estimation, the proposed OVOD solution allows to find occluded regions in the disparity map and simultaneously improve the matching result. As a result we can perform only
one energy minimization process and avoid the cost calculation for the second view and the left-right check procedure. We show that the OVOD approach considerably improves results for cost augmentation and energy minimization techniques in comparison with the standard one-view affinity space implementation. We apply our method to the Middlebury data set and reach state-ofthe-art especially for median, average and mean squared error metrics.
Keywords: Stereo matching; energy minimization; fully connected MRF model; geodesic distance filter
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Lichao Zhang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, Martin Danelljan, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2019). Synthetic Data Generation for End-to-End Thermal Infrared Tracking. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 28(4), 1837–1850.
Abstract: The usage of both off-the-shelf and end-to-end trained deep networks have significantly improved the performance of visual tracking on RGB videos. However, the lack of large labeled datasets hampers the usage of convolutional neural networks for tracking in thermal infrared (TIR) images. Therefore, most state-of-the-art methods on tracking for TIR data are still based on handcrafted features. To address this problem, we propose to use image-to-image translation models. These models allow us to translate the abundantly available labeled RGB data to synthetic TIR data. We explore both the usage of paired and unpaired image translation models for this purpose. These methods provide us with a large labeled dataset of synthetic TIR sequences, on which we can train end-to-end optimal features for tracking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to train end-to-end features for TIR tracking. We perform extensive experiments on the VOT-TIR2017 dataset. We show that a network trained on a large dataset of synthetic TIR data obtains better performance than one trained on the available real TIR data. Combining both data sources leads to further improvement. In addition, when we combine the network with motion features, we outperform the state of the art with a relative gain of over 10%, clearly showing the efficiency of using synthetic data to train end-to-end TIR trackers.
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2017). Improved Recursive Geodesic Distance Computation for Edge Preserving Filter. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 26(8), 3696–3706.
Abstract: All known recursive filters based on the geodesic distance affinity are realized by two 1D recursions applied in two orthogonal directions of the image plane. The 2D extension of the filter is not valid and has theoretically drawbacks, which lead to known artifacts. In this paper, a maximum influence propagation method is proposed to approximate the 2D extension for the
geodesic distance-based recursive filter. The method allows to partially overcome the drawbacks of the 1D recursion approach. We show that our improved recursion better approximates the true geodesic distance filter, and the application of this improved filter for image denoising outperforms the existing recursive implementation of the geodesic distance. As an application,
we consider a geodesic distance-based filter for image denoising.
Experimental evaluation of our denoising method demonstrates comparable and for several test images better results, than stateof-the-art approaches, while our algorithm is considerably fasterwith computational complexity O(8P).
Keywords: Geodesic distance filter; color image filtering; image enhancement
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Xinhang Song, Shuqiang Jiang, & Luis Herranz. (2017). Multi-Scale Multi-Feature Context Modeling for Scene Recognition in the Semantic Manifold. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 26(6), 2721–2735.
Abstract: Before the big data era, scene recognition was often approached with two-step inference using localized intermediate representations (objects, topics, and so on). One of such approaches is the semantic manifold (SM), in which patches and images are modeled as points in a semantic probability simplex. Patch models are learned resorting to weak supervision via image labels, which leads to the problem of scene categories co-occurring in this semantic space. Fortunately, each category has its own co-occurrence patterns that are consistent across the images in that category. Thus, discovering and modeling these patterns are critical to improve the recognition performance in this representation. Since the emergence of large data sets, such as ImageNet and Places, these approaches have been relegated in favor of the much more powerful convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which can automatically learn multi-layered representations from the data. In this paper, we address many limitations of the original SM approach and related works. We propose discriminative patch representations using neural networks and further propose a hybrid architecture in which the semantic manifold is built on top of multiscale CNNs. Both representations can be computed significantly faster than the Gaussian mixture models of the original SM. To combine multiple scales, spatial relations, and multiple features, we formulate rich context models using Markov random fields. To solve the optimization problem, we analyze global and local approaches, where a top-down hierarchical algorithm has the best performance. Experimental results show that exploiting different types of contextual relations jointly consistently improves the recognition accuracy.
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2015). Global Color Sparseness and a Local Statistics Prior for Fast Bilateral Filtering. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5842–5853.
Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.
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Lluis Garrido, M.Guerrieri, & Laura Igual. (2015). Image Segmentation with Cage Active Contours. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5557–5566.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework for image segmentation based on parametrized active contours. The evolving contour is parametrized according to a reduced set of control points that form a closed polygon and have a clear visual interpretation. The parametrization, called mean value coordinates, stems from the techniques used in computer graphics to animate virtual models. Our framework allows to easily formulate region-based energies to segment an image. In particular, we present three different local region-based energy terms: 1) the mean model; 2) the Gaussian model; 3) and the histogram model. We show the behavior of our method on synthetic and real images and compare the performance with state-of-the-art level set methods.
Keywords: Level sets; Mean value coordinates; Parametrized active contours; level sets; mean value coordinates
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Jiaolong Xu, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Antonio Lopez. (2015). Recognizing Actions through Action-specific Person Detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(11), 4422–4432.
Abstract: Action recognition in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To facilitate comparative evaluation independently of person detection, the standard evaluation protocol for action recognition uses an oracle person detector to obtain perfect bounding box information at both training and test time. The assumption is that, in practice, a general person detector will provide candidate bounding boxes for action recognition. In this paper, we argue that this paradigm is suboptimal and that action class labels should already be considered during the detection stage. Motivated by the observation that body pose is strongly conditioned on action class, we show that: 1) the existing state-of-the-art generic person detectors are not adequate for proposing candidate bounding boxes for action classification; 2) due to limited training examples, the direct training of action-specific person detectors is also inadequate; and 3) using only a small number of labeled action examples, the transfer learning is able to adapt an existing detector to propose higher quality bounding boxes for subsequent action classification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate transfer learning for the task of action-specific person detection in still images. We perform extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets: 1) Stanford-40 and 2) PASCAL VOC 2012. For the action detection task (i.e., both person localization and classification of the action performed), our approach outperforms methods based on general person detection by 5.7% mean average precision (MAP) on Stanford-40 and 2.1% MAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state of the art with a MAP of 45.4% on Stanford-40 and 31.4% on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also evaluate our action detection approach for the task of action classification (i.e., recognizing actions without localizing them). For this task, our approach, without using any ground-truth person localization at test tim- , outperforms on both data sets state-of-the-art methods, which do use person locations.
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Mikhail Mozerov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2015). Accurate stereo matching by two step global optimization. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(3), 1153–1163.
Abstract: In stereo matching cost filtering methods and energy minimization algorithms are considered as two different techniques. Due to their global extend energy minimization methods obtain good stereo matching results. However, they tend to fail in occluded regions, in which cost filtering approaches obtain better results. In this paper we intend to combine both approaches with the aim to improve overall stereo matching results. We show that a global optimization with a fully connected model can be solved by cost fil tering methods. Based on this observation we propose to perform stereo matching as a two-step energy minimization algorithm. We consider two MRF models: a fully connected model defined on the complete set of pixels in an image and a conventional locally connected model. We solve the energy minimization problem for the fully connected model, after which the marginal function of the solution is used as the unary potential in the locally connected MRF model. Experiments on the Middlebury stereo datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts results.
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Miguel Oliveira, Angel Sappa, & Victor Santos. (2015). A probabilistic approach for color correction in image mosaicking applications. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 14(2), 508–523.
Abstract: Image mosaicking applications require both geometrical and photometrical registrations between the images that compose the mosaic. This paper proposes a probabilistic color correction algorithm for correcting the photometrical disparities. First, the image to be color corrected is segmented into several regions using mean shift. Then, connected regions are extracted using a region fusion algorithm. Local joint image histograms of each region are modeled as collections of truncated Gaussians using a maximum likelihood estimation procedure. Then, local color palette mapping functions are computed using these sets of Gaussians. The color correction is performed by applying those functions to all the regions of the image. An extensive comparison with ten other state of the art color correction algorithms is presented, using two different image pair data sets. Results show that the proposed approach obtains the best average scores in both data sets and evaluation metrics and is also the most robust to failures.
Keywords: Color correction; image mosaicking; color transfer; color palette mapping functions
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Mohammad Rouhani, Angel Sappa, & E. Boyer. (2015). Implicit B-Spline Surface Reconstruction. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(1), 22–32.
Abstract: This paper presents a fast and flexible curve, and surface reconstruction technique based on implicit B-spline. This representation does not require any parameterization and it is locally supported. This fact has been exploited in this paper to propose a reconstruction technique through solving a sparse system of equations. This method is further accelerated to reduce the dimension to the active control lattice. Moreover, the surface smoothness and user interaction are allowed for controlling the surface. Finally, a novel weighting technique has been introduced in order to blend small patches and smooth them in the overlapping regions. The whole framework is very fast and efficient and can handle large cloud of points with very low computational cost. The experimental results show the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm to describe objects with complex topologies. Comparisons with other fitting methods highlight the superiority of the proposed approach in the presence of noise and missing data.
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Noha Elfiky, Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2014). Color Constancy using 3D Scene Geometry derived from a Single Image. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(9), 3855–3868.
Abstract: The aim of color constancy is to remove the effect of the color of the light source. As color constancy is inherently an ill-posed problem, most of the existing color constancy algorithms are based on specific imaging assumptions (e.g. grey-world and white patch assumption).
In this paper, 3D geometry models are used to determine which color constancy method to use for the different geometrical regions (depth/layer) found
in images. The aim is to classify images into stages (rough 3D geometry models). According to stage models; images are divided into stage regions using hard and soft segmentation. After that, the best color constancy methods is selected for each geometry depth. To this end, we propose a method to combine color constancy algorithms by investigating the relation between depth, local image statistics and color constancy. Image statistics are then exploited per depth to select the proper color constancy method. Our approach opens the possibility to estimate multiple illuminations by distinguishing
nearby light source from distant illuminations. Experiments on state-of-the-art data sets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art
single color constancy algorithms with an improvement of almost 50% of median angular error. When using a perfect classifier (i.e, all of the test images are correctly classified into stages); the performance of the proposed method achieves an improvement of 52% of the median angular error compared to the best-performing single color constancy algorithm.
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