|
Antonio Hernandez, Carlo Gatta, Sergio Escalera, Laura Igual, Victoria Martin Yuste, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Accurate and Robust Fully-Automatic QCA: Method and Numerical Validation. In 14th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (Vol. 14, pp. 496–503). Springer.
Abstract: The Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA) is a methodology used to evaluate the arterial diseases and, in particular, the degree of stenosis. In this paper we propose AQCA, a fully automatic method for vessel segmentation based on graph cut theory. Vesselness, geodesic paths and a new multi-scale edgeness map are used to compute a globally optimal artery segmentation. We evaluate the method performance in a rigorous numerical way on two datasets. The method can detect an artery with precision 92.9 +/- 5% and sensitivity 94.2 +/- 6%. The average absolute distance error between detected and ground truth centerline is 1.13 +/- 0.11 pixels (about 0.27 +/- 0.025 mm) and the absolute relative error in the vessel caliber estimation is 2.93% with almost no bias. Moreover, the method can discriminate between arteries and catheter with an accuracy of 96.4%.
|
|
|
M. Visani, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Salvatore Tabbone. (2011). A Protocol to Characterize the Descriptive Power and the Complementarity of Shape Descriptors. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 14(1), 87–100.
Abstract: Most document analysis applications rely on the extraction of shape descriptors, which may be grouped into different categories, each category having its own advantages and drawbacks (O.R. Terrades et al. in Proceedings of ICDAR’07, pp. 227–231, 2007). In order to improve the richness of their description, many authors choose to combine multiple descriptors. Yet, most of the authors who propose a new descriptor content themselves with comparing its performance to the performance of a set of single state-of-the-art descriptors in a specific applicative context (e.g. symbol recognition, symbol spotting...). This results in a proliferation of the shape descriptors proposed in the literature. In this article, we propose an innovative protocol, the originality of which is to be as independent of the final application as possible and which relies on new quantitative and qualitative measures. We introduce two types of measures: while the measures of the first type are intended to characterize the descriptive power (in terms of uniqueness, distinctiveness and robustness towards noise) of a descriptor, the second type of measures characterizes the complementarity between multiple descriptors. Characterizing upstream the complementarity of shape descriptors is an alternative to the usual approach where the descriptors to be combined are selected by trial and error, considering the performance characteristics of the overall system. To illustrate the contribution of this protocol, we performed experimental studies using a set of descriptors and a set of symbols which are widely used by the community namely ART and SC descriptors and the GREC 2003 database.
Keywords: Document analysis; Shape descriptors; Symbol description; Performance characterization; Complementarity analysis
|
|
|
Ferran Diego, Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Video Alignment for Change Detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(7), 1858–1869.
Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of aligning two video sequences. Such alignment refers to synchronization, i.e., the establishment of temporal correspondence between frames of the first and second video, followed by spatial registration of all the temporally corresponding frames. Video synchronization and alignment have been attempted before, but most often in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, restrictive assumptions have been applied, including linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of any solutions developed. We intend to solve the more general problem of aligning video sequences recorded by independently moving cameras that follow similar trajectories, based only on the fusion of image intensity and GPS information. The novelty of our approach is to pose the synchronization as a MAP inference problem on a Bayesian network including the observations from these two sensor types, which have been proved complementary. Alignment results are presented in the context of videos recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times, for different road types. In addition, we explore two applications of the proposed video alignment method, both based on change detection between aligned videos. One is the detection of vehicles, which could be of use in ADAS. The other is online difference spotting videos of surveillance rounds.
Keywords: video alignment
|
|
|
Ariel Amato, Mikhail Mozerov, Andrew Bagdanov, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Accurate Moving Cast Shadow Suppression Based on Local Color Constancy detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(10), 2954–2966.
Abstract: This paper describes a novel framework for detection and suppression of properly shadowed regions for most possible scenarios occurring in real video sequences. Our approach requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene, the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. We show how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that our approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.
|
|
|
Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2011). Computational Color Constancy: Survey and Experiments. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(9), 2475–2489.
Abstract: Computational color constancy is a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision applications. This paper presents a survey of many recent developments and state-of-the- art methods. Several criteria are proposed that are used to assess the approaches. A taxonomy of existing algorithms is proposed and methods are separated in three groups: static methods, gamut-based methods and learning-based methods. Further, the experimental setup is discussed including an overview of publicly available data sets. Finally, various freely available methods, of which some are considered to be state-of-the-art, are evaluated on two data sets.
Keywords: computational color constancy;computer vision application;gamut-based method;learning-based method;static method;colour vision;computer vision;image colour analysis;learning (artificial intelligence);lighting
|
|
|
Carme Julia, Felipe Lumbreras, & Angel Sappa. (2011). A Factorization-based Approach to Photometric Stereo. IJIST - International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, 21(1), 115–119.
Abstract: This article presents an adaptation of a factorization technique to tackle the photometric stereo problem. That is to recover the surface normals and reflectance of an object from a set of images obtained under different lighting conditions. The main contribution of the proposed approach is to consider pixels in shadow and saturated regions as missing data, in order to reduce their influence to the result. Concretely, an adapted Alternation technique is used to deal with missing data. Experimental results considering both synthetic and real images show the viability of the proposed factorization-based strategy. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 21, 115–119, 2011.
|
|
|
Xavier Carrillo, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, Petia Radeva, Neus Salvatella, et al. (2011). Changes in Radial Artery Volume Assessed Using Intravascular Ultrasound: A Comparison of Two Vasodilator Regimens in Transradial Coronary Intervention. JOIC - Journal of Invasive Cardiology, 23(10), 401–404.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
This study used intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to evaluate radial artery volume changes after intraarterial administration of nitroglycerin and/or verapamil.
BACKGROUND:
Radial artery spasm, which is associated with radial artery size, is the main limitation of the transradial approach in percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI).
METHODS:
This prospective, randomized study compared the effect of two intra-arterial vasodilator regimens on radial artery volume: 0.2 mg of nitroglycerin plus 2.5 mg of verapamil (Group 1; n = 15) versus 2.5 mg of verapamil alone (Group 2; n = 15). Radial artery lumen volume was assessed using IVUS at two time points: at baseline (5 minutes after sheath insertion) and post-vasodilator (1 minute after drug administration). The luminal volume of the radial artery was computed using ECOC Random Fields (ECOC-RF), a technique used for automatic segmentation of luminal borders in longitudinal cut images from IVUS sequences.
RESULTS:
There was a significant increase in arterial lumen volume in both groups, with an increase from 451 ± 177 mm³ to 508 ± 192 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 1 and from 456 ± 188 mm³ to 509 ± 170 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 2. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of absolute volume increase (58 mm³ versus 53 mm³, respectively; p = 0.65) or in relative volume increase (14% versus 20%, respectively; p = 0.69).
CONCLUSIONS:
Administration of nitroglycerin plus verapamil or verapamil alone to the radial artery resulted in similar increases in arterial lumen volume according to ECOC-RF IVUS measurements.
Keywords: radial; vasodilator treatment; percutaneous coronary intervention; IVUS; volumetric IVUS analysis
|
|
|
Mariano Vazquez, Ruth Aris, Guillaume Hozeaux, R.Aubry, P.Villar, Jaume Garcia, et al. (2011). A massively parallel computational electrophysiology model of the heart. IJNMBE - International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 27, 1911–1929.
Abstract: This paper presents a patient-sensitive simulation strategy capable of using the most efficient way the high-performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players: Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists and Cardiologists, each one mastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme but focusing on the CMS side presents a massively parallel implementation of computational electrophysiology applied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem: equations, numerical issues, the algorithm and parallel implementation. The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains up to very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems but also for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly well suited for solving this highly transient problems, with very short time-scale.
Keywords: computational electrophysiology; parallelization; finite element methods
|
|
|
Sergio Escalera, Ana Puig, Oscar Amoros, & Maria Salamo. (2011). Intelligent GPGPU Classification in Volume Visualization: a framework based on Error-Correcting Output Codes. CGF - Computer Graphics Forum, 30(7), 2107–2115.
Abstract: IF JCR 1.455 2010 25/99
In volume visualization, the definition of the regions of interest is inherently an iterative trial-and-error process finding out the best parameters to classify and render the final image. Generally, the user requires a lot of expertise to analyze and edit these parameters through multi-dimensional transfer functions. In this paper, we present a framework of intelligent methods to label on-demand multiple regions of interest. These methods can be split into a two-level GPU-based labelling algorithm that computes in time of rendering a set of labelled structures using the Machine Learning Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In a pre-processing step, ECOC trains a set of Adaboost binary classifiers from a reduced pre-labelled data set. Then, at the testing stage, each classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabelled samples and combined to perform multi-class labelling. We also propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allows to highly parallelize the testing stage. To exploit that parallelism we implemented the testing stage in GPU-OpenCL. The empirical results on different data sets for several volume structures shows high computational performance and classification accuracy.
|
|
|
Marco Pedersoli, Jordi Gonzalez, Andrew Bagdanov, & Xavier Roca. (2011). Efficient Discriminative Multiresolution Cascade for Real-Time Human Detection Applications. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(13), 1581–1587.
Abstract: Human detection is fundamental in many machine vision applications, like video surveillance, driving assistance, action recognition and scene understanding. However in most of these applications real-time performance is necessary and this is not achieved yet by current detection methods.
This paper presents a new method for human detection based on a multiresolution cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that can highly reduce the computational cost of detection search without affecting accuracy. The method consists of a cascade of sliding window detectors. Each detector is a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) composed of HOG features at different resolutions, from coarse at the first level to fine at the last one.
In contrast to previous methods, our approach uses a non-uniform stride of the sliding window that is defined by the feature resolution and allows the detection to be incrementally refined as going from coarse-to-fine resolution. In this way, the speed-up of the cascade is not only due to the fewer number of features computed at the first levels of the cascade, but also to the reduced number of windows that need to be evaluated at the coarse resolution. Experimental results show that our method reaches a detection rate comparable with the state-of-the-art of detectors based on HOG features, while at the same time the detection search is up to 23 times faster.
|
|
|
Sergio Escalera, David Masip, Eloi Puertas, Petia Radeva, & Oriol Pujol. (2011). Online Error-Correcting Output Codes. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(3), 458–467.
Abstract: IF JCR CCIA 1.303 2009 54/103
This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.
|
|
|
Carles Fernandez, Pau Baiget, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Augmenting Video Surveillance Footage with Virtual Agents for Incremental Event Evaluation. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 32(6), 878–889.
Abstract: The fields of segmentation, tracking and behavior analysis demand for challenging video resources to test, in a scalable manner, complex scenarios like crowded environments or scenes with high semantics. Nevertheless, existing public databases cannot scale the presence of appearing agents, which would be useful to study long-term occlusions and crowds. Moreover, creating these resources is expensive and often too particularized to specific needs. We propose an augmented reality framework to increase the complexity of image sequences in terms of occlusions and crowds, in a scalable and controllable manner. Existing datasets can be increased with augmented sequences containing virtual agents. Such sequences are automatically annotated, thus facilitating evaluation in terms of segmentation, tracking, and behavior recognition. In order to easily specify the desired contents, we propose a natural language interface to convert input sentences into virtual agent behaviors. Experimental tests and validation in indoor, street, and soccer environments are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, scalability, and semantics.
|
|
|
Kaida Xiao, Chenyang Fu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Sophie Wuerger. (2011). Visual Gamma Correction for LCD Displays. DIS - Displays, 32(1), 17–23.
Abstract: An improved method for visual gamma correction is developed for LCD displays to increase the accuracy of digital colour reproduction. Rather than utilising a photometric measurement device, we use observ- ers’ visual luminance judgements for gamma correction. Eight half tone patterns were designed to gen- erate relative luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 for each colour channel. A psychophysical experiment was conducted on an LCD display to find the digital signals corresponding to each relative luminance by visually matching the half-tone background to a uniform colour patch. Both inter- and intra-observer vari- ability for the eight luminance matches in each channel were assessed and the luminance matches proved to be consistent across observers (DE00 < 3.5) and repeatable (DE00 < 2.2). Based on the individual observer judgements, the display opto-electronic transfer function (OETF) was estimated by using either a 3rd order polynomial regression or linear interpolation for each colour channel. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by predicting the CIE tristimulus values of a set of coloured patches (using the observer-based OETFs) and comparing them to the expected CIE tristimulus values (using the OETF obtained from spectro-radiometric luminance measurements). The resulting colour differences range from 2 to 4.6 DE00. We conclude that this observer-based method of visual gamma correction is useful to estimate the OETF for LCD displays. Its major advantage is that no particular functional relationship between digital inputs and luminance outputs has to be assumed.
Keywords: Display calibration; Psychophysics ; Perceptual; Visual gamma correction; Luminance matching; Observer-based calibration
|
|
|
Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). On-board image-based vehicle detection and tracking. TIM - Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control, 33(7), 783–805.
Abstract: In this paper we present a computer vision system for daytime vehicle detection and localization, an essential step in the development of several types of advanced driver assistance systems. It has a reduced processing time and high accuracy thanks to the combination of vehicle detection with lane-markings estimation and temporal tracking of both vehicles and lane markings. Concerning vehicle detection, our main contribution is a frame scanning process that inspects images according to the geometry of image formation, and with an Adaboost-based detector that is robust to the variability in the different vehicle types (car, van, truck) and lighting conditions. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the most likely three-dimensional locations of vehicles on the road ahead. With regards to the lane-markings estimation component, we have two main contributions. First, we employ a different image feature to the other commonly used edges: we use ridges, which are better suited to this problem. Second, we adapt RANSAC, a generic robust estimation method, to fit a parametric model of a pair of lane markings to the image features. We qualitatively assess our vehicle detection system in sequences captured on several road types and under very different lighting conditions. The processed videos are available on a web page associated with this paper. A quantitative evaluation of the system has shown quite accurate results (a low number of false positives and negatives) at a reasonable computation time.
Keywords: vehicle detection
|
|
|
Eduard Vazquez, Ramon Baldrich, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Describing Reflectances for Colour Segmentation Robust to Shadows, Highlights and Textures. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(5), 917–930.
Abstract: The segmentation of a single material reflectance is a challenging problem due to the considerable variation in image measurements caused by the geometry of the object, shadows, and specularities. The combination of these effects has been modeled by the dichromatic reflection model. However, the application of the model to real-world images is limited due to unknown acquisition parameters and compression artifacts. In this paper, we present a robust model for the shape of a single material reflectance in histogram space. The method is based on a multilocal creaseness analysis of the histogram which results in a set of ridges representing the material reflectances. The segmentation method derived from these ridges is robust to both shadow, shading and specularities, and texture in real-world images. We further complete the method by incorporating prior knowledge from image statistics, and incorporate spatial coherence by using multiscale color contrast information. Results obtained show that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods on a widely used segmentation benchmark, having as a main characteristic its excellent performance in the presence of shadows and highlights at low computational cost.
|
|