From 3D Point Clouds to Pose-Normalised Depth Maps

We consider the problem of generating either pairwise-aligned or pose-normalised depth maps from noisy 3D point clouds in a relatively unrestricted poses. Our system is deployed in a 3D face alignment application and consists of the following four stages: (i) data filtering, (ii) nose tip identification and sub-vertex localisation, (iii) computation of the (relative) face orientation, (iv) generation of either a pose aligned or a pose normalised depth map. We generate an implicit radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface and this is employed within all four stages of the process. For example, in stage (ii), construction of novel invariant features is based on sampling this RBF over a set of concentric spheres to give a spherically-sampled RBF (SSR) shape histogram. In stage (iii), a second novel descriptor, called an isoradius contour curvature signal, is defined, which allows rotational alignment to be determined using a simple process of 1D correlation. We test our system on both the University of York (UoY) 3D face dataset and the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 3D data. For the more challenging UoY data, our SSR descriptors significantly outperform three variants of spin images, successfully identifying nose vertices at a rate of 99.6%. Nose localisation performance on the higher quality FRGC data, which has only small pose variations, is 99.9%. Our best system successfully normalises the pose of 3D faces at rates of 99.1% (UoY data) and 99.6% (FRGC data)

Barcode Annotations for Medical Image Retrieval: A Preliminary Investigation

This paper proposes to generate and to use barcodes to annotate medical images and/or their regions of interest such as organs, tumors and tissue types. A multitude of efficient feature-based image retrieval methods already exist that can assign a query image to a certain image class. Visual annotations may help to increase the retrieval accuracy if combined with existing feature-based classification paradigms. Whereas with annotations we usually mean textual descriptions, in this paper barcode annotations are proposed. In particular, Radon barcodes (RBC) are introduced. As well, local binary patterns (LBP) and local Radon binary patterns (LRBP) are implemented as barcodes. The IRMA x-ray dataset with 12,677 training images and 1,733 test images is used to verify how barcodes could facilitate image retrieval.Comment: To be published in proceedings of The IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2015), September 27-30, 2015, Quebec City, Canad

MinMax Radon Barcodes for Medical Image Retrieval

Content-based medical image retrieval can support diagnostic decisions by clinical experts. Examining similar images may provide clues to the expert to remove uncertainties in his/her final diagnosis. Beyond conventional feature descriptors, binary features in different ways have been recently proposed to encode the image content. A recent proposal is "Radon barcodes" that employ binarized Radon projections to tag/annotate medical images with content-based binary vectors, called barcodes. In this paper, MinMax Radon barcodes are introduced which are superior to "local thresholding" scheme suggested in the literature. Using IRMA dataset with 14,410 x-ray images from 193 different classes, the advantage of using MinMax Radon barcodes over \emph{thresholded} Radon barcodes are demonstrated. The retrieval error for direct search drops by more than 15\%. As well, SURF, as a well-established non-binary approach, and BRISK, as a recent binary method are examined to compare their results with MinMax Radon barcodes when retrieving images from IRMA dataset. The results demonstrate that MinMax Radon barcodes are faster and more accurate when applied on IRMA images.Comment: To appear in proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Visual Computing, December 12-14, 2016, Las Vegas, Nevada, US

A Method of Protein Model Classification and Retrieval Using Bag-of-Visual-Features

In this paper we propose a novel visual method for protein model classification and retrieval. Different from the conventional methods, the key idea of the proposed method is to extract image features of proteins and measure the visual similarity between proteins. Firstly, the multiview images are captured by vertices and planes of a given octahedron surrounding the protein. Secondly, the local features are extracted from each image of the different views by the SURF algorithm and are vector quantized into visual words using a visual codebook. Finally, KLD is employed to calculate the similarity distance between two feature vectors. Experimental results show that the proposed method has encouraging performances for protein retrieval and categorization as shown in the comparison with other methods

Learning View-Model Joint Relevance for 3D Object Retrieval

3D object retrieval has attracted extensive research efforts and become an important task in recent years. It is noted that how to measure the relevance between 3D objects is still a difficult issue. Most of the existing methods employ just the model-based or view-based approaches, which may lead to incomplete information for 3D object representation. In this paper, we propose to jointly learn the view-model relevance among 3D objects for retrieval, in which the 3D objects are formulated in different graph structures. With the view information, the multiple views of 3D objects are employed to formulate the 3D object relationship in an object hypergraph structure. With the model data, the model-based features are extracted to construct an object graph to describe the relationship among the 3D objects. The learning on the two graphs is conducted to estimate the relevance among the 3D objects, in which the view/model graph weights can be also optimized in the learning process. This is the first work to jointly explore the view-based and model-based relevance among the 3D objects in a graph-based framework. The proposed method has been evaluated in three data sets. The experimental results and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness on retrieval accuracy of the proposed 3D object retrieval method

Phaseless computational imaging with a radiating metasurface

Computational imaging modalities support a simplification of the active architectures required in an imaging system and these approaches have been validated across the electromagnetic spectrum. Recent implementations have utilized pseudo-orthogonal radiation patterns to illuminate an object of interest---notably, frequency-diverse metasurfaces have been exploited as fast and low-cost alternative to conventional coherent imaging systems. However, accurately measuring the complex-valued signals in the frequency domain can be burdensome, particularly for sub-centimeter wavelengths. Here, computational imaging is studied under the relaxed constraint of intensity-only measurements. A novel 3D imaging system is conceived based on 'phaseless' and compressed measurements, with benefits from recent advances in the field of phase retrieval. In this paper, the methodology associated with this novel principle is described, studied, and experimentally demonstrated in the microwave range. A comparison of the estimated images from both complex valued and phaseless measurements are presented, verifying the fidelity of phaseless computational imaging.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures, articl