2,659 research outputs found
A Survey on Ear Biometrics
Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though, current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion; earprint forensics; ear symmetry; ear classification; and ear individuality. This paper provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers
200x Low-dose PET Reconstruction using Deep Learning
Positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used in various clinical
applications, including cancer diagnosis, heart disease and neuro disorders.
The use of radioactive tracer in PET imaging raises concerns due to the risk of
radiation exposure. To minimize this potential risk in PET imaging, efforts
have been made to reduce the amount of radio-tracer usage. However, lowing dose
results in low Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) and loss of information, both of
which will heavily affect clinical diagnosis. Besides, the ill-conditioning of
low-dose PET image reconstruction makes it a difficult problem for iterative
reconstruction algorithms. Previous methods proposed are typically complicated
and slow, yet still cannot yield satisfactory results at significantly low
dose. Here, we propose a deep learning method to resolve this issue with an
encoder-decoder residual deep network with concatenate skip connections.
Experiments shows the proposed method can reconstruct low-dose PET image to a
standard-dose quality with only two-hundredth dose. Different cost functions
for training model are explored. Multi-slice input strategy is introduced to
provide the network with more structural information and make it more robust to
noise. Evaluation on ultra-low-dose clinical data shows that the proposed
method can achieve better result than the state-of-the-art methods and
reconstruct images with comparable quality using only 0.5% of the original
regular dose
Unified Heat Kernel Regression for Diffusion, Kernel Smoothing and Wavelets on Manifolds and Its Application to Mandible Growth Modeling in CT Images
We present a novel kernel regression framework for smoothing scalar surface
data using the Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions. Starting with the heat kernel
constructed from the eigenfunctions, we formulate a new bivariate kernel
regression framework as a weighted eigenfunction expansion with the heat kernel
as the weights. The new kernel regression is mathematically equivalent to
isotropic heat diffusion, kernel smoothing and recently popular diffusion
wavelets. Unlike many previous partial differential equation based approaches
involving diffusion, our approach represents the solution of diffusion
analytically, reducing numerical inaccuracy and slow convergence. The numerical
implementation is validated on a unit sphere using spherical harmonics. As an
illustration, we have applied the method in characterizing the localized growth
pattern of mandible surfaces obtained in CT images from subjects between ages 0
and 20 years by regressing the length of displacement vectors with respect to
the template surface.Comment: Accepted in Medical Image Analysi
Radiological images and machine learning: trends, perspectives, and prospects
The application of machine learning to radiological images is an increasingly
active research area that is expected to grow in the next five to ten years.
Recent advances in machine learning have the potential to recognize and
classify complex patterns from different radiological imaging modalities such
as x-rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and positron
emission tomography imaging. In many applications, machine learning based
systems have shown comparable performance to human decision-making. The
applications of machine learning are the key ingredients of future clinical
decision making and monitoring systems. This review covers the fundamental
concepts behind various machine learning techniques and their applications in
several radiological imaging areas, such as medical image segmentation, brain
function studies and neurological disease diagnosis, as well as computer-aided
systems, image registration, and content-based image retrieval systems.
Synchronistically, we will briefly discuss current challenges and future
directions regarding the application of machine learning in radiological
imaging. By giving insight on how take advantage of machine learning powered
applications, we expect that clinicians can prevent and diagnose diseases more
accurately and efficiently.Comment: 13 figure
Deep Learning in Cardiology
The medical field is creating large amount of data that physicians are unable
to decipher and use efficiently. Moreover, rule-based expert systems are
inefficient in solving complicated medical tasks or for creating insights using
big data. Deep learning has emerged as a more accurate and effective technology
in a wide range of medical problems such as diagnosis, prediction and
intervention. Deep learning is a representation learning method that consists
of layers that transform the data non-linearly, thus, revealing hierarchical
relationships and structures. In this review we survey deep learning
application papers that use structured data, signal and imaging modalities from
cardiology. We discuss the advantages and limitations of applying deep learning
in cardiology that also apply in medicine in general, while proposing certain
directions as the most viable for clinical use.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, 10 table
Machine Vision in the Context of Robotics: A Systematic Literature Review
Machine vision is critical to robotics due to a wide range of applications
which rely on input from visual sensors such as autonomous mobile robots and
smart production systems. To create the smart homes and systems of tomorrow, an
overview about current challenges in the research field would be of use to
identify further possible directions, created in a systematic and reproducible
manner. In this work a systematic literature review was conducted covering
research from the last 10 years. We screened 172 papers from four databases and
selected 52 relevant papers. While robustness and computation time were
improved greatly, occlusion and lighting variance are still the biggest
problems faced. From the number of recent publications, we conclude that the
observed field is of relevance and interest to the research community. Further
challenges arise in many areas of the field.Comment: 10 pages 5 figures, systematic literature stud
Face Restoration via Plug-and-Play 3D Facial Priors
State-of-the-art face restoration methods employ deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn a mapping between degraded and sharp facial patterns by exploring local appearance knowledge. However, most of these methods do not well exploit facial structures and identity information, and only deal with task-specific face restoration (e.g.,face super-resolution or deblurring). In this paper, we propose cross-tasks and cross-models plug-and-play 3D facial priors to explicitly embed the network with the sharp facial structures for general face restoration tasks. Our 3D priors are the first to explore 3D morphable knowledge based on the fusion of parametric descriptions of face attributes (e.g., identity, facial expression, texture, illumination, and face pose). Furthermore, the priors can easily be incorporated into any network and are very efficient in improving the performance and accelerating the convergence speed. Firstly, a 3D face rendering branch is set up to obtain 3D priors of salient facial structures and identity knowledge. Secondly, for better exploiting this hierarchical information (i.e., intensity similarity, 3D facial structure, and identity content), a spatial attention module is designed for image restoration problems. Extensive face restoration experiments including face super-resolution and deblurring demonstrate that the proposed 3D priors achieve superior face restoration results over the state-of-the-art algorithm
Automated X-ray image analysis for cargo security: Critical review and future promise
We review the relatively immature field of automated image analysis for X-ray cargo imagery. There is increasing demand for automated analysis methods that can assist in the inspection and selection of containers, due to the ever-growing volumes of traded cargo and the increasing concerns that customs- and security-related threats are being smuggled across borders by organised crime and terrorist networks. We split the field into the classical pipeline of image preprocessing and image understanding. Preprocessing includes: image manipulation; quality improvement; Threat Image Projection (TIP); and material discrimination and segmentation. Image understanding includes: Automated Threat Detection (ATD); and Automated Contents Verification (ACV). We identify several gaps in the literature that need to be addressed and propose ideas for future research. Where the current literature is sparse we borrow from the single-view, multi-view, and CT X-ray baggage domains, which have some characteristics in common with X-ray cargo
A Gentle Introduction to Deep Learning in Medical Image Processing
This paper tries to give a gentle introduction to deep learning in medical
image processing, proceeding from theoretical foundations to applications. We
first discuss general reasons for the popularity of deep learning, including
several major breakthroughs in computer science. Next, we start reviewing the
fundamental basics of the perceptron and neural networks, along with some
fundamental theory that is often omitted. Doing so allows us to understand the
reasons for the rise of deep learning in many application domains. Obviously
medical image processing is one of these areas which has been largely affected
by this rapid progress, in particular in image detection and recognition, image
segmentation, image registration, and computer-aided diagnosis. There are also
recent trends in physical simulation, modelling, and reconstruction that have
led to astonishing results. Yet, some of these approaches neglect prior
knowledge and hence bear the risk of producing implausible results. These
apparent weaknesses highlight current limitations of deep learning. However, we
also briefly discuss promising approaches that might be able to resolve these
problems in the future.Comment: Accepted by Journal of Medical Physics; Final Version after revie
Improved Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Hyperspectral image is unique and useful for its abundant spectral bands, but
it subsequently requires extra elaborated treatments of the spatial-spectral
correlation as well as the global correlation along the spectrum for building a
robust and powerful HSI restoration algorithm. By considering such HSI
characteristics, 3D Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN3D) is one of the HSI
denoising networks that has been shown to achieve excellent performance and
flexibility. In this paper, we show that with a few simple modifications, the
performance of QRNN3D could be substantially improved further. Our
modifications are based on the finding that through QRNN3D is powerful for
modeling spectral correlation, it neglects the proper treatment between
features from different sources and its training strategy is suboptimal. We,
therefore, introduce an adaptive fusion module to replace its vanilla additive
skip connection to better fuse the features of the encoder and decoder. We
additionally identify several important techniques to further enhance the
performance, which includes removing batch normalization, use of extra
frequency loss, and learning rate warm-up. Experimental results on various
noise settings demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our
method.Comment: technical repor
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