Real-Time Hand Shape Classification

The problem of hand shape classification is challenging since a hand is characterized by a large number of degrees of freedom. Numerous shape descriptors have been proposed and applied over the years to estimate and classify hand poses in reasonable time. In this paper we discuss our parallel framework for real-time hand shape classification applicable in real-time applications. We show how the number of gallery images influences the classification accuracy and execution time of the parallel algorithm. We present the speedup and efficiency analyses that prove the efficacy of the parallel implementation. Noteworthy, different methods can be used at each step of our parallel framework. Here, we combine the shape contexts with the appearance-based techniques to enhance the robustness of the algorithm and to increase the classification score. An extensive experimental study proves the superiority of the proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 11 page

Hybrid Information Retrieval Model For Web Images

The Bing Bang of the Internet in the early 90's increased dramatically the number of images being distributed and shared over the web. As a result, image information retrieval systems were developed to index and retrieve image files spread over the Internet. Most of these systems are keyword-based which search for images based on their textual metadata; and thus, they are imprecise as it is vague to describe an image with a human language. Besides, there exist the content-based image retrieval systems which search for images based on their visual information. However, content-based type systems are still immature and not that effective as they suffer from low retrieval recall/precision rate. This paper proposes a new hybrid image information retrieval model for indexing and retrieving web images published in HTML documents. The distinguishing mark of the proposed model is that it is based on both graphical content and textual metadata. The graphical content is denoted by color features and color histogram of the image; while textual metadata are denoted by the terms that surround the image in the HTML document, more particularly, the terms that appear in the tags p, h1, and h2, in addition to the terms that appear in the image's alt attribute, filename, and class-label. Moreover, this paper presents a new term weighting scheme called VTF-IDF short for Variable Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency which unlike traditional schemes, it exploits the HTML tag structure and assigns an extra bonus weight for terms that appear within certain particular HTML tags that are correlated to the semantics of the image. Experiments conducted to evaluate the proposed IR model showed a high retrieval precision rate that outpaced other current models.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Computer Science & Emerging Technologies (IJCSET), Vol. 3, No. 1, February 201

A very simple framework for 3D human poses estimation using a single 2D image: Comparison of geometric moments descriptors.

In this paper, we propose a framework in order to automatically extract the 3D pose of an individual from a single silhouette image obtained with a classical low-cost camera without any depth information. By pose, we mean the configuration of human bones in order to reconstruct a 3D skeleton representing the 3D posture of the detected human. Our approach combines prior learned correspondences between silhouettes and skeletons extracted from simulated 3D human models publicly available on the internet. The main advantages of such approach are that silhouettes can be very easily extracted from video, and 3D human models can be animated using motion capture data in order to quickly build any movement training data. In order to match detected silhouettes with simulated silhouettes, we compared geometrics invariants moments. According to our results, we show that the proposed method provides very promising results with a very low time processing

Similarity Measurement of Breast Cancer Mammographic Images Using Combination of Mesh Distance Fourier Transform and Global Features

Similarity measurement in breast cancer is an important aspect of determining the vulnerability of detected masses based on the previous cases. It is used to retrieve the most similar image for a given mammographic query image from a collection of previously archived images. By analyzing these results, doctors and radiologists can more accurately diagnose early-stage breast cancer and determine the best treatment. The direct result is better prognoses for breast cancer patients. Similarity measurement in images has always been a challenging task in the field of pattern recognition. A widely-adopted strategy in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is comparison of local shape-based features of images. Contours summarize the orientations and sizes images, allowing for heuristic approach in measuring similarity between images. Similarly, global features of an image have the ability to generalize the entire object with a single vector which is also an important aspect of CBIR. The main objective of this paper is to enhance the similarity measurement between query images and database images so that the best match is chosen from the database for a particular query image, thus decreasing the chance of false positives. In this paper, a method has been proposed which compares both local and global features of images to determine their similarity. Three image filters are applied to make this comparison. First, we filter using the mesh distance Fourier descriptor (MDFD), which is based on the calculation of local features of the mammographic image. After this filter is applied, we retrieve the five most similar images from the database. Two additional filters are applied to the resulting image set to determine the best match. Experiments show that this proposed method overcomes shortcomings of existing methods, increasing accuracy of matches from 68% to 88%