A New Type of Image-Based Key

Keys are character based tools for plant identification. They are based on the decomposition of the plant into very small, atomistic parts. These parts are described with the technical and often arcane terminology of plant taxonomy. Even the best electronic keys (Delta, Lucid) make use of this terminology. Keys are not based on pattern recognition, the forte of visual experts. Instead they demand that the user look at the plant as if it consisted of a series of isolated parts that are classified by name. Keys would be more effective if they were visually based. They would be easier to use for visual experts because accurate perception is their providence. They would also be easier to use for novices because they would not depend on knowledge of arcane terminology. This paper proposed an innovative image-based key system for species recognition

Effective evaluation of privacy protection techniques in visible and thermal imagery

Privacy protection may be defined as replacing the original content in an image region with a new (less intrusive) content having modified target appearance information to make it less recognizable by applying a privacy protection technique. Indeed the development of privacy protection techniques needs also to be complemented with an established objective evaluation method to facilitate their assessment and comparison. Generally, existing evaluation methods rely on the use of subjective judgements or assume a specific target type in image data and use target detection and recognition accuracies to assess privacy protection. This paper proposes a new annotation-free evaluation method that is neither subjective nor assumes a specific target type. It assesses two key aspects of privacy protection: protection and utility. Protection is quantified as an appearance similarity and utility is measured as a structural similarity between original and privacy-protected image regions. We performed an extensive experimentation using six challenging datasets (having 12 video sequences) including a new dataset (having six sequences) that contains visible and thermal imagery. The new dataset is made available online for community. We demonstrate effectiveness of proposed method by evaluating six image-based privacy protection techniques, and also show comparisons of proposed method over existing methods

The Magnetic Topology of the Weak-Lined T Tauri Star V410 - A Simultaneous Temperature and Magnetic Field Inversion

We present a detailed temperature and magnetic investigation of the T Tauri star V410 Tau by means of a simultaneous Doppler- and Zeeman-Doppler Imaging. Moreover we introduce a new line profile reconstruction method based on a singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract the weak polarized line profiles. One of the key features of the line profile reconstruction is that the SVD line profiles are amenable to radiative transfer modeling within our Zeeman-Doppler Imaging code iMap. The code also utilizes a new iterative regularization scheme which is independent of any additional surface constraints. To provide more stability a vital part of our inversion strategy is the inversion of both Stokes I and Stokes V profiles to simultaneously reconstruct the temperature and magnetic field surface distribution of V410 Tau. A new image-shear analysis is also implemented to allow the search for image and line profile distortions induced by a differential rotation of the star. The magnetic field structure we obtain for V410 Tau shows a good spatial correlation with the surface temperature and is dominated by a strong field within the cool polar spot. The Zeeman-Doppler maps exhibit a large-scale organization of both polarities around the polar cap in the form of a twisted bipolar structure. The magnetic field reaches a value of almost 2 kG within the polar region but smaller fields are also present down to lower latitudes. The pronounced non-axisymmetric field structure and the non-detection of a differential rotation for V410 Tau supports the idea of an underlying $\alpha^2$-type dynamo, which is predicted for weak-lined T Tauri stars.Comment: Accepted for A&A, 18 pages, 10 figure

Evolution-Operator-Based Single-Step Method for Image Processing

This work proposes an evolution-operator-based single-time-step method for image and signal processing. The key component of the proposed method is a local spectral evolution kernel (LSEK) that analytically integrates a class of evolution partial differential equations (PDEs). From the point of view PDEs, the LSEK provides the analytical solution in a single time step, and is of spectral accuracy, free of instability constraint. From the point of image/signal processing, the LSEK gives rise to a family of lowpass filters. These filters contain controllable time delay and amplitude scaling. The new evolution operator-based method is constructed by pointwise adaptation of anisotropy to the coefficients of the LSEK. The Perona-Malik-type of anisotropic diffusion schemes is incorporated in the LSEK for image denoising. A forward-backward diffusion process is adopted to the LSEK for image deblurring or sharpening. A coupled PDE system is modified for image edge detection. The resulting image edge is utilized for image enhancement. Extensive computer experiments are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. The major advantages of the proposed method are its single-step solution and readiness for multidimensional data analysis