A bio-inspired software for segmenting digital images.

Segmentation in computer vision refers to the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple segments (sets of pixels). It has several features which make it suitable for techniques inspired by nature. It can be parallelized, locally solved and the input data can be easily encoded by bio-inspired representations. In this paper, we present a new software for performing a segmentation of 2D digital images based on Membrane Computing techniques

Automatic 2d image segmentation using tissue-like p system

This paper uses P-Lingua, a standard programming language that is designed specifically for P systems, to automatically simulate the region-based segmentation of 2D images. P-Lingua, which is based on membrane computing, links to Java Netbeans using the PLinguaCore4 Java library to automatically codify the pixels of the input image as long as automatically draw the output segmented image. Many methods have been suggested previously and used for artificial image segmentation, but to the best of our knowledge, none of those techniques were automatic, where the image was codified manually and the visualization of the output image was done manually in the tissue simulator which takes time and effort, especially when dealing with large images in the system. Two types of pixel adjacency have been utilized in this paper, namely; 4-adjacency and 8-adjacency. The jacquard index method has been used to measure the accuracy of the segmentation. The results of the proposed method demonstrated that beside its ability to automatically segmenting 2D images with arbitrary sizes, it is more efficient and faster than the tissue simulator tool, since the latter needs the input image to be codified manually pixel by pixel which makes it impractical for real-world applications

Membrane Computing for Real Medical Image Segmentation

In this paper, membrane-based computing image segmentation, both region-based and edge-based, is proposed for medical images that involve two types of neighborhood relations between pixels. These neighborhood relations—namely, 4-adjacency and 8-adjacency of a membrane computing approach—construct a family of tissue-like P systems for segmenting actual 2D medical images in a constant number of steps; the two types of adjacency were compared using different hardware platforms. The process involves the generation of membrane-based segmentation rules for 2D medical images. The rules are written in the P-Lingua format and appended to the input image for visualization. The findings show that the neighborhood relations between pixels of 8-adjacency give better results compared with the 4-adjacency neighborhood relations, because the 8-adjacency considers the eight pixels around the center pixel, which reduces the required communication rules to obtain the final segmentation results. The experimental results proved that the proposed approach has superior results in terms of the number of computational steps and processing time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an evaluation procedure is conducted to evaluate the efficiency of real image segmentations using membrane computing

Tissue-like P system for Segmentation of 2D Hexagonal Images

Membrane computing, which is a new computational model inspired by the structure and functioning of biological cells and by the way the cells are organized in tissues. MC has been adopted in many real world applications including image segmentation. In contrast to the traditional square grid for representing and sampling digital images, hexagonal grid is an alternative efficient mechanism which can better represents and visualizes the curved objects. In this paper, a tissue-like P system with region-based and edge-based segmentation is used to segment two dimensional hexagonal images, wherein P-Lingua programming language is used to implement and validate the proposed system. The achieved experimental results clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of using hexagonal connectivity to segment two dimensional images in a less number of rules and computational steps. Moreover, the results reveal that this approach has the potential of segmenting large images in few number of steps

Segmenting images with gradient-based edge detection using Membrane Computing

In this paper, we present a parallel implementation of a new algorithm for segmenting images with gradient-based edge detection by using techniques from Natural Computing. This bio-inspired parallel algorithm has been implemented in a novel device architecture called CUDA™(Compute Unified Device Architecture). The implementation has been designed via tissue P systems on the framework of Membrane Computing. Some examples and experimental results are also presented.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-04487-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–13192Junta de Andalucía P08–TIC-04200Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-02268Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia MTM2009-12716Universidad del Pais Vasco EHU09/0

Modeling Brain Circuitry over a Wide Range of Scales

If we are ever to unravel the mysteries of brain function at its most fundamental level, we will need a precise understanding of how its component neurons connect to each other. Electron Microscopes (EM) can now provide the nanometer resolution that is needed to image synapses, and therefore connections, while Light Microscopes (LM) see at the micrometer resolution required to model the 3D structure of the dendritic network. Since both the topology and the connection strength are integral parts of the brain's wiring diagram, being able to combine these two modalities is critically important. In fact, these microscopes now routinely produce high-resolution imagery in such large quantities that the bottleneck becomes automated processing and interpretation, which is needed for such data to be exploited to its full potential. In this paper, we briefly review the Computer Vision techniques we have developed at EPFL to address this need. They include delineating dendritic arbors from LM imagery, segmenting organelles from EM, and combining the two into a consistent representation

Image Segmentation Inspired by Cellular Models using hardware programming

Several features of image segmentation make it suitable for bio–inspired techniques. It can be parallelized, locally solved and the input data can be easily encoded using representations inspired by nature. In this paper, we present a new hardware system that follows the Membrane Computing approach, and performs edge–based segmentation, noise removal and thresholding of digital images

A Parallel Implementation of the Thresholding Problem by Using Tissue-Like P Systems

In this paper we present a parallel algorithm to solve the thresholding problem by using Membrane Computing techniques. This bio-inspired algorithm has been implemented in a novel device architecture called CUDATM, (Compute Unified Device Architecture). We present some examples, compare the obtained time and present some research lines for the future.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-04487-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN-2009-13192Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04200Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia MTM2009-12716Junta de Andalucía PO6-TIC-02268Universidad del País Vasco EHU09/0

Optimization Based Liver Contour Extraction of Abdominal CT Images

This paper introduces computer aided analysis system for diagnosis of liver abnormality in abdominal CT images. Segmenting the liver and visualizing the region of interest is a most challenging task in the field of cancer imaging, due to small observable changes between healthy and unhealthy liver. In this paper, hybrid approach for automatic extraction of liver contour is proposed. To obtain optimal threshold, the proposed work integrates segmentation method with optimization technique in order to provide better accuracy. This method uses bilateral filter for preprocessing and Fuzzy C means clustering (FCM) for segmentation. Mean Grey Wolf Optimization technique (mGWO) has been used to get the optimal threshold. This threshold is used for segmenting the region of interest. From the segmented output, largest connected region are identified using Label Connected Component (LCC) algorithm. The effectiveness of proposed method is quantitatively evaluated by comparing with ground truth obtained from radiologists. The performance criteria like dice coefficient, true positive error and misclassification rate are taken for evaluation