Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Biometric Systems

Because of the accelerating progress in biometrics research and the latest nation-state threats to security, this book's publication is not only timely but also much needed. This volume contains seventeen peer-reviewed chapters reporting the state of the art in biometrics research: security issues, signature verification, fingerprint identification, wrist vascular biometrics, ear detection, face detection and identification (including a new survey of face recognition), person re-identification, electrocardiogram (ECT) recognition, and several multi-modal systems. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students, engineers, and researchers interested in understanding and investigating this important field of study

Gaze-Based Human-Robot Interaction by the Brunswick Model

We present a new paradigm for human-robot interaction based on social signal processing, and in particular on the Brunswick model. Originally, the Brunswick model copes with face-to-face dyadic interaction, assuming that the interactants are communicating through a continuous exchange of non verbal social signals, in addition to the spoken messages. Social signals have to be interpreted, thanks to a proper recognition phase that considers visual and audio information. The Brunswick model allows to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the interaction using statistical tools which measure how effective is the recognition phase. In this paper we cast this theory when one of the interactants is a robot; in this case, the recognition phase performed by the robot and the human have to be revised w.r.t. the original model. The model is applied to Berrick, a recent open-source low-cost robotic head platform, where the gazing is the social signal to be considered

Segmentation of images by color features: a survey

En este articulo se hace la revisión del estado del arte sobre la segmentación de imagenes de colorImage segmentation is an important stage for object recognition. Many methods have been proposed in the last few years for grayscale and color images. In this paper, we present a deep review of the state of the art on color image segmentation methods; through this paper, we explain the techniques based on edge detection, thresholding, histogram-thresholding, region, feature clustering and neural networks. Because color spaces play a key role in the methods reviewed, we also explain in detail the most commonly color spaces to represent and process colors. In addition, we present some important applications that use the methods of image segmentation reviewed. Finally, a set of metrics frequently used to evaluate quantitatively the segmented images is shown

Texture and Colour in Image Analysis

Research in colour and texture has experienced major changes in the last few years. This book presents some recent advances in the field, specifically in the theory and applications of colour texture analysis. This volume also features benchmarks, comparative evaluations and reviews

A machine learning approach to the unsupervised segmentation of mitochondria in subcellular electron microscopy data

Recent advances in cellular and subcellular microscopy demonstrated its potential towards unravelling the mechanisms of various diseases at the molecular level. The biggest challenge in both human- and computer-based visual analysis of micrographs is the variety of nanostructures and mitochondrial morphologies. The state-of-the-art is, however, dominated by supervised manual data annotation and early attempts to automate the segmentation process were based on supervised machine learning techniques which require large datasets for training. Given a minimal number of training sequences or none at all, unsupervised machine learning formulations, such as spectral dimensionality reduction, are known to be superior in detecting salient image structures. This thesis presents three major contributions developed around the spectral clustering framework which is proven to capture perceptual organization features. Firstly, we approach the problem of mitochondria localization. We propose a novel grouping method for the extracted line segments which describes the normal mitochondrial morphology. Experimental findings show that the clusters obtained successfully model the inner mitochondrial membrane folding and therefore can be used as markers for the subsequent segmentation approaches. Secondly, we developed an unsupervised mitochondria segmentation framework. This method follows the evolutional ability of human vision to extrapolate salient membrane structures in a micrograph. Furthermore, we designed robust non-parametric similarity models according to Gestaltic laws of visual segregation. Experiments demonstrate that such models automatically adapt to the statistical structure of the biological domain and return optimal performance in pixel classification tasks under the wide variety of distributional assumptions. The last major contribution addresses the computational complexity of spectral clustering. Here, we introduced a new anticorrelation-based spectral clustering formulation with the objective to improve both: speed and quality of segmentation. The experimental findings showed the applicability of our dimensionality reduction algorithm to very large scale problems as well as asymmetric, dense and non-Euclidean datasets

Change detection and landscape similarity comparison using computer vision methods

Human-induced disturbances of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems continue at alarming rates. With the advent of both raw sensor and analysis-ready datasets, the need to monitor ecosystem disturbances is now more imperative than ever; yet the task is becoming increasingly complex with increasing sources and varieties of earth observation data. In this research, computer vision methods and tools are interrogated to understand their capability for comparing spatial patterns. A critical survey of literature provides evidence that computer vision methods are relatively robust to scale and highlights issues involved in parameterization of computer vision models for characterizing significant pattern information in a geographic context. Utilizing two widely used pattern indices to compare spatial patterns in simulated and real-world datasets revealed their potential to detect subtle changes in spatial patterns which would not otherwise be feasible using traditional pixel-level techniques. A texture-based CNN model was developed to extract spatially relevant information for landscape similarity comparison; the CNN feature maps proved to be effective in distinguishing agriculture landscapes from other landscape types (e.g., forest and mountainous landscapes). For real-world human disturbance monitoring, a U-Net CNN was developed and compared with a random forest model. Both modeling frameworks exhibit promising potential to map placer mining disturbance; however, random forests proved simple to train and deploy for placer mapping, while the U-Net may be used to augment RF as it is capable of reducing misclassification errors and will benefit from increasing availability of detailed training data

2D and 3D segmentation of medical images.

"Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of the morbidity and mortality in the western world today. Many different imaging modalities are in place today to diagnose and investigate cardiovascular diseases. Each of these, however, has strengths and weaknesses. There are different forms of noise and artifacts in each image modality that combine to make the field of medical image analysis both important and challenging. The aim of this thesis is develop a reliable method for segmentation of vessel structures in medical imaging, combining the expert knowledge of the user in such a way as to maintain efficiency whilst overcoming the inherent noise and artifacts present in the images. We present results from 2D segmentation techniques using different methodologies, before developing 3D techniques for segmenting vessel shape from a series of images. The main drive of the work involves the investigation of medical images obtained using catheter based techniques, namely Intra Vascular Ultrasound (IVUS) and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). We will present a robust segmentation paradigm, combining both edge and region information to segment the media-adventitia, and lumenal borders in those modalities respectively. By using a semi-interactive method that utilizes "soft" constraints, allowing imprecise user input which provides a balance between using the user's expert knowledge and efficiency. In the later part of the work, we develop automatic methods for segmenting the walls of lymph vessels. These methods are employed on sequential images in order to obtain data to reconstruct the vessel walls in the region of the lymph valves. We investigated methods to segment the vessel walls both individually and simultaneously, and compared the results both quantitatively and qualitatively in order obtain the most appropriate for the 3D reconstruction of the vessel wall. Lastly, we adapt the semi-interactive method used on vessels earlier into 3D to help segment out the lymph valve. This involved the user interactive method to provide guidance to help segment the boundary of the lymph vessel, then we apply a minimal surface segmentation methodology to provide segmentation of the valve.