18,262 research outputs found
Retrieval and Registration of Long-Range Overlapping Frames for Scalable Mosaicking of In Vivo Fetoscopy
Purpose: The standard clinical treatment of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome
consists in the photo-coagulation of undesired anastomoses located on the
placenta which are responsible to a blood transfer between the two twins. While
being the standard of care procedure, fetoscopy suffers from a limited
field-of-view of the placenta resulting in missed anastomoses. To facilitate
the task of the clinician, building a global map of the placenta providing a
larger overview of the vascular network is highly desired. Methods: To overcome
the challenging visual conditions inherent to in vivo sequences (low contrast,
obstructions or presence of artifacts, among others), we propose the following
contributions: (i) robust pairwise registration is achieved by aligning the
orientation of the image gradients, and (ii) difficulties regarding long-range
consistency (e.g. due to the presence of outliers) is tackled via a bag-of-word
strategy, which identifies overlapping frames of the sequence to be registered
regardless of their respective location in time. Results: In addition to visual
difficulties, in vivo sequences are characterised by the intrinsic absence of
gold standard. We present mosaics motivating qualitatively our methodological
choices and demonstrating their promising aspect. We also demonstrate
semi-quantitatively, via visual inspection of registration results, the
efficacy of our registration approach in comparison to two standard baselines.
Conclusion: This paper proposes the first approach for the construction of
mosaics of placenta in in vivo fetoscopy sequences. Robustness to visual
challenges during registration and long-range temporal consistency are
proposed, offering first positive results on in vivo data for which standard
mosaicking techniques are not applicable.Comment: Accepted for publication in International Journal of Computer
Assisted Radiology and Surgery (IJCARS
The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury
The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) is an on-going HST
Multicycle Treasury program to image ~1/3 of M31's star forming disk in 6
filters, from the UV to the NIR. The full survey will resolve the galaxy into
more than 100 million stars with projected radii from 0-20 kpc over a
contiguous 0.5 square degree area in 828 orbits, producing imaging in the F275W
and F336W filters with WFC3/UVIS, F475W and F814W with ACS/WFC, and F110W and
F160W with WFC3/IR. The resulting wavelength coverage gives excellent
constraints on stellar temperature, bolometric luminosity, and extinction for
most spectral types. The photometry reaches SNR=4 at F275W=25.1, F336W=24.9,
F475W=27.9, F814W=27.1, F110W=25.5, and F160W=24.6 for single pointings in the
uncrowded outer disk; however, the optical and NIR data are crowding limited,
and the deepest reliable magnitudes are up to 5 magnitudes brighter in the
inner bulge. All pointings are dithered and produce Nyquist-sampled images in
F475W, F814W, and F160W. We describe the observing strategy, photometry,
astrometry, and data products, along with extensive tests of photometric
stability, crowding errors, spatially-dependent photometric biases, and
telescope pointing control. We report on initial fits to the structure of M31's
disk, derived from the density of RGB stars, in a way that is independent of
the assumed M/L and is robust to variations in dust extinction. These fits also
show that the 10 kpc ring is not just a region of enhanced recent star
formation, but is instead a dynamical structure containing a significant
overdensity of stars with ages >1 Gyr. (Abridged)Comment: 48 pages including 22 pages of figures. Accepted to the Astrophysical
Journal Supplements. Some figures slightly degraded to reduce submission siz
MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum
In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application
Unsupervised Segmentation of Action Segments in Egocentric Videos using Gaze
Unsupervised segmentation of action segments in egocentric videos is a
desirable feature in tasks such as activity recognition and content-based video
retrieval. Reducing the search space into a finite set of action segments
facilitates a faster and less noisy matching. However, there exist a
substantial gap in machine understanding of natural temporal cuts during a
continuous human activity. This work reports on a novel gaze-based approach for
segmenting action segments in videos captured using an egocentric camera. Gaze
is used to locate the region-of-interest inside a frame. By tracking two simple
motion-based parameters inside successive regions-of-interest, we discover a
finite set of temporal cuts. We present several results using combinations (of
the two parameters) on a dataset, i.e., BRISGAZE-ACTIONS. The dataset contains
egocentric videos depicting several daily-living activities. The quality of the
temporal cuts is further improved by implementing two entropy measures.Comment: To appear in 2017 IEEE International Conference On Signal and Image
Processing Application
Alternative Stacking Sequences in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
The relative orientation of successive sheets, i.e. the stacking sequence, in
layered two-dimensional materials is central to the electronic, thermal, and
mechanical properties of the material. Often different stacking sequences have
comparable cohesive energy, leading to alternative stable crystal structures.
Here we theoretically and experimentally explore different stacking sequences
in the van der Waals bonded material hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). We examine
the total energy, electronic bandgap, and dielectric response tensor for five
distinct high symmetry stacking sequences for both bulk and bilayer forms of
h-BN. Two sequences, the generally assumed AA' sequence and the relatively
unknown (for h-BN) AB (Bernal) sequence, are predicted to have comparably low
energy. We present a scalable modified chemical vapor deposition method that
produces large flakes of virtually pure AB stacked h-BN; this new material
complements the generally available AA' stacked h-BN
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