Regionalized Random Germs by a Classification for Probabilistic Watershed Application: Angiogenesis Imaging Segmentation

International audienceNew methods are presented to generate random germs regionalized by a previous classification in order to use probabilistic watershed on hyperspectral images. These germs are much more efficient than the standard uniform random germs

On morphological hierarchical representations for image processing and spatial data clustering

Hierarchical data representations in the context of classi cation and data clustering were put forward during the fties. Recently, hierarchical image representations have gained renewed interest for segmentation purposes. In this paper, we briefly survey fundamental results on hierarchical clustering and then detail recent paradigms developed for the hierarchical representation of images in the framework of mathematical morphology: constrained connectivity and ultrametric watersheds. Constrained connectivity can be viewed as a way to constrain an initial hierarchy in such a way that a set of desired constraints are satis ed. The framework of ultrametric watersheds provides a generic scheme for computing any hierarchical connected clustering, in particular when such a hierarchy is constrained. The suitability of this framework for solving practical problems is illustrated with applications in remote sensing

Classification-Driven Stochastic Watershed: Application to Multispectral Segmentation

ISBN 978-0-89208-262-6This product consists of a hardcopy booklet of abstracts and a CD-ROM which contains the full texts of the presentations from the 2008 CGIV conference.issn 2158-6330eissn 2169-2947International audienceThe aim of this paper is to present a general methodology based on multispectral mathematical morphology in order to segment multispectral images. The methods consists in computing a probability density function pdf of contours conditioned by a spectral classification. The pdf is conditioned through regionalized random balls markers thanks to a new algorithm. Therefore the pdf contains spatial and spectral information. Finally, the pdf is segmented by a watershed with seeds (i.e., markers) coming from the classification. Consequently, a complete method, based on a classification-driven stochastic watershed is introduced. This approach requires a unique and robust parameter: the number of classes which is the same for similar images. Moreover, an efficient way to select factor axes, of Factor Correspondence Analysis (FCA), based on signal-to-noise ratio on factor pixels is presented

Waterpixels

International audience— Many approaches for image segmentation rely on a 1 first low-level segmentation step, where an image is partitioned 2 into homogeneous regions with enforced regularity and adherence 3 to object boundaries. Methods to generate these superpixels have 4 gained substantial interest in the last few years, but only a few 5 have made it into applications in practice, in particular because 6 the requirements on the processing time are essential but are not 7 met by most of them. Here, we propose waterpixels as a general 8 strategy for generating superpixels which relies on the marker 9 controlled watershed transformation. We introduce a spatially 10 regularized gradient to achieve a tunable tradeoff between the 11 superpixel regularity and the adherence to object boundaries. 12 The complexity of the resulting methods is linear with respect 13 to the number of image pixels. We quantitatively evaluate our 14 approach on the Berkeley segmentation database and compare 15 it against the state-of-the-art

Morphological Segmentation on Learned Boundaries

International audienceColour information is usually not enough to segment natural complex scenes. Texture contains relevant information that segmentation approaches should consider. Martin et al. [Learning to detect natural image boundaries using local brightness, color, and texture cues, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 26 (5) (2004) 530-549] proposed a particularly interesting colour-texture gradient. This gradient is not suitable for Watershed-based approaches because it contains gaps. In this paper, we propose a method based on the distance function to fill these gaps. Then, two hierarchical Watershed-based approaches, the Watershed using volume extinction values and the Waterfall, are used to segment natural complex scenes. Resulting segmentations are thoroughly evaluated and compared to segmentations produced by the Normalised Cuts algorithm using the Berkeley segmentation dataset and benchmark. Evaluations based on both the area overlap and boundary agreement with manual segmentations are performed

A morphological approach to the design of complex objects

The surface-trajectory model gives a solution to some of the problems presented by the general geometric models where the design of an object is separated from its manufacture. In fact, in this model, the internal representation of objects is made up of machining trajectories. As the display systems usually need triangles to represent the objects, a process of triangulation is needed to visualize them. In other words, a secondary surface model is needed to display the objects. The following is a geometric model that, maintaining the philosophy of the surface-trajectory model, encapsulates the calculation of the machining process from the formal framework that provides the set theory and the mathematical morphology. The model addresses the process of designing objects by assimilation of a machining process by giving solutions to the design of complex objects and an arithmetic to support the generation of trajectories of manufacturing. The design process is similar to the craft work of sculptors designing their pieces by hand with their tools. It also gives a direct solution to the problems of the trajectory generation since they are already defined at the design phase. The model is generic and robust as there are no special cases or complex objects in which the model does not provide a correct solution. It also naturally incorporates the realistic display of the machined objects in a quickly and accurately way

Semi-Supervised Hyperspectral Image Segmentation Using Regionalized Stochastic Watershed

International audienceStochastic watershed is a robust method to estimate the probability density function (pdf) of contours of a multi-variate image using MonteCarlo simulations of watersheds from random markers. The aim of this paper is to propose a stochastic watershed-based algorithm for segmenting hyperspectral images using a semi-supervised approach. Starting from a training dataset consisting in a selection of representative pixel vectors of each spectral class of the image, the algorithm calculate for each class a membership probability map (MPM). Then, the MPM of class k is considered as a regionalized density function which is used to simulate the random markers for the MonteCarlo estimation of the pdf of contours of the corresponding class k. This pdf favours the spatial regions of the image spectrally close to the class k. After applying the same technique to each class, a series of pdf are obtained for a single image. Finally, the pdf's can be segmented hierarchically either separately for each class or after combination, as a single pdf function. In the results, besides the generic spatial-spectral segmentation of hyperspectral images, the interest of the approach is also illustrated for target segmentation

Segmentation Based Features for Wide-Baseline Multi-view Reconstruction

A common problem in wide-baseline stereo is the sparse and non-uniform distribution of correspondences when using conventional detectors such as SIFT, SURF, FAST and MSER. In this paper we introduce a novel segmentation based feature detector SFD that produces an increased number of ‘good’ features for accurate wide-baseline reconstruction. Each image is segmented into regions by over-segmentation and feature points are detected at the intersection of the boundaries for three or more regions. Segmentation-based feature detection locates features at local maxima giving a relatively large number of feature points which are consistently detected across wide-baseline views and accurately localised. A comprehensive comparative performance evaluation with previous feature detection approaches demonstrates that: SFD produces a large number of features with increased scene coverage; detected features are consistent across wide-baseline views for images of a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes; and the number of wide-baseline matches is increased by an order of magnitude compared to alternative detector-descriptor combinations. Sparse scene reconstruction from multiple wide-baseline stereo views using the SFD feature detector demonstrates at least a factor six increase in the number of reconstructed points with reduced error distribution compared to SIFT when evaluated against ground-truth and similar computational cost to SURF/FAST

Random projection depth for multivariate mathematical morphology

International audienceThe open problem of the generalization of mathematical morphology to vector images is handled in this paper using the paradigm of depth functions. Statistical depth functions provide from the "deepest" point a "center-outward ordering" of a multidimensional data distribution and they can be therefore used to construct morphological operators. The fundamental assumption of this data-driven approach is the existence of "background/foreground" image representation. Examples in real color and hyperspectral images illustrate the results