Automatic region-of-interest extraction in low depth-of-field images

PhD ThesisAutomatic extraction of focused regions from images with low depth-of-field (DOF) is a problem without an efficient solution yet. The capability of extracting focused regions can help to bridge the semantic gap by integrating image regions which are meaningfully relevant and generally do not exhibit uniform visual characteristics. There exist two main difficulties for extracting focused regions from low DOF images using high-frequency based techniques: computational complexity and performance. A novel unsupervised segmentation approach based on ensemble clustering is proposed to extract the focused regions from low DOF images in two stages. The first stage is to cluster image blocks in a joint contrast-energy feature space into three constituent groups. To achieve this, we make use of a normal mixture-based model along with standard expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm at two consecutive levels of block size. To avoid the common problem of local optima experienced in many models, an ensemble EM clustering algorithm is proposed. As a result, relevant blocks, i.e., block-based region-of-interest (ROI), closely conforming to image objects are extracted. In stage two, two different approaches have been developed to extract pixel-based ROI. In the first approach, a binary saliency map is constructed from the relevant blocks at the pixel level, which is based on difference of Gaussian (DOG) and binarization methods. Then, a set of morphological operations is employed to create the pixel-based ROI from the map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an average segmentation performance of 91.3% and is computationally 3 times faster than the best existing approach. In the second approach, a minimal graph cut is constructed by using the max-flow method and also by using object/background seeds provided by the ensemble clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate an average segmentation performance of 91.7% and approximately 50% reduction of the average computational time by the proposed colour based approach compared with existing unsupervised approaches

Image Registration Workshop Proceedings

Automatic image registration has often been considered as a preliminary step for higher-level processing, such as object recognition or data fusion. But with the unprecedented amounts of data which are being and will continue to be generated by newly developed sensors, the very topic of automatic image registration has become and important research topic. This workshop presents a collection of very high quality work which has been grouped in four main areas: (1) theoretical aspects of image registration; (2) applications to satellite imagery; (3) applications to medical imagery; and (4) image registration for computer vision research

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Matched wavelet construction and its application to target detection

This dissertation develops a new wavelet design technique that produces a wavelet that matches a desired signal in the least squares sense. The Wavelet Transform has become very popular in signal and image processing over the last 6 years because it is a linear transform with an infinite number of possible basis functions that provides localization in both time (space) and frequency (spatial frequency). The Wavelet Transform is very similar to the matched filter problem, where the wavelet acts as a zero mean matched filter. In pattern recognition applications where the output of the Wavelet Transform is to be maximized, it is necessary to use wavelets that are specifically matched to the signal of interest. Most current wavelet design techniques, however, do not design the wavelet directly, but rather, build a composite wavelet from a library of previously designed wavelets, modify the bases in an existing multiresolution analysis or design a multiresolution analysis that is generated by a scaling function which has a specific corresponding wavelet. In this dissertation, an algorithm for finding both symmetric and asymmetric matched wavelets is developed. It will be shown that under certain conditions, the matched wavelets generate an orthonormal basis of the Hilbert space containing all finite energy signals. The matched orthonormal wavelets give rise to a pair of Quadrature Mirror Filters (QMF) that can be used in the fast Discrete Wavelet Transform. It will also be shown that as the conditions are relaxed, the algorithm produces dyadic wavelets which when used in the Wavelet Transform provides significant redundancy in the transform domain. Finally, this dissertation develops a shift, scale and rotation invariant technique for detecting an object in an image using the Wavelet Radon Transform (WRT) and matched wavelets. The detection algorithm consists of two levels. The first level detects the location, rotation and scale of the object, while the second level detects the fine details in the object. Each step of the wavelet matching algorithm and the object detection algorithm is demonstrated with specific examples

Multi-Scale Spatially Weighted Local Histograms in O(1)

Weighting pixel contribution considering its location is a key feature in many fundamental image processing tasks including filtering, object modeling and distance matching. Several techniques have been proposed that incorporate Spatial information to increase the accuracy and boost the performance of detection, tracking and recognition systems at the cost of speed. But, it is still not clear how to efficiently ex- tract weighted local histograms in constant time using integral histogram. This paper presents a novel algorithm to compute accurately multi-scale Spatially weighted local histograms in constant time using Weighted Integral Histogram (SWIH) for fast search. We applied our spatially weighted integral histogram approach for fast tracking and obtained more accurate and robust target localization result in comparison with using plain histogram.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

Multiresolutional Fault-Tolerant Sensor Integration and Object Recognition in Images.

This dissertation applies multiresolution methods to two important problems in signal analysis. The problem of fault-tolerant sensor integration in distributed sensor networks is addressed, and an efficient multiresolutional algorithm for estimating the sensors\u27 effective output is proposed. The problem of object/shape recognition in images is addressed in a multiresolutional setting using pyramidal decomposition of images with respect to an orthonormal wavelet basis. A new approach to efficient template matching to detect objects using computational geometric methods is put forward. An efficient paradigm for object recognition is described

FACE CLASSIFICATION FOR AUTHENTICATION APPROACH BY USING WAVELET TRANSFORM AND STATISTICAL FEATURES SELECTION

This thesis consists of three parts: face localization, features selection and classification process. Three methods were proposed to locate the face region in the input image. Two of them based on pattern (template) Matching Approach, and the other based on clustering approach. Five datasets of faces namely: YALE database, MIT-CBCL database, Indian database, BioID database and Caltech database were used to evaluate the proposed methods. For the first method, the template image is prepared previously by using a set of faces. Later, the input image is enhanced by applying n-means kernel to decrease the image noise. Then Normalized Correlation (NC) is used to measure the correlation coefficients between the template image and the input image regions. For the second method, instead of using n-means kernel, an optimized metrics are used to measure the difference between the template image and the input image regions. In the last method, the Modified K-Means Algorithm was used to remove the non-face regions in the input image. The above-mentioned three methods showed accuracy of localization between 98% and 100% comparing with the existed methods. In the second part of the thesis, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) utilized to transform the input image into number of wavelet coefficients. Then, the coefficients of weak statistical energy less than certain threshold were removed, and resulted in decreasing the primary wavelet coefficients number up to 98% out of the total coefficients. Later, only 40% statistical features were extracted from the hight energy features by using the variance modified metric. During the experimental (ORL) Dataset was used to test the proposed statistical method. Finally, Cluster-K-Nearest Neighbor (C-K-NN) was proposed to classify the input face based on the training faces images. The results showed a significant improvement of 99.39% in the ORL dataset and 100% in the Face94 dataset classification accuracy. Moreover, a new metrics were introduced to quantify the exactness of classification and some errors of the classification can be corrected. All the above experiments were implemented in MATLAB environment