A Compact Representation of Histopathology Images using Digital Stain Separation & Frequency-Based Encoded Local Projections

In recent years, histopathology images have been increasingly used as a diagnostic tool in the medical field. The process of accurately diagnosing a biopsy sample requires significant expertise in the field, and as such can be time-consuming and is prone to uncertainty and error. With the advent of digital pathology, using image recognition systems to highlight problem areas or locate similar images can aid pathologists in making quick and accurate diagnoses. In this paper, we specifically consider the encoded local projections (ELP) algorithm, which has previously shown some success as a tool for classification and recognition of histopathology images. We build on the success of the ELP algorithm as a means for image classification and recognition by proposing a modified algorithm which captures the local frequency information of the image. The proposed algorithm estimates local frequencies by quantifying the changes in multiple projections in local windows of greyscale images. By doing so we remove the need to store the full projections, thus significantly reducing the histogram size, and decreasing computation time for image retrieval and classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of applying our method to histopathology images which have been digitally separated into their hematoxylin and eosin stain components. The proposed algorithm is tested on the publicly available invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) data set. The histograms are used to train an SVM to classify the data. The experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms the original ELP algorithm in image retrieval tasks. On classification tasks, the results are found to be comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods and better than many handcrafted features from the literature.Comment: Accepted for publication in the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2019

Autoencoding the Retrieval Relevance of Medical Images

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) of medical images is a crucial task that can contribute to a more reliable diagnosis if applied to big data. Recent advances in feature extraction and classification have enormously improved CBIR results for digital images. However, considering the increasing accessibility of big data in medical imaging, we are still in need of reducing both memory requirements and computational expenses of image retrieval systems. This work proposes to exclude the features of image blocks that exhibit a low encoding error when learned by a $n/p/n$ autoencoder ($p\!<\!n$). We examine the histogram of autoendcoding errors of image blocks for each image class to facilitate the decision which image regions, or roughly what percentage of an image perhaps, shall be declared relevant for the retrieval task. This leads to reduction of feature dimensionality and speeds up the retrieval process. To validate the proposed scheme, we employ local binary patterns (LBP) and support vector machines (SVM) which are both well-established approaches in CBIR research community. As well, we use IRMA dataset with 14,410 x-ray images as test data. The results show that the dimensionality of annotated feature vectors can be reduced by up to 50% resulting in speedups greater than 27% at expense of less than 1% decrease in the accuracy of retrieval when validating the precision and recall of the top 20 hits.Comment: To appear in proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA'15), Nov 10-13, 2015, Orleans, Franc

Bag-of-Features Image Indexing and Classification in Microsoft SQL Server Relational Database

This paper presents a novel relational database architecture aimed to visual objects classification and retrieval. The framework is based on the bag-of-features image representation model combined with the Support Vector Machine classification and is integrated in a Microsoft SQL Server database.Comment: 2015 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Cybernetics (CYBCONF), Gdynia, Poland, 24-26 June 201

Classification and Retrieval of Digital Pathology Scans: A New Dataset

In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, \textbf{Kimia Path24}, for image classification and retrieval in digital pathology. We use the whole scan images of 24 different tissue textures to generate 1,325 test patches of size 1000$\times$1000 (0.5mm$\times$0.5mm). Training data can be generated according to preferences of algorithm designer and can range from approximately 27,000 to over 50,000 patches if the preset parameters are adopted. We propose a compound patch-and-scan accuracy measurement that makes achieving high accuracies quite challenging. In addition, we set the benchmarking line by applying LBP, dictionary approach and convolutional neural nets (CNNs) and report their results. The highest accuracy was 41.80\% for CNN.Comment: Accepted for presentation at Workshop for Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis (CVMI 2017) @ CVPR 2017, Honolulu, Hawai

Scale Selective Extended Local Binary Pattern for Texture Classification

In this paper, we propose a new texture descriptor, scale selective extended local binary pattern (SSELBP), to characterize texture images with scale variations. We first utilize multi-scale extended local binary patterns (ELBP) with rotation-invariant and uniform mappings to capture robust local micro- and macro-features. Then, we build a scale space using Gaussian filters and calculate the histogram of multi-scale ELBPs for the image at each scale. Finally, we select the maximum values from the corresponding bins of multi-scale ELBP histograms at different scales as scale-invariant features. A comprehensive evaluation on public texture databases (KTH-TIPS and UMD) shows that the proposed SSELBP has high accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art texture descriptors on gray-scale-, rotation-, and scale-invariant texture classification but uses only one-third of the feature dimension.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 201

Robust Adaptive Median Binary Pattern for noisy texture classification and retrieval

Texture is an important cue for different computer vision tasks and applications. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is considered one of the best yet efficient texture descriptors. However, LBP has some notable limitations, mostly the sensitivity to noise. In this paper, we address these criteria by introducing a novel texture descriptor, Robust Adaptive Median Binary Pattern (RAMBP). RAMBP based on classification process of noisy pixels, adaptive analysis window, scale analysis and image regions median comparison. The proposed method handles images with high noisy textures, and increases the discriminative properties by capturing microstructure and macrostructure texture information. The proposed method has been evaluated on popular texture datasets for classification and retrieval tasks, and under different high noise conditions. Without any train or prior knowledge of noise type, RAMBP achieved the best classification compared to state-of-the-art techniques. It scored more than $90\%$ under $50\%$ impulse noise densities, more than $95\%$ under Gaussian noised textures with standard deviation $\sigma = 5$, and more than $99\%$ under Gaussian blurred textures with standard deviation $\sigma = 1.25$. The proposed method yielded competitive results and high performance as one of the best descriptors in noise-free texture classification. Furthermore, RAMBP showed also high performance for the problem of noisy texture retrieval providing high scores of recall and precision measures for textures with high levels of noise