175 research outputs found
Visual Human Tracking and Group Activity Analysis: A Video Mining System for Retail Marketing
Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Computer Sciences, 2007In this thesis we present a system for automatic human tracking and activity recognition from
video sequences. The problem of automated analysis of visual information in order to derive descriptors
of high level human activities has intrigued computer vision community for decades and is
considered to be largely unsolved. A part of this interest is derived from the vast range of applications
in which such a solution may be useful. We attempt to find efficient formulations of these tasks
as applied to the extracting customer behavior information in a retail marketing context. Based on
these formulations, we present a system that visually tracks customers in a retail store and performs
a number of activity analysis tasks based on the output from the tracker.
In tracking we introduce new techniques for pedestrian detection, initialization of the body
model and a formulation of the temporal tracking as a global trans-dimensional optimization problem.
Initial human detection is addressed by a novel method for head detection, which incorporates
the knowledge of the camera projection model.The initialization of the human body model is addressed
by newly developed shape and appearance descriptors. Temporal tracking of customer
trajectories is performed by employing a human body tracking system designed as a Bayesian
jump-diffusion filter. This approach demonstrates the ability to overcome model dimensionality
ambiguities as people are leaving and entering the scene.
Following the tracking, we developed a two-stage group activity formulation based upon the
ideas from swarming research. For modeling purposes, all moving actors in the scene are viewed here as simplistic agents in the swarm. This allows to effectively define a set of inter-agent interactions,
which combine to derive a distance metric used in further swarm clustering. This way, in the
first stage the shoppers that belong to the same group are identified by deterministically clustering
bodies to detect short term events and in the second stage events are post-processed to form clusters
of group activities with fuzzy memberships.
Quantitative analysis of the tracking subsystem shows an improvement over the state of the
art methods, if used under similar conditions. Finally, based on the output from the tracker, the
activity recognition procedure achieves over 80% correct shopper group detection, as validated by
the human generated ground truth results
Computational methods to predict and enhance decision-making with biomedical data.
The proposed research applies machine learning techniques to healthcare applications. The core ideas were using intelligent techniques to find automatic methods to analyze healthcare applications. Different classification and feature extraction techniques on various clinical datasets are applied. The datasets include: brain MR images, breathing curves from vessels around tumor cells during in time, breathing curves extracted from patients with successful or rejected lung transplants, and lung cancer patients diagnosed in US from in 2004-2009 extracted from SEER database. The novel idea on brain MR images segmentation is to develop a multi-scale technique to segment blood vessel tissues from similar tissues in the brain. By analyzing the vascularization of the cancer tissue during time and the behavior of vessels (arteries and veins provided in time), a new feature extraction technique developed and classification techniques was used to rank the vascularization of each tumor type. Lung transplantation is a critical surgery for which predicting the acceptance or rejection of the transplant would be very important. A review of classification techniques on the SEER database was developed to analyze the survival rates of lung cancer patients, and the best feature vector that can be used to predict the most similar patients are analyzed
Colour Texture analysis
This chapter presents a novel and generic framework for image segmentation using a compound image descriptor that encompasses both colour and texture information in an adaptive fashion. The developed image segmentation method extracts the texture information using low-level image descriptors (such as the Local Binary Patterns (LBP)) and colour information by using colour space partitioning. The main advantage of this approach is the analysis of the textured images at a micro-level using the local distribution of the LBP values, and in the colour domain by analysing the local colour distribution obtained after colour segmentation. The use of the colour and texture information separately has proven to be inappropriate for natural images as they are generally heterogeneous with respect to colour and texture characteristics. Thus, the main problem is to use the colour and texture information in a joint descriptor that can adapt to the local properties of the image under analysis. We will review existing approaches to colour and texture analysis as well as illustrating how our approach can be successfully applied to a range of applications including the segmentation of natural images, medical imaging and product inspection
Large-Scale Automatic Reconstruction of Neuronal Processes from Electron Microscopy Images
Automated sample preparation and electron microscopy enables acquisition of
very large image data sets. These technical advances are of special importance
to the field of neuroanatomy, as 3D reconstructions of neuronal processes at
the nm scale can provide new insight into the fine grained structure of the
brain. Segmentation of large-scale electron microscopy data is the main
bottleneck in the analysis of these data sets. In this paper we present a
pipeline that provides state-of-the art reconstruction performance while
scaling to data sets in the GB-TB range. First, we train a random forest
classifier on interactive sparse user annotations. The classifier output is
combined with an anisotropic smoothing prior in a Conditional Random Field
framework to generate multiple segmentation hypotheses per image. These
segmentations are then combined into geometrically consistent 3D objects by
segmentation fusion. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the
automatic segmentation and demonstrate large-scale 3D reconstructions of
neuronal processes from a volume of brain
tissue over a cube of in each dimension corresponding to
1000 consecutive image sections. We also introduce Mojo, a proofreading tool
including semi-automated correction of merge errors based on sparse user
scribbles
Assessment of mechanical properties of isolated bovine intervertebral discs from multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging
BACKGROUND: The treatment planning of spine pathologies requires information on the rigidity and permeability of the intervertebral discs (IVDs). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers great potential as a sensitive and non-invasive technique for describing the mechanical properties of IVDs. However, the literature reported small correlation coefficients between mechanical properties and MRI parameters. Our hypothesis is that the compressive modulus and the permeability of the IVD can be predicted by a linear combination of MRI parameters. METHODS: Sixty IVDs were harvested from bovine tails, and randomly separated in four groups (in-situ, digested-6h, digested-18h, digested-24h). Multi-parametric MRI acquisitions were used to quantify the relaxation times T1 and T2, the magnetization transfer ratio MTR, the apparent diffusion coefficient ADC and the fractional anisotropy FA. Unconfined compression, confined compression and direct permeability measurements were performed to quantify the compressive moduli and the hydraulic permeabilities. Differences between groups were evaluated from a one way ANOVA. Multi linear regressions were performed between dependent mechanical properties and independent MRI parameters to verify our hypothesis. A principal component analysis was used to convert the set of possibly correlated variables into a set of linearly uncorrelated variables. Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering was performed on the 3 principal components. RESULTS: Multilinear regressions showed that 45 to 80% of the Youngβs modulus E, the aggregate modulus in absence of deformation H(A0), the radial permeability k(r) and the axial permeability in absence of deformation k(0) can be explained by the MRI parameters within both the nucleus pulposus and the annulus pulposus. The principal component analysis reduced our variables to two principal components with a cumulative variability of 52-65%, which increased to 70-82% when considering the third principal component. The dendograms showed a natural division into four clusters for the nucleus pulposus and into three or four clusters for the annulus fibrosus. CONCLUSIONS: The compressive moduli and the permeabilities of isolated IVDs can be assessed mostly by MT and diffusion sequences. However, the relationships have to be improved with the inclusion of MRI parameters more sensitive to IVD degeneration. Before the use of this technique to quantify the mechanical properties of IVDs in vivo on patients suffering from various diseases, the relationships have to be defined for each degeneration state of the tissue that mimics the pathology. Our MRI protocol associated to principal component analysis and agglomerative hierarchical clustering are promising tools to classify the degenerated intervertebral discs and further find biomarkers and predictive factors of the evolution of the pathologies
Patch-based semantic labelling of images.
PhDThe work presented in this thesis is focused at associating a semantics
to the content of an image, linking the content to high level
semantic categories. The process can take place at two levels: either
at image level, towards image categorisation, or at pixel level, in se-
mantic segmentation or semantic labelling. To this end, an analysis
framework is proposed, and the different steps of part (or patch) extraction,
description and probabilistic modelling are detailed. Parts of
different nature are used, and one of the contributions is a method to
complement information associated to them. Context for parts has to
be considered at different scales. Short range pixel dependences are accounted
by associating pixels to larger patches. A Conditional Random
Field, that is, a probabilistic discriminative graphical model, is used
to model medium range dependences between neighbouring patches.
Another contribution is an efficient method to consider rich neighbourhoods
without having loops in the inference graph. To this end, weak
neighbours are introduced, that is, neighbours whose label probability
distribution is pre-estimated rather than mutable during the inference.
Longer range dependences, that tend to make the inference problem
intractable, are addressed as well. A novel descriptor based on local
histograms of visual words has been proposed, meant to both complement
the feature descriptor of the patches and augment the context
awareness in the patch labelling process. Finally, an alternative approach
to consider multiple scales in a hierarchical framework based
on image pyramids is proposed. An image pyramid is a compositional
representation of the image based on hierarchical clustering. All the
presented contributions are extensively detailed throughout the thesis,
and experimental results performed on publicly available datasets are
reported to assess their validity. A critical comparison with the state
of the art in this research area is also presented, and the advantage in
adopting the proposed improvements are clearly highlighted
Multicut Algorithms for Neurite Segmentation
Correlation clustering, or multicut partitioning is widely used for image segmentation
and graph partitioning. Given an undirected edge weighted graph with positive and
negative weights, correlation clustering partitions the graph such that the sum of
cut edge weights is minimized. Since the optimal number of clusters is automatically
chosen, multicut partitioning is well suited for clustering neural structures in EM
connectomics datasets where the optimal number of clusters is unknown a-priori. Due
to the NP-hardness of optimizing the multicut objective, exact solvers do not scale
and approximative solvers often give unsatisfactory results.
In chapter 2 we investigate scalable methods for correlation clustering. To this end
we define fusion moves for the multicut objective function which iteratively fuses
the current and a proposed partitioning and monotonously improves the partitioning.
Fusion moves scale to larger datasets, give near optimal solutions and at the same
time show state of the art anytime performance.
In chapter 3 we generalize the fusion moves frameworks for the lifted multicut ob-
jective, a generalization of the multicut objective which can penalize or reward all
decompositions of a graph for which any given pair of nodes are in distinct compo-
nents. The proposed framework scales well to large datasets and has a cutting edge
anytime performance.
In chapter 4 we propose a framework for automatic segmentation of neural structures
in 3D EM connectomics data where a membrane probability is predicted for each
pixel with a neural network and superpixels are computed based on this probability
map. Finally the superpixels are merged to neurites using the techniques described
in chapter 3. The proposed pipeline is validated with an extensive set of experiments
and a detailed lesion study. This work substantially narrows the accuracy gap between
humans and computers for neurite segmentation.
In chapter 5 we summarize the software written for this thesis. The provided imple-
mentations for algorithms and techniques described in chapters 2 to 4 and many other
algorithms resulted in a software library for graph partitioning, image segmentation
and discrete optimization
- β¦