Automatic classification of skin lesions using color mathematical morphology-based texture descriptors

SPIE : Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation EngineersInternational audienceIn this paper an automatic classification method of skin lesions from dermoscopic images is proposed. This method is based on color texture analysis based both on color mathematical morphology and Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), and it does not need any previous segmentation process. More concretely, mathematical morphology is used to compute a local descriptor for each pixel of the image, while the SOM is used to cluster them and, thus, create the texture descriptor of the global image. Two approaches are proposed, depending on whether the pixel descriptor is computed using classical (i.e. spatially invariant) or adaptive (i.e. spatially variant) mathematical morphology by means of the Color Adaptive Neighborhoods (CANs) framework. Both approaches obtained similar areas under the ROC curve (AUC): 0.854 and 0.859 outperforming the AUC built upon dermatologists' predictions (0.792)

Texture descriptors based on adaptive neighborhoods for classification of pigmented skin lesions

art. 061104Se proponen diferentes descriptores de textura para la clasificación automática de lesiones cutáneas a partir de imágenes dermoscópicas. Se basan en el análisis de textura de color obtenido de (1) morfología matemática del color (MM) y mapas autoorganizativos de Kohonen (SOM) o (2) patrones binarios locales (LBP), calculados con el uso de barrios adaptativos locales de la imagen. Ninguno de estos dos enfoques necesita un proceso de segmentación anterior. En el primer descriptor propuesto, los barrios adaptativos se utilizan como elementos de estructuración para llevar a cabo operaciones MM adaptables que se combinan aún más mediante el uso de KOhonen SOM; esto se ha comparado con una versión no adaptativa. En la segunda, las vecindades adaptables permiten definir mapas de entidades geométricas, a partir de los cuales se calculan histogramas LBP. Esto también se ha comparado con un enfoque clásico de LBP. Un análisis de las características operativas del receptor de los resultados experimentales muestra que el enfoque adaptativo de LBP basado en la vecindad produce los mejores resultados. Supera a las versiones no adaptativas de los descriptores propuestos y las predicciones visuales de los dermatólogos.S

Coding of details in very low bit-rate video systems

In this paper, the importance of including small image features at the initial levels of a progressive second generation video coding scheme is presented. It is shown that a number of meaningful small features called details should be coded, even at very low data bit-rates, in order to match their perceptual significance to the human visual system. We propose a method for extracting, perceptually selecting and coding of visual details in a video sequence using morphological techniques. Its application in the framework of a multiresolution segmentation-based coding algorithm yields better results than pure segmentation techniques at higher compression ratios, if the selection step fits some main subjective requirements. Details are extracted and coded separately from the region structure and included in the reconstructed images in a later stage. The bet of considering the local background of a given detail for its perceptual selection breaks the concept ofPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Mathematical Modeling of Textures: Application to Color Image Decomposition with a Projected Gradient Algorithm

International audienceIn this paper, we are interested in color image processing, and in particular color image decomposition. The problem of image decomposition consists in splitting an original image f into two components u and v. u should contain the geometric information of the original image, while v should be made of the oscillating patterns of f, such as textures. We propose here a scheme based on a projected gradient algorithm to compute the solution of various decomposition models for color images or vector-valued images. We provide a direct convergence proof of the scheme, and we give some analysis on color texture modeling

A bilateral schema for interval-valued image differentiation

Differentiation of interval-valued functions is an intricate problem, since it cannot be defined as a direct generalization of differentiation of scalar ones. Literature on interval arithmetic contains proposals and definitions for differentiation, but their semantic is unclear for the cases in which intervals represent the ambiguity due to hesitancy or lack of knowledge. In this work we analyze the needs, tools and goals for interval-valued differentiation, focusing on the case of interval-valued images. This leads to the formulation of a differentiation schema inspired by bilateral filters, which allows for the accommodation of most of the methods for scalar image differentiation, but also takes support from interval-valued arithmetic. This schema can produce area-, segment-and vector-valued gradients, according to the needs of the image processing task it is applied to. Our developments are put to the test in the context of edge detection

General Adaptive Neighborhood Image Processing for Biomedical Applications

In biomedical imaging, the image processing techniques using spatially invariant transformations, with fixed operational windows, give efficient and compact computing structures, with the conventional separation between data and operations. Nevertheless, these operators have several strong drawbacks, such as removing significant details, changing some meaningful parts of large objects, and creating artificial patterns. This kind of approaches is generally not sufficiently relevant for helping the biomedical professionals to perform accurate diagnosis and therapy by using image processing techniques. Alternative approaches addressing context-dependent processing have been proposed with the introduction of spatially-adaptive operators (Bouannaya and Schonfeld, 2008; Ciuc et al., 2000; Gordon and Rangayyan, 1984;Maragos and Vachier, 2009; Roerdink, 2009; Salembier, 1992), where the adaptive concept results from the spatial adjustment of the sliding operational window. A spatially-adaptive image processing approach implies that operators will no longer be spatially invariant, but must vary over the whole image with adaptive windows, taking locally into account the image context by involving the geometrical, morphological or radiometric aspects. Nevertheless, most of the adaptive approaches require a priori or extrinsic informations on the image for efficient processing and analysis. An original approach, called General Adaptive Neighborhood Image Processing (GANIP), has been introduced and applied in the past few years by Debayle & Pinoli (2006a;b); Pinoli and Debayle (2007). This approach allows the building of multiscale and spatially adaptive image processing transforms using context-dependent intrinsic operational windows. With the help of a specified analyzing criterion (such as luminance, contrast, ...) and of the General Linear Image Processing (GLIP) (Oppenheim, 1967; Pinoli, 1997a), such transforms perform a more significant spatial and radiometric analysis. Indeed, they take intrinsically into account the local radiometric, morphological or geometrical characteristics of an image, and are consistent with the physical (transmitted or reflected light or electromagnetic radiation) and/or physiological (human visual perception) settings underlying the image formation processes. The proposed GAN-based transforms are very useful and outperforms several classical or modern techniques (Gonzalez and Woods, 2008) - such as linear spatial transforms, frequency noise filtering, anisotropic diffusion, thresholding, region-based transforms - used for image filtering and segmentation (Debayle and Pinoli, 2006b; 2009a; Pinoli and Debayle, 2007). This book chapter aims to first expose the fundamentals of the GANIP approach (Section 2) by introducing the GLIP frameworks, the General Adaptive Neighborhood (GAN) sets and two kinds of GAN-based image transforms: the GAN morphological filters and the GAN Choquet filters. Thereafter in Section 3, several GANIP processes are illustrated in the fields of image restoration, image enhancement and image segmentation on practical biomedical application examples. Finally, Section 4 gives some conclusions and prospects of the proposed GANIP approach

Estimación de la orientación múltiple mediante un banco de filtros y su uso en el desarrollo de aplicaciones de procesado de imagen

Mención Europeo / Mención Internacional: Concedido.[SPA] Esta tesis doctoral se presenta bajo la modalidad de compendio de publicaciones. En las últimas décadas, la estimación de orientación se ha convertido en una tarea clave del procesado de imagen, dada su capacidad para extraer características de bajo nivel y su aplicación en el análisis de datos. Existen un gran número de aplicaciones donde la estimación de orientación juega un papel fundamental como son: el análisis de huellas dactilares, extracción de puntos característicos, bifurcaciones, esquinas o intersecciones, filtrado adaptativo o seguimiento de objetos, entre otras. Sin embargo, con el paso del tiempo han aparecido diferentes problemas asociados a la estimación de orientación que pueden complicar este proceso. Los más importantes a destacar son los siguientes: las limitaciones que presentan muchos de los métodos de estimación en estructuras complejas, por ejemplo, estructuras con varias orientaciones asociadas, el incremento de la complejidad computacional de los métodos más modernos o la dependencia de éstos a solo unas determinadas aplicaciones. Resulta en estos momentos, por tanto, una tarea clave conseguir métodos de estimación que sean lo más globales y genéricos posibles, en otras palabras, lo más independientes del tipo de imagen con la que se trabaje y del campo de aplicación. En esta Tesis doctoral, en primer lugar, se aborda una revisión de los conceptos más importantes de la estimación de orientación, como es el concepto de estructura, orientación y sus propiedades principales. También se describen los métodos de estimación de orientaciones más importantes: tensor estructural, bancos de filtros, gradiente al cuadrado promediado, etc. Y las aplicaciones más importantes como la detección de texturas, extracción de características, análisis de huellas dactilares, filtrado variante o seguimiento de objetos, entre otras. Las contribuciones principales a esta Tesis son dos. En primer lugar, la propuesta de un marco de trabajo (de estimación de orientaciones) capaz de sistematizar el proceso de estimación de orientaciones, independientemente del tipo de estructuras o el tipo de aplicación. El marco propuesto está basado en una de las técnicas de estimación de orientación más usadas, los bancos de filtros. Durante este trabajo, éstos han sido probados en multitud de escenarios mientras se consideraban diferentes familias de filtros para su aplicación. En segundo lugar, se abordan casos prácticos de aplicación del marco de trabajo propuesto con el objetivo de mostrar sus excelentes capacidades en aplicaciones muy dispares, mostrando su potencial en multitud de posibilidades. Dado que el método de presentación de la presente Tesis doctoral es mediante un compendio de artículos, la organización de esta memoria constará de un primer capítulo de introducción y estado del arte. Seguidamente se mostrarán, de forma coherente y organizada, los artículos con los resultados obtenidos durante el periodo de investigación de la Tesis, con una introducción para cada uno de los artículos incluidos en este compendio. Finalmente, el capítulo de conclusiones y trabajo futuro cierra la Tesis.[ENG] This doctoral dissertation has been presented in the form of thesis by publication. In the last decades, image orientation estimation has become in a fundamental task of image processing, due to its ability to extract low level features and its application to data analysis. There are a wide number of applications where the image orientation estimation plays and important role, some of these are: fingerprint analysis, feature extractions such as bifurcation, junction and corner, adaptive filtering or tracking applications. However, with the pass of time, different problems related to orientation estimation have appeared and they can complicate this process. The most important problems to highlight are: difficult of a wide number of methods to estimate the orientation of complex object structures, for example, structures with multiple orientations associated, high computational cost of modern methods or dependence on the application framework. Therefore, nowadays, the obtention of global and generics methods, in other words, methods as independent as possible from the image and the application, has become in a important task. In this Thesis, firstly, a review of main concepts of image orientation have been carried out, such as the concept of structure, orientation and their main properties. The most important methods have been described, as e.g., structural tensor, bank of filters, average square gradient, etc. And the most important applications based on image orientation estimation as texture analysis, feature extraction, fingerprint analysis, object tracking and space variant filtering, among others. The main contributions to this Thesis are two. First one is the proposal of a new framework for image orientation estimation, which can systematize this process, making it independent of image type and application. The proposed framework is based on one of the most used estimation orientation techniques, the bank of filters. Throughout this work, it have been tested in a wide variety of scenarios, considering different families of filters for their application. Secondly, the proposed framework has been evaluated in practical applications to show its ability and potential. This Thesis has been carried out by the method of compendium of publications, it has been organized as follows. Chapter one shows an introduction and a review of the state of art. Chapter two shows the journal papers and other contributions done during the research period of this Thesis. Finally, Chapter three shows the conclusion and future work.El trabajo de esta Tesis ha estado financiado parcialmente por el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Proyecto PI17/00771) y la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia - Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación en Bioingeniería y Tecnología Orientada al Ser Humano. Labhuman- conjuntamente con la Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (Proyectos 4106/15TIC y 3626/13TIC).Los artículos y capítulos de libros que forman la tesis son los siguientes: Artículo 1: A.G. Legaz-Aparicio, R. Verdú-Monedero, J. Angulo, “Multiscale Estimation of Multiple Orientations based on Morphological Directional Openings”, Signal, Image and Video Processing, 2018, Accepted, (doi:10.1007/s11760-018-1276-y). ISI-JCR(2017): 1.643, Posición 163 de 260 (T2, Q3), cat ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC. Artículo 2: Álvar-Ginés Legaz-Aparicio, Rafael Verdú-Monedero, Juan Morales-Sanchez, Jorge Larrey- Ruiz, Jesús Angulo, “Detection of Retinal Vessel Bifurcation by Means of Multiple Orientation Estimation Based on Regularized Morphological Openings”. XIII Medierranean Confe-rence on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, Sevilla, 2013. Artículo 3: S. Morales, Á. Legaz-Aparicio, V. Naranjo, R. Verdú-Monedero, “Determination of Bifurcation Angles of the Retinal Vascular Tree through Multiple Orientation Estimation ba-sed on Regularized Morphological Openings”, International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing (BIOSIGNALS 2015), Lisbon (Portugal), January 2015. Artículo 4: S. Morales, V. Naranjo, J. Angulo, A.G. Legaz-Aparicio, R. Verdú-Monedero, “Retinal network characterization through fundus image processing: signicant point identication on vessel centerline”, Signal Processing: Image Communication, Vol. 59, pp. 50-64, November 2017. ISI-JCR(2017): 2.073, Posición 118 de 260 (T2, Q2), cat ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELEC-TRONIC. Artículo 5: A.G. Legaz-Aparicio, R. Verdú-Monedero, K. Engan, “Noise Robust and Ro-tation Invariant Framework for Texture Analysis and Classification”, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Volume 335, pp. 124 a 132, October 2018. ISI-JCR(2017): 2.300, Posición 21 de 252 (T1, Q1), cat MATHEMATICS, APPLIED. Artículo 6: Álvar-Ginés Legaz-Aparicio, Rafael Verdú-Monedero, Jesús Angulo, “Adaptive spatially variant morphological filters based on a multiple orientation vector field”, Mathematical modelling in Engineering & Human Behaviour 2016. Artículo 7: A.G. Legaz-Aparicio, R. Verdú-Monedero, J. Angulo, “Adaptive morphological filters based on a multiple orientation vector field dependent on image local features”, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 330, pp. 965-981, March 2018. ISI-JCR(2017): 1.632, Posición 49 de 252 (T1, Q1), cat MATHEMATICS, APPLIED.Escuela Internacional de Doctorado de la Universidad Politécnica de CartagenaUniversidad Politécnica de CartagenaPrograma de Doctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones por la Universidad Politécnica de Cartagen

Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks

Urbanisation is a fundamental phenomenon whose quantitative characterisation is still inadequate. We report here the empirical analysis of a unique data set regarding almost 200 years of evolution of the road network in a large area located north of Milan (Italy). We find that urbanisation is characterised by the homogenisation of cell shapes, and by the stability throughout time of high-centrality roads which constitute the backbone of the urban structure, confirming the importance of historical paths. We show quantitatively that the growth of the network is governed by two elementary processes: (i) `densification', corresponding to an increase in the local density of roads around existing urban centres and (ii) `exploration', whereby new roads trigger the spatial evolution of the urbanisation front. The empirical identification of such simple elementary mechanisms suggests the existence of general, simple properties of urbanisation and opens new directions for its modelling and quantitative description.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Morphological bilateral filtering

International audienceA current challenging topic in mathematical morphology is the construction of locally adaptive operators; i.e., structuring functions that are dependent on the input image itself at each position. Development of spatially-variant filtering is well established in the theory and practice of Gaussian filtering. The aim of the first part of the paper is to study how to generalize these convolution-based approaches in order to introduce adaptive nonlinear filters that asymptotically correspond to spatially-variant morphological dilation and erosion. In particular, starting from the bilateral filtering framework and using the notion of counter-harmonic mean, our goal is to propose a new low complexity approach to define spatially-variant bilateral structuring functions. Then, in the second part of the paper, an original formulation of spatially-variant flat morphological filters is proposed, where the adaptive structuring elements are obtained by thresholding the bilateral structuring functions. The methodological results of the paper are illustrated with various comparative examples