Mapping of cell nuclei based on contour warping

The dynamics of genome regions are associated to the functional or dysfunctional behaviour of the human cell. In order to study these dynamics it is necessary to remove all perturbations coming from movement and deformation of the nucleus, i.e. the container holding the genome. In literature models have been proposed to cope with the transformations corresponding to nuclear dynamics of healthy cells. However for pathological cells, the nucleus deforms in an apparently random way, making the use of such models a non trivial task. In this paper we propose a mapping of the cell nucleus which is based on the matching of the nuclear contours. The proposed method does not put constraints on the possible shapes nor on the possible deformations, making this method suited for the analysis of pathological nuclei

Subset Warping: Rubber Sheeting with Cuts

Image warping, often referred to as "rubber sheeting" represents the deformation of a domain image space into a range image space. In this paper, a technique is described which extends the definition of a rubber-sheet transformation to allow a polygonal region to be warped into one or more subsets of itself, where the subsets may be multiply connected. To do this, it constructs a set of "slits" in the domain image, which correspond to discontinuities in the range image, using a technique based on generalized Voronoi diagrams. The concept of medial axis is extended to describe inner and outer medial contours of a polygon. Polygonal regions are decomposed into annular subregions, and path homotopies are introduced to describe the annular subregions. These constructions motivate the definition of a ladder, which guides the construction of grid point pairs necessary to effect the warp itself

A Framework for Image Segmentation Using Shape Models and Kernel Space Shape Priors

©2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2007.70774Segmentation involves separating an object from the background in a given image. The use of image information alone often leads to poor segmentation results due to the presence of noise, clutter or occlusion. The introduction of shape priors in the geometric active contour (GAC) framework has proved to be an effective way to ameliorate some of these problems. In this work, we propose a novel segmentation method combining image information with prior shape knowledge, using level-sets. Following the work of Leventon et al., we propose to revisit the use of PCA to introduce prior knowledge about shapes in a more robust manner. We utilize kernel PCA (KPCA) and show that this method outperforms linear PCA by allowing only those shapes that are close enough to the training data. In our segmentation framework, shape knowledge and image information are encoded into two energy functionals entirely described in terms of shapes. This consistent description permits to fully take advantage of the Kernel PCA methodology and leads to promising segmentation results. In particular, our shape-driven segmentation technique allows for the simultaneous encoding of multiple types of shapes, and offers a convincing level of robustness with respect to noise, occlusions, or smearing

Singing voice correction using canonical time warping

Expressive singing voice correction is an appealing but challenging problem. A robust time-warping algorithm which synchronizes two singing recordings can provide a promising solution. We thereby propose to address the problem by canonical time warping (CTW) which aligns amateur singing recordings to professional ones. A new pitch contour is generated given the alignment information, and a pitch-corrected singing is synthesized back through the vocoder. The objective evaluation shows that CTW is robust against pitch-shifting and time-stretching effects, and the subjective test demonstrates that CTW prevails the other methods including DTW and the commercial auto-tuning software. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method in a practical, real-world scenario

Flexural–torsional behavior of thin-walled composite box beams using shear-deformable beam theory

This paper presents a flexural–torsional analysis of thin-walled composite box beams. A general analytical model applicable to thin-walled composite box beams subjected to vertical and torsional loads is developed. This model is based on the shear-deformable beam theory, and accounts for the flexural–torsional response of the thin-walled composites for an arbitrary laminate stacking sequence configuration, i.e. unsymmetric as well as symmetric. The governing equations are derived from the principle of the stationary value of total potential energy. Numerical results are obtained for thin-walled composites under vertical loading, addressing the effects of fiber angle and span-to-height ratio of the composite beam

On sixfold coupled vibrations of thin-walled composite box beams

This paper presents a general analytical model for free vibration of thin-walled composite beams with arbitrary laminate stacking sequences and studies the effects of shear deformation over the natural frequencies. This model is based on the first-order shear-deformable beam theory and accounts for all the structural coupling coming from the material anisotropy. The seven governing differential equations for coupled flexural–torsional–shearing vibration are derived from the Hamilton’s principle. The resulting coupling is referred to as sixfold coupled vibration. Numerical results are obtained to investigate the effects of fiber angle, span-to-height ratio, modulus ratio, and boundary conditions on the natural frequencies as well as corresponding mode shapes of thin-walled composite box beams

Hexagonal warping on spin texture, Hall conductivity and circular dichroism of Topological Insulator

The topological protected electronic states on the surface of a topological insulator can progressively change their Fermi cross-section from circular to a snowflake shape as the chemical potential is increased above the Dirac point because of an hexagonal warping term in the Hamiltonian. Another effect of warping is to change the spin texture which exists when a finite gap is included by magnetic doping, although the in-plane spin component remains locked perpendicular to momentum. It also changes the orbital magnetic moment, the matrix element for optical absorption and the circular dichroism. We find that the Fermi surface average of z-component of spin is closely related to the value of the Berry phase. This holds even when the Hamiltonian includes a subdominant non-relativistic quadratic in momentum term (which provides particle-hole asymmetry) in addition to the dominant relativistic Dirac term. There is also a qualitative correlation between $\left\langle S_z \right\rangle$ and the dichroism. For the case when the chemical potential falls inside the gap between valence and conduction band, the Hall conductivity remains quantized and unaffected in value by the hexagonal warping term.Comment: 10 figures, accepted in PR