Properties of Gauss digitized sets and digital surface integration

International audienceThis paper presents new topological and geometrical properties of Gauss digitizations of Euclidean shapes, most of them holding in arbitrary dimension $d$. We focus on $r$-regular shapes sampled by Gauss digitization at gridstep $h$. The digitized boundary is shown to be close to the Euclidean boundary in the Hausdorff sense, the minimum distance $\frac{\sqrt{d}}{2}h$ being achieved by the projection map $\xi$ induced by the Euclidean distance. Although it is known that Gauss digitized boundaries may not be manifold when $d \ge 3$, we show that non-manifoldness may only occur in places where the normal vector is almost aligned with some digitization axis, and the limit angle decreases with $h$. We then have a closer look at the projection of the digitized boundary onto the continuous boundary by $\xi$. We show that the size of its non-injective part tends to zero with $h$. This leads us to study the classical digital surface integration scheme, which allocates a measure to each surface element that is proportional to the cosine of the angle between an estimated normal vector and the trivial surface element normal vector. We show that digital integration is convergent whenever the normal estimator is multigrid convergent, and we explicit the convergence speed. Since convergent estimators are now available in the litterature, digital integration provides a convergent measure for digitized objects

Courbure discrète : théorie et applications

International audienceThe present volume contains the proceedings of the 2013 Meeting on discrete curvature, held at CIRM, Luminy, France. The aim of this meeting was to bring together researchers from various backgrounds, ranging from mathematics to computer science, with a focus on both theory and applications. With 27 invited talks and 8 posters, the conference attracted 70 researchers from all over the world. The challenge of finding a common ground on the topic of discrete curvature was met with success, and these proceedings are a testimony of this wor

Curvature based corner detector for discrete, noisy and multi-scale contours

International audienceEstimating curvature on digital shapes is known to be a difficult problem even in high resolution images 10,19. Moreover the presence of noise contributes to the insta- bility of the estimators and limits their use in many computer vision applications like corner detection. Several recent curvature estimators 16,13,15, which come from the dis- crete geometry community, can now process damaged data and integrate the amount of noise in their analysis. In this paper, we propose a comparative evaluation of these estimators, testing their accuracy, efficiency, and robustness with respect to several type of degradations. We further compare the best one with the visual curvature proposed by Liu et al. 14, a recently published method from the computer vision community. We finally propose a novel corner detector, which is based on curvature estimation, and we provide a comprehensive set of experiments to compare it with many other classical cor- ner detectors. Our study shows that this corner detector has most of the time a better behavior than the others, while requiring only one parameter to take into account the noise level. It is also promising for multi-scale shape description

Curvature Estimation along Noisy Digital Contours by Approximate Global Optimization

International audienceIn this paper we introduce a new curvature estimator along digital contours, that we called Global Min-Curvature estimator (GMC). As opposed to previous curvature estimators, it considers all the possible shapes that are digitized as this contour, and selects the most probable one with a global optimization approach. The GMC estimator exploits the geometric properties of digital contours by using local bounds on tangent directions defined by the maximal digital straight segments. The estimator is then adapted to noisy contours by replacing maximal segments with maximal blurred digital straight segments. Experiments on perfect and damaged digital contours are performed and in both cases, comparisons with other existing methods are presented

Positive Definite Kernels in Machine Learning

This survey is an introduction to positive definite kernels and the set of methods they have inspired in the machine learning literature, namely kernel methods. We first discuss some properties of positive definite kernels as well as reproducing kernel Hibert spaces, the natural extension of the set of functions $\{k(x,\cdot),x\in\mathcal{X}\}$ associated with a kernel $k$ defined on a space $\mathcal{X}$. We discuss at length the construction of kernel functions that take advantage of well-known statistical models. We provide an overview of numerous data-analysis methods which take advantage of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and discuss the idea of combining several kernels to improve the performance on certain tasks. We also provide a short cookbook of different kernels which are particularly useful for certain data-types such as images, graphs or speech segments.Comment: draft. corrected a typo in figure

Discrete Riemannian Calculus and A Posteriori Error Control on Shape Spaces

In this thesis, a novel discrete approximation of the curvature tensor on Riemannian manifolds is derived, efficient methods to interpolate and extrapolate images in the context of the time discrete metamorphosis model are analyzed, and an a posteriori error estimator for the binary Mumford–Shah model is examined. Departing from the variational time discretization on (possibly infinite-dimensional) Riemannian manifolds originally proposed by Rumpf and Wirth, in which a consistent time discrete approximation of geodesic curves, the logarithm, the exponential map and parallel transport is analyzed, we construct the discrete curvature tensor and prove its convergence under certain smoothness assumptions. To this end, several time discrete parallel transports are applied to suitably rescaled tangent vectors, where each parallel transport is computed using Schild’s ladder. The associated convergence proof essentially relies on multiple Taylor expansions incorporating symmetry and scaling relations. In several numerical examples we validate this approach for surfaces. The by now classical flow of diffeomorphism approach allows the transport of image intensities along paths in time, which are characterized by diffeomorphisms, and the brightness of each image particle is assumed to be constant along each trajectory. As an extension, the metamorphosis model proposed by Trouvé, Younes and coworkers allows for intensity variations of the image particles along the paths, which is reflected by an additional penalization term appearing in the energy functional that quantifies the squared weak material derivative. Taking into account the aforementioned time discretization, we propose a time discrete metamorphosis model in which the associated time discrete path energy consists of the sum of squared L2-mismatch functionals of successive square-integrable image intensity functions and a regularization functional for pairwise deformations. Our main contributions are the existence proof of time discrete geodesic curves in the context of this model, which are defined as minimizers of the time discrete path energy, and the proof of the Mosco-convergence of a suitable interpolation of the time discrete to the time continuous path energy with respect to the L2-topology. Using an alternating update scheme as well as a multilinear finite element respectively cubic spline discretization for the images and deformations allows to efficiently compute time discrete geodesic curves. In several numerical examples we demonstrate that time discrete geodesics can be robustly computed for gray-scale and color images. Taking into account the time discretization of the metamorphosis model we define the discrete exponential map in the space of images, which allows image extrapolation of arbitrary length for given weakly differentiable initial images and variations. To this end, starting from a suitable reformulation of the Euler–Lagrange equations characterizing the one-step extrapolation a fixed point iteration is employed to establish the existence of critical points of the Euler–Lagrange equations provided that the initial variation is small in L2. In combination with an implicit function type argument requiring H1-closeness of the initial variation one can prove the local existence as well as the local uniqueness of the discrete exponential map. The numerical algorithm for the one-step extrapolation is based on a slightly modified fixed point iteration using a spatial Galerkin scheme to obtain the optimal deformation associated with the unknown image, from which the unknown image itself can be recovered. To prove the applicability of the proposed method we compute the extrapolated image path for real image data. A common tool to segment images and shapes into multiple regions was developed by Mumford and Shah. The starting point to derive a posteriori error estimates for the binary Mumford–Shah model, which is obtained by restricting the original model to two regions, is a uniformly convex and non-constrained relaxation of the binary model following the work by Chambolle and Berkels. In particular, minimizers of the binary model can be exactly recovered from minimizers of the relaxed model via thresholding. Then, applying duality techniques proposed by Repin and Bartels allows deriving a consistent functional a posteriori error estimate for the relaxed model. Afterwards, an a posteriori error estimate for the original binary model can be computed incorporating a suitable cut-out argument in combination with the functional error estimate. To calculate minimizers of the relaxed model on an adaptive mesh described by a quadtree structure, we employ a primal-dual as well as a purely dual algorithm. The quality of the error estimator is analyzed for different gray-scale input images

Scale-space Feature Extraction on Digital Surfaces

International audienceA classical problem in many computer graphics applications consists in extracting significant zones or points on an object surface,like loci of tangent discontinuity (edges), maxima or minima of curvatures, inflection points, etc. These places have specific localgeometrical properties and often called generically features. An important problem is related to the scale, or range of scales,for which a feature is relevant. We propose a new robust method to detect features on digital data (surface of objects in Z^3 ),which exploits asymptotic properties of recent digital curvature estimators. In [1, 2], authors have proposed curvature estimators(mean, principal and Gaussian) on 2D and 3D digitized shapes and have demonstrated their multigrid convergence (for C^3 -smoothsurfaces). Since such approaches integrate local information within a ball around points of interest, the radius is a crucial parameter.In this article, we consider the radius as a scale-space parameter. By analyzing the behavior of such curvature estimators as the ballradius tends to zero, we propose a tool to efficiently characterize and extract several relevant features (edges, smooth and flat parts)on digital surfaces