Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates

The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data. To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of- Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets. To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed landmark study. To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus

The bi-elliptical deformable contour and its application to automated tongue segmentation in Chinese medicine

2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

A Survey on Joint Object Detection and Pose Estimation using Monocular Vision

In this survey we present a complete landscape of joint object detection and pose estimation methods that use monocular vision. Descriptions of traditional approaches that involve descriptors or models and various estimation methods have been provided. These descriptors or models include chordiograms, shape-aware deformable parts model, bag of boundaries, distance transform templates, natural 3D markers and facet features whereas the estimation methods include iterative clustering estimation, probabilistic networks and iterative genetic matching. Hybrid approaches that use handcrafted feature extraction followed by estimation by deep learning methods have been outlined. We have investigated and compared, wherever possible, pure deep learning based approaches (single stage and multi stage) for this problem. Comprehensive details of the various accuracy measures and metrics have been illustrated. For the purpose of giving a clear overview, the characteristics of relevant datasets are discussed. The trends that prevailed from the infancy of this problem until now have also been highlighted.Comment: Accepted at the International Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CCVPR) 201

Facial Feature Extraction Using a 4D Stereo Camera System

Facial feature recognition has received much attention among the researchers in computer vision. This paper presents a new approach for facial feature extraction. The work can be broadly classified into two stages, face acquisition and feature extraction. Face acquisition is done by a 4D stereo camera system from Dimensional Imaging and the data is available in ‘obj’ files generated by the camera system. The second stage illustrates extraction of important facial features. The algorithm developed for this purpose is inspired from the natural biological shape and structure of human face. The accuracy of identifying the facial points has been shown using simulation results. The algorithm is able to identify the tip of the nose, the point where nose meets the forehead, and near corners of both the eyes from the faces acquired by the camera system

A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"

Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a) generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c) hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second authorshi