4,578 research outputs found
Measuring cellular traction forces on non-planar substrates
Animal cells use traction forces to sense the mechanics and geometry of their
environment. Measuring these traction forces requires a workflow combining cell
experiments, image processing and force reconstruction based on elasticity
theory. Such procedures have been established before mainly for planar
substrates, in which case one can use the Green's function formalism. Here we
introduce a worksflow to measure traction forces of cardiac myofibroblasts on
non-planar elastic substrates. Soft elastic substrates with a wave-like
topology were micromolded from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and fluorescent
marker beads were distributed homogeneously in the substrate. Using feature
vector based tracking of these marker beads, we first constructed a hexahedral
mesh for the substrate. We then solved the direct elastic boundary volume
problem on this mesh using the finite element method (FEM). Using data
simulations, we show that the traction forces can be reconstructed from the
substrate deformations by solving the corresponding inverse problem with a
L1-norm for the residue and a L2-norm for 0th order Tikhonov regularization.
Applying this procedure to the experimental data, we find that cardiac
myofibroblast cells tend to align both their shapes and their forces with the
long axis of the deformable wavy substrate.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
Accurate Light Field Depth Estimation with Superpixel Regularization over Partially Occluded Regions
Depth estimation is a fundamental problem for light field photography
applications. Numerous methods have been proposed in recent years, which either
focus on crafting cost terms for more robust matching, or on analyzing the
geometry of scene structures embedded in the epipolar-plane images. Significant
improvements have been made in terms of overall depth estimation error;
however, current state-of-the-art methods still show limitations in handling
intricate occluding structures and complex scenes with multiple occlusions. To
address these challenging issues, we propose a very effective depth estimation
framework which focuses on regularizing the initial label confidence map and
edge strength weights. Specifically, we first detect partially occluded
boundary regions (POBR) via superpixel based regularization. Series of
shrinkage/reinforcement operations are then applied on the label confidence map
and edge strength weights over the POBR. We show that after weight
manipulations, even a low-complexity weighted least squares model can produce
much better depth estimation than state-of-the-art methods in terms of average
disparity error rate, occlusion boundary precision-recall rate, and the
preservation of intricate visual features
Compact Model Representation for 3D Reconstruction
3D reconstruction from 2D images is a central problem in computer vision.
Recent works have been focusing on reconstruction directly from a single image.
It is well known however that only one image cannot provide enough information
for such a reconstruction. A prior knowledge that has been entertained are 3D
CAD models due to its online ubiquity. A fundamental question is how to
compactly represent millions of CAD models while allowing generalization to new
unseen objects with fine-scaled geometry. We introduce an approach to compactly
represent a 3D mesh. Our method first selects a 3D model from a graph structure
by using a novel free-form deformation FFD 3D-2D registration, and then the
selected 3D model is refined to best fit the image silhouette. We perform a
comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis that demonstrates
impressive dense and realistic 3D reconstruction from single images.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
Detail-preserving and Content-aware Variational Multi-view Stereo Reconstruction
Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view
images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite
the steady progress in multi-view stereo reconstruction, most existing methods
are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while
suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with few textures.
To address these limitations, this paper presents a Detail-preserving and
Content-aware Variational (DCV) multi-view stereo method, which reconstructs
the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimization and mesh
denoising. In reprojection error minimization, we propose a novel inter-image
similarity measure, which is effective to preserve fine-scale details of the
reconstructed surface and builds a connection between guided image filtering
and image registration. In mesh denoising, we propose a content-aware
-minimization algorithm by adaptively estimating the value and
regularization parameters based on the current input. It is much more promising
in suppressing noise while preserving sharp features than conventional
isotropic mesh smoothing. Experimental results on benchmark datasets
demonstrate that our DCV method is capable of recovering more surface details,
and obtains cleaner and more accurate reconstructions than state-of-the-art
methods. In particular, our method achieves the best results among all
published methods on the Middlebury dino ring and dino sparse ring datasets in
terms of both completeness and accuracy.Comment: 14 pages,16 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transaction on image
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A Two-stage Method for Inverse Medium Scattering
We present a novel numerical method to the time-harmonic inverse medium
scattering problem of recovering the refractive index from near-field scattered
data. The approach consists of two stages, one pruning step of detecting the
scatterer support, and one resolution enhancing step with mixed regularization.
The first step is strictly direct and of sampling type, and faithfully detects
the scatterer support. The second step is an innovative application of
nonsmooth mixed regularization, and it accurately resolves the scatterer sizes
as well as intensities. The model is efficiently solved by a semi-smooth
Newton-type method. Numerical results for two- and three-dimensional examples
indicate that the approach is accurate, computationally efficient, and robust
with respect to data noise.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure
Surface Modeling and Analysis Using Range Images: Smoothing, Registration, Integration, and Segmentation
This dissertation presents a framework for 3D reconstruction and scene analysis, using a set of range images. The motivation for developing this framework came from the needs to reconstruct the surfaces of small mechanical parts in reverse engineering tasks, build a virtual environment of indoor and outdoor scenes, and understand 3D images.
The input of the framework is a set of range images of an object or a scene captured by range scanners. The output is a triangulated surface that can be segmented into meaningful parts. A textured surface can be reconstructed if color images are provided. The framework consists of surface smoothing, registration, integration, and segmentation.
Surface smoothing eliminates the noise present in raw measurements from range scanners. This research proposes area-decreasing flow that is theoretically identical to the mean curvature flow. Using area-decreasing flow, there is no need to estimate the curvature value and an optimal step size of the flow can be obtained. Crease edges and sharp corners are preserved by an adaptive scheme.
Surface registration aligns measurements from different viewpoints in a common coordinate system. This research proposes a new surface representation scheme named point fingerprint. Surfaces are registered by finding corresponding point pairs in an overlapping region based on fingerprint comparison.
Surface integration merges registered surface patches into a whole surface. This research employs an implicit surface-based integration technique. The proposed algorithm can generate watertight models by space carving or filling the holes based on volumetric interpolation. Textures from different views are integrated inside a volumetric grid. Surface segmentation is useful to decompose CAD models in reverse engineering tasks and help object recognition in a 3D scene. This research proposes a watershed-based surface mesh segmentation approach. The new algorithm accurately segments the plateaus by geodesic erosion using fast marching method.
The performance of the framework is presented using both synthetic and real world data from different range scanners. The dissertation concludes by summarizing the development of the framework and then suggests future research topics
Eigenvector Model Descriptors for Solving an Inverse Problem of Helmholtz Equation: Extended Materials
We study the seismic inverse problem for the recovery of subsurface
properties in acoustic media. In order to reduce the ill-posedness of the
problem, the heterogeneous wave speed parameter to be recovered is represented
using a limited number of coefficients associated with a basis of eigenvectors
of a diffusion equation, following the regularization by discretization
approach. We compare several choices for the diffusion coefficient in the
partial differential equations, which are extracted from the field of image
processing. We first investigate their efficiency for image decomposition
(accuracy of the representation with respect to the number of variables and
denoising). Next, we implement the method in the quantitative reconstruction
procedure for seismic imaging, following the Full Waveform Inversion method,
where the difficulty resides in that the basis is defined from an initial model
where none of the actual structures is known. In particular, we demonstrate
that the method is efficient for the challenging reconstruction of media with
salt-domes. We employ the method in two and three-dimensional experiments and
show that the eigenvector representation compensates for the lack of low
frequency information, it eventually serves us to extract guidelines for the
implementation of the method.Comment: 45 pages, 37 figure
Continuous Modeling of 3D Building Rooftops From Airborne LIDAR and Imagery
In recent years, a number of mega-cities have provided 3D photorealistic virtual models to support the decisions making process for maintaining the cities' infrastructure and environment more effectively. 3D virtual city models are static snap-shots of the environment and represent the status quo at the time of their data acquisition. However, cities are dynamic system that continuously change over time. Accordingly, their virtual representation need to be regularly updated in a timely manner to allow for accurate analysis and simulated results that decisions are based upon. The concept of "continuous city modeling" is to progressively reconstruct city models by accommodating their changes recognized in spatio-temporal domain, while preserving unchanged structures. However, developing a universal intelligent machine enabling continuous modeling still remains a challenging task. Therefore, this thesis proposes a novel research framework for continuously reconstructing 3D building rooftops using multi-sensor data. For achieving this goal, we first proposes a 3D building rooftop modeling method using airborne LiDAR data. The main focus is on the implementation of an implicit regularization method which impose a data-driven building regularity to noisy boundaries of roof planes for reconstructing 3D building rooftop models. The implicit regularization process is implemented in the framework of Minimum Description Length (MDL) combined with Hypothesize and Test (HAT). Secondly, we propose a context-based geometric hashing method to align newly acquired image data with existing building models. The novelty is the use of context features to achieve robust and accurate matching results. Thirdly, the existing building models are refined by newly proposed sequential fusion method. The main advantage of the proposed method is its ability to progressively refine modeling errors frequently observed in LiDAR-driven building models. The refinement process is conducted in the framework of MDL combined with HAT. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MDMC) coupled with Simulated Annealing (SA) is employed to perform a global optimization. The results demonstrates that the proposed continuous rooftop modeling methods show a promising aspects to support various critical decisions by not only reconstructing 3D rooftop models accurately, but also by updating the models using multi-sensor data
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