Face analysis using curve edge maps

This paper proposes an automatic and real-time system for face analysis, usable in visual communication applications. In this approach, faces are represented with Curve Edge Maps, which are collections of polynomial segments with a convex region. The segments are extracted from edge pixels using an adaptive incremental linear-time fitting algorithm, which is based on constructive polynomial fitting. The face analysis system considers face tracking, face recognition and facial feature detection, using Curve Edge Maps driven by histograms of intensities and histograms of relative positions. When applied to different face databases and video sequences, the average face recognition rate is 95.51%, the average facial feature detection rate is 91.92% and the accuracy in location of the facial features is 2.18% in terms of the size of the face, which is comparable with or better than the results in literature. However, our method has the advantages of simplicity, real-time performance and extensibility to the different aspects of face analysis, such as recognition of facial expressions and talking

ANSIG - An Analytic Signature for Arbitrary 2D Shapes (or Bags of Unlabeled Points)

In image analysis, many tasks require representing two-dimensional (2D) shape, often specified by a set of 2D points, for comparison purposes. The challenge of the representation is that it must not only capture the characteristics of the shape but also be invariant to relevant transformations. Invariance to geometric transformations, such as translation, rotation, and scale, has received attention in the past, usually under the assumption that the points are previously labeled, i.e., that the shape is characterized by an ordered set of landmarks. However, in many practical scenarios, the points describing the shape are obtained from automatic processes, e.g., edge or corner detection, thus without labels or natural ordering. Obviously, the combinatorial problem of computing the correspondences between the points of two shapes in the presence of the aforementioned geometrical distortions becomes a quagmire when the number of points is large. We circumvent this problem by representing shapes in a way that is invariant to the permutation of the landmarks, i.e., we represent bags of unlabeled 2D points. Within our framework, a shape is mapped to an analytic function on the complex plane, leading to what we call its analytic signature (ANSIG). To store an ANSIG, it suffices to sample it along a closed contour in the complex plane. We show that the ANSIG is a maximal invariant with respect to the permutation group, i.e., that different shapes have different ANSIGs and shapes that differ by a permutation (or re-labeling) of the landmarks have the same ANSIG. We further show how easy it is to factor out geometric transformations when comparing shapes using the ANSIG representation. Finally, we illustrate these capabilities with shape-based image classification experiments

AMAT: Medial Axis Transform for Natural Images

We introduce Appearance-MAT (AMAT), a generalization of the medial axis transform for natural images, that is framed as a weighted geometric set cover problem. We make the following contributions: i) we extend previous medial point detection methods for color images, by associating each medial point with a local scale; ii) inspired by the invertibility property of the binary MAT, we also associate each medial point with a local encoding that allows us to invert the AMAT, reconstructing the input image; iii) we describe a clustering scheme that takes advantage of the additional scale and appearance information to group individual points into medial branches, providing a shape decomposition of the underlying image regions. In our experiments, we show state-of-the-art performance in medial point detection on Berkeley Medial AXes (BMAX500), a new dataset of medial axes based on the BSDS500 database, and good generalization on the SK506 and WH-SYMMAX datasets. We also measure the quality of reconstructed images from BMAX500, obtained by inverting their computed AMAT. Our approach delivers significantly better reconstruction quality with respect to three baselines, using just 10% of the image pixels. Our code and annotations are available at https://github.com/tsogkas/amat .Comment: 10 pages (including references), 5 figures, accepted at ICCV 201

A Novel Framework for Highlight Reflectance Transformation Imaging

We propose a novel pipeline and related software tools for processing the multi-light image collections (MLICs) acquired in different application contexts to obtain shape and appearance information of captured surfaces, as well as to derive compact relightable representations of them. Our pipeline extends the popular Highlight Reflectance Transformation Imaging (H-RTI) framework, which is widely used in the Cultural Heritage domain. We support, in particular, perspective camera modeling, per-pixel interpolated light direction estimation, as well as light normalization correcting vignetting and uneven non-directional illumination. Furthermore, we propose two novel easy-to-use software tools to simplify all processing steps. The tools, in addition to support easy processing and encoding of pixel data, implement a variety of visualizations, as well as multiple reflectance-model-fitting options. Experimental tests on synthetic and real-world MLICs demonstrate the usefulness of the novel algorithmic framework and the potential benefits of the proposed tools for end-user applications.Terms: "European Union (EU)" & "Horizon 2020" / Action: H2020-EU.3.6.3. - Reflective societies - cultural heritage and European identity / Acronym: Scan4Reco / Grant number: 665091DSURF project (PRIN 2015) funded by the Italian Ministry of University and ResearchSardinian Regional Authorities under projects VIGEC and Vis&VideoLa

Image Colour Segmentation by Genetic Algorithms

Segmentation of a colour image composed of different kinds of texture regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains similar and/or unstationary texture fields. In this work, a method is described for evolving adaptive procedures for these problems. In many real world applications data clustering constitutes a fundamental issue whenever behavioural or feature domains can be mapped into topological domains. We formulate the segmentation problem upon such images as an optimisation problem and adopt evolutionary strategy of Genetic Algorithms for the clustering of small regions in colour feature space. The present approach uses k-Means unsupervised clustering methods into Genetic Algorithms, namely for guiding this last Evolutionary Algorithm in his search for finding the optimal or sub-optimal data partition, task that as we know, requires a non-trivial search because of its intrinsic NP-complete nature. To solve this task, the appropriate genetic coding is also discussed, since this is a key aspect in the implementation. Our purpose is to demonstrate the efficiency of Genetic Algorithms to automatic and unsupervised texture segmentation. Some examples in Colour Maps, Ornamental Stones and in Human Skin Mark segmentation are presented and overall results discussed. KEYWORDS: Genetic Algorithms, Colour Image Segmentation, Classification, Clustering.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Author at http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/ref_26.htm

Entropy-difference based stereo error detection

Stereo depth estimation is error-prone; hence, effective error detection methods are desirable. Most such existing methods depend on characteristics of the stereo matching cost curve, making them unduly dependent on functional details of the matching algorithm. As a remedy, we propose a novel error detection approach based solely on the input image and its depth map. Our assumption is that, entropy of any point on an image will be significantly higher than the entropy of its corresponding point on the image's depth map. In this paper, we propose a confidence measure, Entropy-Difference (ED) for stereo depth estimates and a binary classification method to identify incorrect depths. Experiments on the Middlebury dataset show the effectiveness of our method. Our proposed stereo confidence measure outperforms 17 existing measures in all aspects except occlusion detection. Established metrics such as precision, accuracy, recall, and area-under-curve are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method

A Methodological Review of Visual Road Recognition Procedures for Autonomous Driving Applications

The current research interest in autonomous driving is growing at a rapid pace, attracting great investments from both the academic and corporate sectors. In order for vehicles to be fully autonomous, it is imperative that the driver assistance system is adapt in road and lane keeping. In this paper, we present a methodological review of techniques with a focus on visual road detection and recognition. We adopt a pragmatic outlook in presenting this review, whereby the procedures of road recognition is emphasised with respect to its practical implementations. The contribution of this review hence covers the topic in two parts -- the first part describes the methodological approach to conventional road detection, which covers the algorithms and approaches involved to classify and segregate roads from non-road regions; and the other part focuses on recent state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that are applied to visual road recognition, with an emphasis on methods that incorporate convolutional neural networks and semantic segmentation. A subsequent overview of recent implementations in the commercial sector is also presented, along with some recent research works pertaining to road detections.Comment: 14 pages, 6 Figures, 2 Tables. Permission to reprint granted from original figure author

3D Face Synthesis with KINECT

This work describes the process of face synthesis by image morphing from less expensive 3D sensors such as KINECT that are prone to sensor noise. Its main aim is to create a useful face database for future face recognition studies.Peer reviewe

Learning to Refine Object Contours with a Top-Down Fully Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network

We develop a novel deep contour detection algorithm with a top-down fully convolutional encoder-decoder network. Our proposed method, named TD-CEDN, solves two important issues in this low-level vision problem: (1) learning multi-scale and multi-level features; and (2) applying an effective top-down refined approach in the networks. TD-CEDN performs the pixel-wise prediction by means of leveraging features at all layers of the net. Unlike skip connections and previous encoder-decoder methods, we first learn a coarse feature map after the encoder stage in a feedforward pass, and then refine this feature map in a top-down strategy during the decoder stage utilizing features at successively lower layers. Therefore, the deconvolutional process is conducted stepwise, which is guided by Deeply-Supervision Net providing the integrated direct supervision. The above proposed technologies lead to a more precise and clearer prediction. Our proposed algorithm achieved the state-of-the-art on the BSDS500 dataset (ODS F-score of 0.788), the PASCAL VOC2012 dataset (ODS F-score of 0.588), and and the NYU Depth dataset (ODS F-score of 0.735).Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure

Multi-radial LBP Features as a Tool for Rapid Glomerular Detection and Assessment in Whole Slide Histopathology Images

We demonstrate a simple and effective automated method for the segmentation of glomeruli from large (~1 gigapixel) histopathological whole-slide images (WSIs) of thin renal tissue sections and biopsies, using an adaptation of the well-known local binary patterns (LBP) image feature vector to train a support vector machine (SVM) model. Our method offers high precision (>90%) and reasonable recall (>70%) for glomeruli from WSIs, is readily adaptable to glomeruli from multiple species, including mouse, rat, and human, and is robust to diverse slide staining methods. Using 5 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPUs with 40 GB RAM, our method typically requires ~15 sec for training and ~2 min to extract glomeruli reproducibly from a WSI. Deploying a deep convolutional neural network trained for glomerular recognition in tandem with the SVM suffices to reduce false positives to below 3%. We also apply our LBP-based descriptor to successfully detect pathologic changes in a mouse model of diabetic nephropathy. We envision potential clinical and laboratory applications for this approach in the study and diagnosis of glomerular disease, and as a means of greatly accelerating the construction of feature sets to fuel deep learning studies into tissue structure and pathology.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Added scalebars, and for Fig. 3b a clearer example of medulla remova