61,018 research outputs found
Visual-hint Boundary to Segment Algorithm for Image Segmentation
Image segmentation has been a very active research topic in image analysis
area. Currently, most of the image segmentation algorithms are designed based
on the idea that images are partitioned into a set of regions preserving
homogeneous intra-regions and inhomogeneous inter-regions. However, human
visual intuition does not always follow this pattern. A new image segmentation
method named Visual-Hint Boundary to Segment (VHBS) is introduced, which is
more consistent with human perceptions. VHBS abides by two visual hint rules
based on human perceptions: (i) the global scale boundaries tend to be the real
boundaries of the objects; (ii) two adjacent regions with quite different
colors or textures tend to result in the real boundaries between them. It has
been demonstrated by experiments that, compared with traditional image
segmentation method, VHBS has better performance and also preserves higher
computational efficiency.Comment: 45 page
Automatic Image Segmentation by Dynamic Region Merging
This paper addresses the automatic image segmentation problem in a region
merging style. With an initially over-segmented image, in which the many
regions (or super-pixels) with homogeneous color are detected, image
segmentation is performed by iteratively merging the regions according to a
statistical test. There are two essential issues in a region merging algorithm:
order of merging and the stopping criterion. In the proposed algorithm, these
two issues are solved by a novel predicate, which is defined by the sequential
probability ratio test (SPRT) and the maximum likelihood criterion. Starting
from an over-segmented image, neighboring regions are progressively merged if
there is an evidence for merging according to this predicate. We show that the
merging order follows the principle of dynamic programming. This formulates
image segmentation as an inference problem, where the final segmentation is
established based on the observed image. We also prove that the produced
segmentation satisfies certain global properties. In addition, a faster
algorithm is developed to accelerate the region merging process, which
maintains a nearest neighbor graph in each iteration. Experiments on real
natural images are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed
dynamic region merging algorithm.Comment: 28 pages. This paper is under review in IEEE TI
A comparative evaluation of interactive segmentation algorithms
In this paper we present a comparative evaluation of four popular interactive segmentation algorithms. The evaluation was carried out as a series of user-experiments, in which participants were tasked with extracting 100 objects from a common dataset: 25 with each algorithm, constrained within a time limit of 2 min for each object. To facilitate the experiments, a “scribble-driven” segmentation tool was developed to enable interactive image segmentation by simply marking areas of foreground and background with the mouse. As the participants refined and improved their respective segmentations, the corresponding updated segmentation mask was stored along with the elapsed time. We then collected and evaluated each recorded mask against a manually segmented ground truth, thus allowing us to gauge segmentation accuracy over time. Two benchmarks were used for the evaluation: the well-known Jaccard index for measuring object accuracy, and a new fuzzy metric, proposed in this paper, designed for measuring boundary accuracy. Analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of the suggested measures and provides valuable insights into the performance and characteristics of the evaluated algorithms
Deep Interactive Region Segmentation and Captioning
With recent innovations in dense image captioning, it is now possible to
describe every object of the scene with a caption while objects are determined
by bounding boxes. However, interpretation of such an output is not trivial due
to the existence of many overlapping bounding boxes. Furthermore, in current
captioning frameworks, the user is not able to involve personal preferences to
exclude out of interest areas. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid deep
learning architecture for interactive region segmentation and captioning where
the user is able to specify an arbitrary region of the image that should be
processed. To this end, a dedicated Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) named
Lyncean FCN (LFCN) is trained using our special training data to isolate the
User Intention Region (UIR) as the output of an efficient segmentation. In
parallel, a dense image captioning model is utilized to provide a wide variety
of captions for that region. Then, the UIR will be explained with the caption
of the best match bounding box. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
work that provides such a comprehensive output. Our experiments show the
superiority of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art interactive
segmentation methods on several well-known datasets. In addition, replacement
of the bounding boxes with the result of the interactive segmentation leads to
a better understanding of the dense image captioning output as well as accuracy
enhancement for the object detection in terms of Intersection over Union (IoU).Comment: 17, pages, 9 figure
Methods for Analysing Endothelial Cell Shape and Behaviour in Relation to the Focal Nature of Atherosclerosis
The aim of this thesis is to develop automated methods for the analysis of the
spatial patterns, and the functional behaviour of endothelial cells, viewed under
microscopy, with applications to the understanding of atherosclerosis.
Initially, a radial search approach to segmentation was attempted in order to
trace the cell and nuclei boundaries using a maximum likelihood algorithm; it
was found inadequate to detect the weak cell boundaries present in the available
data. A parametric cell shape model was then introduced to fit an equivalent
ellipse to the cell boundary by matching phase-invariant orientation fields of the
image and a candidate cell shape. This approach succeeded on good quality
images, but failed on images with weak cell boundaries. Finally, a support
vector machines based method, relying on a rich set of visual features, and a
small but high quality training dataset, was found to work well on large numbers
of cells even in the presence of strong intensity variations and imaging noise.
Using the segmentation results, several standard shear-stress dependent parameters
of cell morphology were studied, and evidence for similar behaviour
in some cell shape parameters was obtained in in-vivo cells and their nuclei.
Nuclear and cell orientations around immature and mature aortas were broadly
similar, suggesting that the pattern of flow direction near the wall stayed approximately
constant with age. The relation was less strong for the cell and
nuclear length-to-width ratios.
Two novel shape analysis approaches were attempted to find other properties
of cell shape which could be used to annotate or characterise patterns, since a
wide variability in cell and nuclear shapes was observed which did not appear
to fit the standard parameterisations. Although no firm conclusions can yet be
drawn, the work lays the foundation for future studies of cell morphology.
To draw inferences about patterns in the functional response of cells to flow,
which may play a role in the progression of disease, single-cell analysis was performed
using calcium sensitive florescence probes. Calcium transient rates were
found to change with flow, but more importantly, local patterns of synchronisation
in multi-cellular groups were discernable and appear to change with flow.
The patterns suggest a new functional mechanism in flow-mediation of cell-cell
calcium signalling
SeLeCT: a lexical cohesion based news story segmentation system
In this paper we compare the performance of three distinct approaches to lexical cohesion based text segmentation. Most work in this area has focused on the discovery of textual units that discuss subtopic structure within documents. In contrast our segmentation task requires the discovery of topical units of text i.e., distinct news stories from broadcast news programmes. Our approach to news story segmentation (the SeLeCT system) is based on an analysis of lexical cohesive strength between textual units using a linguistic technique called lexical chaining. We evaluate the relative performance of SeLeCT with respect to two other cohesion based segmenters: TextTiling and C99. Using a recently introduced evaluation metric WindowDiff, we contrast the segmentation accuracy of each system on both "spoken" (CNN news transcripts) and "written" (Reuters newswire) news story test sets extracted from the TDT1 corpus
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