37,825 research outputs found
Color image segmentation using a spatial k-means clustering algorithm
This paper details the implementation of a new adaptive technique for color-texture segmentation that is a generalization of the standard K-Means algorithm. The standard K-Means algorithm produces accurate segmentation results only when applied to images defined by homogenous regions with respect to texture and color since no local constraints are applied to impose spatial continuity. In addition, the initialization of the K-Means algorithm is problematic and usually the initial cluster centers are randomly picked. In this paper we detail the implementation of a novel technique to select the dominant colors from the input image using the information from the color histograms. The main contribution of this work is the generalization of the K-Means algorithm that includes the primary features that describe the color smoothness and texture complexity in the process of pixel assignment. The resulting color segmentation scheme has been applied to a large number of natural images and the experimental data indicates the robustness of the new developed segmentation algorithm
Retinal blood vessels extraction using probabilistic modelling
© 2014 Kaba et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The analysis of retinal blood vessels plays an important role in detecting and treating retinal diseases. In this review, we present an automated method to segment blood vessels of fundus retinal image. The proposed method could be used to support a non-intrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology for early detection of retinal diseases, treatment evaluation or clinical study. This study combines the bias correction and an adaptive histogram equalisation to enhance the appearance of the blood vessels. Then the blood vessels are extracted using probabilistic modelling that is optimised by the expectation maximisation algorithm. The method is evaluated on fundus retinal images of STARE and DRIVE datasets. The experimental results are compared with some recently published methods of retinal blood vessels segmentation. The experimental results show that our method achieved the best overall performance and it is comparable to the performance of human experts.The Department of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University
Noise-robust method for image segmentation
Segmentation of noisy images is one of the most challenging problems in image analysis and any improvement of segmentation methods can highly influence the performance of many image processing applications. In automated image segmentation, the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering has been widely used because of its ability to model uncertainty within the data, applicability to multi-modal data and fairly robust behaviour. However, the standard FCM algorithm does not consider any information about the spatial linage context and is highly sensitive to noise and other imaging artefacts. Considering above mentioned problems, we developed a new FCM-based approach for the noise-robust fuzzy clustering and we present it in this paper. In this new iterative algorithm we incorporated both spatial and feature space information into the similarity measure and the membership function. We considered that spatial information depends on the relative location and features of the neighbouring pixels. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on synthetic image with different noise levels and real images. Experimental quantitative and qualitative segmentation results show that our method efficiently preserves the homogeneity of the regions and is more robust to noise than other FCM-based methods
Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks
Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging
A Comparison of Nature Inspired Algorithms for Multi-threshold Image Segmentation
In the field of image analysis, segmentation is one of the most important
preprocessing steps. One way to achieve segmentation is by mean of threshold
selection, where each pixel that belongs to a determined class islabeled
according to the selected threshold, giving as a result pixel groups that share
visual characteristics in the image. Several methods have been proposed in
order to solve threshold selectionproblems; in this work, it is used the method
based on the mixture of Gaussian functions to approximate the 1D histogram of a
gray level image and whose parameters are calculated using three nature
inspired algorithms (Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony
Optimization and Differential Evolution). Each Gaussian function approximates
thehistogram, representing a pixel class and therefore a threshold point.
Experimental results are shown, comparing in quantitative and qualitative
fashion as well as the main advantages and drawbacks of each algorithm, applied
to multi-threshold problem.Comment: 16 pages, this is a draft of the final version of the article sent to
the Journa
An Unsupervised Approach for Overlapping Cervical Cell Cytoplasm Segmentation
The poor contrast and the overlapping of cervical cell cytoplasm are the
major issues in the accurate segmentation of cervical cell cytoplasm. This
paper presents an automated unsupervised cytoplasm segmentation approach which
can effectively find the cytoplasm boundaries in overlapping cells. The
proposed approach first segments the cell clumps from the cervical smear image
and detects the nuclei in each cell clump. A modified Otsu method with prior
class probability is proposed for accurate segmentation of nuclei from the cell
clumps. Using distance regularized level set evolution, the contour around each
nucleus is evolved until it reaches the cytoplasm boundaries. Promising results
were obtained by experimenting on ISBI 2015 challenge dataset.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (IECBES),
2016 IEEE EMBS Conference on. IEEE, 201
Image enhancement using fuzzy intensity measure and adaptive clipping histogram equalization
Image enhancement aims at processing an input
image so that the visual content of the output image is more
pleasing or more useful for certain applications. Although
histogram equalization is widely used in image enhancement due
to its simplicity and effectiveness, it changes the mean brightness
of the enhanced image and introduces a high level of noise and
distortion. To address these problems, this paper proposes
image enhancement using fuzzy intensity measure and adaptive
clipping histogram equalization (FIMHE). FIMHE uses fuzzy
intensity measure to first segment the histogram of the original
image, and then clip the histogram adaptively in order to
prevent excessive image enhancement. Experiments on the
Berkeley database and CVF-UGR-Image database show that
FIMHE outperforms state-of-the-art histogram equalization
based methods
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
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