Perception-based fuzzy partitions for visual texture modelling

Visual textures in images are usually described by humans using linguistic terms related to their perceptual properties, like “very coarse”, “low directional”, or “high contrasted”. Computational models with the ability of providing a perceptual texture characterization on the basis of these terms can be very useful in tasks like semantic description of images, content-based image retrieval using linguistic queries, or expert systems design based on low level visual features. In this paper, we address the problem of simulating the human perception of texture, obtaining linguistic labels to describe it in natural language. For this modeling, fuzzy partitions defined on the domain of some of the most representative measures of each property are employed. In order to define the fuzzy partitions, the number of linguistic labels and the parameters of the membership functions are calculated taking into account the relationship between the computational values given by the measures and the human perception of the corresponding property. The performance of each fuzzy partition is analyzed and tested using the human assessments, and a ranking of measures is obtained according to their ability to represent the perception of the property, allowing to identify the most suitable measure

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) in Remote Clinical Diagnosis and Healthcare

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) locates, retrieves and displays images alike to one given as a query, using a set of features. It demands accessible data in medical archives and from medical equipment, to infer meaning after some processing. A problem similar in some sense to the target image can aid clinicians. CBIR complements text-based retrieval and improves evidence-based diagnosis, administration, teaching, and research in healthcare. It facilitates visual/automatic diagnosis and decision-making in real-time remote consultation/screening, store-and-forward tests, home care assistance and overall patient surveillance. Metrics help comparing visual data and improve diagnostic. Specially designed architectures can benefit from the application scenario. CBIR use calls for file storage standardization, querying procedures, efficient image transmission, realistic databases, global availability, access simplicity, and Internet-based structures. This chapter recommends important and complex aspects required to handle visual content in healthcare.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures, Book Chapter from "Encyclopedia of E-Health and Telemedicine

An adaptive fuzzy approach for modelling visual texture properties

The analysis of the perceptual properties of texture plays a fundamental role in tasks like semantic description of images, content-based image retrieval using linguistic queries, or expert systems design based on low level visual features. The presence of these properties in images is very difficult to characterize due to their imprecision, and, moreover, because their perception may change depending on the user or the image context. In this paper, texture properties are modeled by means of an adaptive fuzzy approach that takes into account the subjectivity of the human perception. For this purpose, a methodology in two phases has been proposed. First, non-adaptive fuzzy models, that represent the average human perception about the presence of the texture properties, are obtained. For this modeling, we propose to learn a relationship between representative measures of the properties and the assessments given by human subjects. In a second phase, the obtained fuzzy sets are adapted in order to model the particular perception of the properties that a user may have, as well as the changes in perception influenced by the image context. For this purpose, the membership functions are automatically transformed on the basic of the information given by the user or extracted from the image context, respectively

A novel fusion approach in the extraction of kernel descriptor with improved effectiveness and efficiency

Image representation using feature descriptors is crucial. A number of histogram-based descriptors are widely used for this purpose. However, histogram-based descriptors have certain limitations and kernel descriptors (KDES) are proven to overcome them. Moreover, the combination of more than one KDES performs better than an individual KDES. Conventionally, KDES fusion is performed by concatenating them after the gradient, colour and shape descriptors have been extracted. This approach has limitations in regard to the efficiency as well as the effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to fuse different image features before the descriptor extraction, resulting in a compact descriptor which is efficient and effective. In addition, we have investigated the effect on the proposed descriptor when texture-based features are fused along with the conventionally used features. Our proposed descriptor is examined on two publicly available image databases and shown to provide outstanding performances

Adaptive Multidimensional Fuzzy Sets for Texture Modeling

The modeling of the perceptual properties of texture plays a fundamental role in tasks where some interaction with subjects is needed. In order to face the imprecision related to these properties, fuzzy sets defined on the domain of computational measures of the corresponding property are usually employed. In this sense, the most interesting approaches show that the combination of different measures as reference sets improve the texture characterization. However, the main drawback of these proposals is that they do not take into account the subjectivity associated with human perception. For example, the perception of a texture property may change depending on the user, and in addition, the image context may influence the global perception of a given property. In this paper, we propose to solve these problems by combining the use of several computational measures in a reference set with adaptation to the subjectivity of human perception. To do this, we propose a generic methodology that automatically transforms any multidimensional fuzzy set modeling a texture property to the particular perception of a new user or to the image context. For this purpose, the information given by the user, or extracted from the textures present in the image, are employed

Research on Beef Skeletal Maturity Determination Based on Shape Description and Neural Network

Physiological maturity is an important indicator for beef quality. In traditional method, the maturity grade is determined by subjectively evaluating the degree of cartilage ossification at the tips of the dorsal spine of the thoracic vertebrae. This paper uses the computer vision to replace the artificial method for extracting object (cartilage and bone) regions. Hu invariant moments of object region were calculated as the regional shape characteristic parameters. A trained Hopfield neural network model was used for recognizing cartilage and bone area in thoracic vertebrae image based on minimum Euclidean distance. The result showed that the accuracy of network recognition for cartilage and bone region was 92.75% and 87.68%, respectively. For automatically maturity prediction, the accuracy of prediction was 86%. Algorithm proposed in this paper proved the image description and neural network modeling was an effective method for extracting image feature regions

Hierarchical indexing for region based image retrieval

Region-based image retrieval system has been an active research area. In this study we developed an improved region-based image retrieval system. The system applies image segmentation to divide an image into discrete regions, which if the segmentation is ideal, correspond to objects. The focus of this research is to improve the capture of regions so as to enhance indexing and retrieval performance and also to provide a better similarity distance computation. During image segmentation, we developed a modified k-means clustering algorithm for image retrieval where hierarchical clustering algorithm is used to generate the initial number of clusters and the cluster centers. In addition, to during similarity distance computation we introduced object weight based on object\u27s uniqueness. Therefore, objects that are not unique such as trees and skies will have less weight. The experimental evaluation is based on the same 1000 COREL color image database with the FuzzyClub, IRM and Geometric Histogram and the performance is compared between them. As compared with existing technique and systems, such as IRM, FuzzyClub, and Geometric Histogram, our study demonstrate the following unique advantages: (i) an improvement in image segmentation accuracy using the modified k-means algorithm (ii)an improvement in retrieval accuracy as a result of a better similarity distance computation that considers the importance and uniqueness of objects in an image

Textural Difference Enhancement based on Image Component Analysis

In this thesis, we propose a novel image enhancement method to magnify the textural differences in the images with respect to human visual characteristics. The method is intended to be a preprocessing step to improve the performance of the texture-based image segmentation algorithms. We propose to calculate the six Tamura's texture features (coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity and roughness) in novel measurements. Each feature follows its original understanding of the certain texture characteristic, but is measured by some local low-level features, e.g., direction of the local edges, dynamic range of the local pixel intensities, kurtosis and skewness of the local image histogram. A discriminant texture feature selection method based on principal component analysis (PCA) is then proposed to find the most representative characteristics in describing textual differences in the image. We decompose the image into pairwise components representing the texture characteristics strongly and weakly, respectively. A set of wavelet-based soft thresholding methods are proposed as the dictionaries of morphological component analysis (MCA) to sparsely highlight the characteristics strongly and weakly from the image. The wavelet-based thresholding methods are proposed in pair, therefore each of the resulted pairwise components can exhibit one certain characteristic either strongly or weakly. We propose various wavelet-based manipulation methods to enhance the components separately. For each component representing a certain texture characteristic, a non-linear function is proposed to manipulate the wavelet coefficients of the component so that the component is enhanced with the corresponding characteristic accentuated independently while having little effect on other characteristics. Furthermore, the above three methods are combined into a uniform framework of image enhancement. Firstly, the texture characteristics differentiating different textures in the image are found. Secondly, the image is decomposed into components exhibiting these texture characteristics respectively. Thirdly, each component is manipulated to accentuate the corresponding texture characteristics exhibited there. After re-combining these manipulated components, the image is enhanced with the textural differences magnified with respect to the selected texture characteristics. The proposed textural differences enhancement method is used prior to both grayscale and colour image segmentation algorithms. The convincing results of improving the performance of different segmentation algorithms prove the potential of the proposed textural difference enhancement method

A new query dependent feature fusion approach for medical image retrieval based on one-class SVM

With the development of the internet, medical images are now available in large numbers in online repositories, and there exists the need to retrieval the medical images in the content-based ways through automatically extracting visual information of the medical images. Since a single feature extracted from images just characterizes certain aspect of image content, multiple features are necessarily employed to improve the retrieval performance. Furthermore, a special feature is not equally important for different image queries since a special feature has different importance in reflecting the content of different images. However, most existed feature fusion methods for image retrieval only utilize query independent feature fusion or rely on explicit user weighting. In this paper, based on multiply query samples provided by the user, we present a novel query dependent feature fusion method for medical image retrieval based on one class support vector machine. The proposed query dependent feature fusion method for medical image retrieval can learn different feature fusion models for different image queries, and the learned feature fusion models can reflect the different importance of a special feature for different image queries. The experimental results on the IRMA medical image collection demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the retrieval performance effectively and can outperform existed feature fusion methods for image retrieval.<br /