11,956 research outputs found
MedGA: A novel evolutionary method for image enhancement in medical imaging systems
Medical imaging systems often require the application of image enhancement techniques to help physicians in anomaly/abnormality detection and diagnosis, as well as to improve the quality of images that undergo automated image processing. In this work we introduce MedGA, a novel image enhancement method based on Genetic Algorithms that is able to improve the appearance and the visual quality of images characterized by a bimodal gray level intensity histogram, by strengthening their two underlying sub-distributions. MedGA can be exploited as a pre-processing step for the enhancement of images with a nearly bimodal histogram distribution, to improve the results achieved by downstream image processing techniques. As a case study, we use MedGA as a clinical expert system for contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance image analysis, considering Magnetic Resonance guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery for uterine fibroids. The performances of MedGA are quantitatively evaluated by means of various image enhancement metrics, and compared against the conventional state-of-the-art image enhancement techniques, namely, histogram equalization, bi-histogram equalization, encoding and decoding Gamma transformations, and sigmoid transformations. We show that MedGA considerably outperforms the other approaches in terms of signal and perceived image quality, while preserving the input mean brightness. MedGA may have a significant impact in real healthcare environments, representing an intelligent solution for Clinical Decision Support Systems in radiology practice for image enhancement, to visually assist physicians during their interactive decision-making tasks, as well as for the improvement of downstream automated processing pipelines in clinically useful measurements
How is Gaze Influenced by Image Transformations? Dataset and Model
Data size is the bottleneck for developing deep saliency models, because
collecting eye-movement data is very time consuming and expensive. Most of
current studies on human attention and saliency modeling have used high quality
stereotype stimuli. In real world, however, captured images undergo various
types of transformations. Can we use these transformations to augment existing
saliency datasets? Here, we first create a novel saliency dataset including
fixations of 10 observers over 1900 images degraded by 19 types of
transformations. Second, by analyzing eye movements, we find that observers
look at different locations over transformed versus original images. Third, we
utilize the new data over transformed images, called data augmentation
transformation (DAT), to train deep saliency models. We find that label
preserving DATs with negligible impact on human gaze boost saliency prediction,
whereas some other DATs that severely impact human gaze degrade the
performance. These label preserving valid augmentation transformations provide
a solution to enlarge existing saliency datasets. Finally, we introduce a novel
saliency model based on generative adversarial network (dubbed GazeGAN). A
modified UNet is proposed as the generator of the GazeGAN, which combines
classic skip connections with a novel center-surround connection (CSC), in
order to leverage multi level features. We also propose a histogram loss based
on Alternative Chi Square Distance (ACS HistLoss) to refine the saliency map in
terms of luminance distribution. Extensive experiments and comparisons over 3
datasets indicate that GazeGAN achieves the best performance in terms of
popular saliency evaluation metrics, and is more robust to various
perturbations. Our code and data are available at:
https://github.com/CZHQuality/Sal-CFS-GAN
Addressing Model Vulnerability to Distributional Shifts over Image Transformation Sets
We are concerned with the vulnerability of computer vision models to
distributional shifts. We formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that
allows evaluating the regions in the image space where a given model is more
vulnerable, in terms of image transformations applied to the input, and face it
with standard search algorithms. We further embed this idea in a training
procedure, where we define new data augmentation rules according to the image
transformations that the current model is most vulnerable to, over iterations.
An empirical evaluation on classification and semantic segmentation problems
suggests that the devised algorithm allows to train models that are more robust
against content-preserving image manipulations and, in general, against
distributional shifts.Comment: ICCV 2019 (camera ready
A Consistent Histogram Estimator for Exchangeable Graph Models
Exchangeable graph models (ExGM) subsume a number of popular network models.
The mathematical object that characterizes an ExGM is termed a graphon. Finding
scalable estimators of graphons, provably consistent, remains an open issue. In
this paper, we propose a histogram estimator of a graphon that is provably
consistent and numerically efficient. The proposed estimator is based on a
sorting-and-smoothing (SAS) algorithm, which first sorts the empirical degree
of a graph, then smooths the sorted graph using total variation minimization.
The consistency of the SAS algorithm is proved by leveraging sparsity concepts
from compressed sensing.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure
Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?
A neural network deployed in the wild may be asked to make predictions for
inputs that were drawn from a different distribution than that of the training
data. A plethora of work has demonstrated that it is easy to find or synthesize
inputs for which a neural network is highly confident yet wrong. Generative
models are widely viewed to be robust to such mistaken confidence as modeling
the density of the input features can be used to detect novel,
out-of-distribution inputs. In this paper we challenge this assumption. We find
that the density learned by flow-based models, VAEs, and PixelCNNs cannot
distinguish images of common objects such as dogs, trucks, and horses (i.e.
CIFAR-10) from those of house numbers (i.e. SVHN), assigning a higher
likelihood to the latter when the model is trained on the former. Moreover, we
find evidence of this phenomenon when pairing several popular image data sets:
FashionMNIST vs MNIST, CelebA vs SVHN, ImageNet vs CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 / SVHN.
To investigate this curious behavior, we focus analysis on flow-based
generative models in particular since they are trained and evaluated via the
exact marginal likelihood. We find such behavior persists even when we restrict
the flows to constant-volume transformations. These transformations admit some
theoretical analysis, and we show that the difference in likelihoods can be
explained by the location and variances of the data and the model curvature.
Our results caution against using the density estimates from deep generative
models to identify inputs similar to the training distribution until their
behavior for out-of-distribution inputs is better understood.Comment: ICLR 201
Diffeomorphic demons using normalized mutual information, evaluation on multimodal brain MR images
The demons algorithm is a fast non-parametric non-rigid registration method. In recent years great efforts have been made to improve the approach; the state of the art version yields symmetric inverse-consistent largedeformation diffeomorphisms. However, only limited work has explored inter-modal similarity metrics, with no practical evaluation on multi-modality data. We present a diffeomorphic demons implementation using the analytical gradient of Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) in a conjugate gradient optimiser. We report the first qualitative and quantitative assessment of the demons for inter-modal registration. Experiments to spatially normalise real MR images, and to recover simulated deformation fields, demonstrate (i) similar accuracy from NMI-demons and classical demons when the latter may be used, and (ii) similar accuracy for NMI-demons on T1w-T1w and T1w-T2w registration, demonstrating its potential in multi-modal scenarios
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