14,427 research outputs found
Joint segmentation and classification of retinal arteries/veins from fundus images
Objective Automatic artery/vein (A/V) segmentation from fundus images is
required to track blood vessel changes occurring with many pathologies
including retinopathy and cardiovascular pathologies. One of the clinical
measures that quantifies vessel changes is the arterio-venous ratio (AVR) which
represents the ratio between artery and vein diameters. This measure
significantly depends on the accuracy of vessel segmentation and classification
into arteries and veins. This paper proposes a fast, novel method for semantic
A/V segmentation combining deep learning and graph propagation.
Methods A convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to jointly segment
and classify vessels into arteries and veins. The initial CNN labeling is
propagated through a graph representation of the retinal vasculature, whose
nodes are defined as the vessel branches and edges are weighted by the cost of
linking pairs of branches. To efficiently propagate the labels, the graph is
simplified into its minimum spanning tree.
Results The method achieves an accuracy of 94.8% for vessels segmentation.
The A/V classification achieves a specificity of 92.9% with a sensitivity of
93.7% on the CT-DRIVE database compared to the state-of-the-art-specificity and
sensitivity, both of 91.7%.
Conclusion The results show that our method outperforms the leading previous
works on a public dataset for A/V classification and is by far the fastest.
Significance The proposed global AVR calculated on the whole fundus image
using our automatic A/V segmentation method can better track vessel changes
associated to diabetic retinopathy than the standard local AVR calculated only
around the optic disc.Comment: Preprint accepted in Artificial Intelligence in Medicin
Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement
Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the
enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features.
For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce
curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow.
These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which
increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image.
In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley
structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation
field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very
noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective
local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency.
Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are
applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental
results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in
comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods
Multispecies Fruit Flower Detection Using a Refined Semantic Segmentation Network
In fruit production, critical crop management decisions are guided by bloom intensity, i.e., the number of flowers present in an orchard. Despite its importance, bloom intensity is still typically estimated by means of human visual inspection. Existing automated computer vision systems for flower identification are based on hand-engineered techniques that work only under specific conditions and with limited performance. This letter proposes an automated technique for flower identification that is robust to uncontrolled environments and applicable to different flower species. Our method relies on an end-to-end residual convolutional neural network (CNN) that represents the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. To enhance its sensitivity to flowers, we fine-tune this network using a single dataset of apple flower images. Since CNNs tend to produce coarse segmentations, we employ a refinement method to better distinguish between individual flower instances. Without any preprocessing or dataset-specific training, experimental results on images of apple, peach, and pear flowers, acquired under different conditions demonstrate the robustness and broad applicability of our method
Automatic Model Based Dataset Generation for Fast and Accurate Crop and Weeds Detection
Selective weeding is one of the key challenges in the field of agriculture
robotics. To accomplish this task, a farm robot should be able to accurately
detect plants and to distinguish them between crop and weeds. Most of the
promising state-of-the-art approaches make use of appearance-based models
trained on large annotated datasets. Unfortunately, creating large agricultural
datasets with pixel-level annotations is an extremely time consuming task,
actually penalizing the usage of data-driven techniques. In this paper, we face
this problem by proposing a novel and effective approach that aims to
dramatically minimize the human intervention needed to train the detection and
classification algorithms. The idea is to procedurally generate large synthetic
training datasets randomizing the key features of the target environment (i.e.,
crop and weed species, type of soil, light conditions). More specifically, by
tuning these model parameters, and exploiting a few real-world textures, it is
possible to render a large amount of realistic views of an artificial
agricultural scenario with no effort. The generated data can be directly used
to train the model or to supplement real-world images. We validate the proposed
methodology by using as testbed a modern deep learning based image segmentation
architecture. We compare the classification results obtained using both real
and synthetic images as training data. The reported results confirm the
effectiveness and the potentiality of our approach.Comment: To appear in IEEE/RSJ IROS 201
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