Automated Algorithm for the Identification of Artifacts in Mottled and Noisy Images

We describe a method for automatically classifying image-quality defects on printed documents. The proposed approach accepts a scanned image where the defect has been localized a priori and performs several appropriate image processing steps to reveal the region of interest. A mask is then created from the exposed region to identify bright outliers. Morphological reconstruction techniques are then applied to emphasize relevant local attributes. The classification of the defects is accomplished via a customized tree classifier that utilizes size or shape attributes at corresponding nodes to yield appropriate binary decisions. Applications of this process include automated/assisted diagnosis and repair of printers/copiers in the field in a timely fashion. The proposed technique was tested on a database of 276 images of synthetic and real-life defects with 94.95% accuracy

Deep Learning in Cardiology

The medical field is creating large amount of data that physicians are unable to decipher and use efficiently. Moreover, rule-based expert systems are inefficient in solving complicated medical tasks or for creating insights using big data. Deep learning has emerged as a more accurate and effective technology in a wide range of medical problems such as diagnosis, prediction and intervention. Deep learning is a representation learning method that consists of layers that transform the data non-linearly, thus, revealing hierarchical relationships and structures. In this review we survey deep learning application papers that use structured data, signal and imaging modalities from cardiology. We discuss the advantages and limitations of applying deep learning in cardiology that also apply in medicine in general, while proposing certain directions as the most viable for clinical use.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, 10 table

A Computer Aided Detection system for mammographic images implemented on a GRID infrastructure

The use of an automatic system for the analysis of mammographic images has proven to be very useful to radiologists in the investigation of breast cancer, especially in the framework of mammographic-screening programs. A breast neoplasia is often marked by the presence of microcalcification clusters and massive lesions in the mammogram: hence the need for tools able to recognize such lesions at an early stage. In the framework of the GPCALMA (GRID Platform for Computer Assisted Library for MAmmography) project, the co-working of italian physicists and radiologists built a large distributed database of digitized mammographic images (about 5500 images corresponding to 1650 patients) and developed a CAD (Computer Aided Detection) system, able to make an automatic search of massive lesions and microcalcification clusters. The CAD is implemented in the GPCALMA integrated station, which can be used also for digitization, as archive and to perform statistical analyses. Some GPCALMA integrated stations have already been implemented and are currently on clinical trial in some italian hospitals. The emerging GRID technology can been used to connect the GPCALMA integrated stations operating in different medical centers. The GRID approach will support an effective tele- and co-working between radiologists, cancer specialists and epidemiology experts by allowing remote image analysis and interactive online diagnosis.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 13th IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference 2003, Montreal, Canada, May 18-23 200

Deep Sketch-Photo Face Recognition Assisted by Facial Attributes

In this paper, we present a deep coupled framework to address the problem of matching sketch image against a gallery of mugshots. Face sketches have the essential in- formation about the spatial topology and geometric details of faces while missing some important facial attributes such as ethnicity, hair, eye, and skin color. We propose a cou- pled deep neural network architecture which utilizes facial attributes in order to improve the sketch-photo recognition performance. The proposed Attribute-Assisted Deep Con- volutional Neural Network (AADCNN) method exploits the facial attributes and leverages the loss functions from the facial attributes identification and face verification tasks in order to learn rich discriminative features in a common em- bedding subspace. The facial attribute identification task increases the inter-personal variations by pushing apart the embedded features extracted from individuals with differ- ent facial attributes, while the verification task reduces the intra-personal variations by pulling together all the fea- tures that are related to one person. The learned discrim- inative features can be well generalized to new identities not seen in the training data. The proposed architecture is able to make full use of the sketch and complementary fa- cial attribute information to train a deep model compared to the conventional sketch-photo recognition methods. Exten- sive experiments are performed on composite (E-PRIP) and semi-forensic (IIIT-D semi-forensic) datasets. The results show the superiority of our method compared to the state- of-the-art models in sketch-photo recognition algorithm