Ayer Hitam Forest (AHFR) from space using satellite remote sensing

There is a high demand to map and monitor the land use and assess their condition for ecological and economic reasons. Information on existing land and cover and their spatial distribution is a pre-requisite for any planning, development and management programme. In this study, Landsat TM data of 1998 were acquired over the AHFR and it's vicinity which covers an area more than 1, 300 ha. The objective of this paper is to map AHFR and assess the land cover of AHFR in 1998 as well as its surrounding area using remote sensing technology. Digital data processing and analysis were carried out using PCI/EASI PACE software, version 6.2 available in Faculty of Forestry, UPM. A false Colour Composite (FCC) of Landsat TM band 4-5-3 (R-G-B) was used in supervised classification using Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC). From a visual interpretation, several features of AHFR could be identified such as federal road, forest road, cleared land, built-up area, oil palm, water bodies and rubber plantation etc. Meanwhile, digital classification showed that seven land use types surrounding AHFR such as forest, secondary forest/shrubs, oil palm, rubber, built-up area, cleared land and water bodies could a easily be mapped out. The mean overall classification accuracy obtained is 86.08 percent with an average accuracy o] 85.64 percent. Satellite map of AHFR is found to be useful for the macro planning and management purposes especially on the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) if further development on the area is to be politicized

Trainable COSFIRE filters for vessel delineation with application to retinal images

Retinal imaging provides a non-invasive opportunity for the diagnosis of several medical pathologies. The automatic segmentation of the vessel tree is an important pre-processing step which facilitates subsequent automatic processes that contribute to such diagnosis. We introduce a novel method for the automatic segmentation of vessel trees in retinal fundus images. We propose a filter that selectively responds to vessels and that we call B-COSFIRE with B standing for bar which is an abstraction for a vessel. It is based on the existing COSFIRE (Combination Of Shifted Filter Responses) approach. A B-COSFIRE filter achieves orientation selectivity by computing the weighted geometric mean of the output of a pool of Difference-of-Gaussians filters, whose supports are aligned in a collinear manner. It achieves rotation invariance efficiently by simple shifting operations. The proposed filter is versatile as its selectivity is determined from any given vessel-like prototype pattern in an automatic configuration process. We configure two B-COSFIRE filters, namely symmetric and asymmetric, that are selective for bars and bar-endings, respectively. We achieve vessel segmentation by summing up the responses of the two rotation-invariant B-COSFIRE filters followed by thresholding. The results that we achieve on three publicly available data sets (DRIVE: Se = 0.7655, Sp = 0.9704; STARE: Se = 0.7716, Sp = 0.9701; CHASE_DB1: Se = 0.7585, Sp = 0.9587) are higher than many of the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed segmentation approach is also very efficient with a time complexity that is significantly lower than existing methods.peer-reviewe

Assessment of a photogrammetric approach for urban DSM extraction from tri-stereoscopic satellite imagery

Built-up environments are extremely complex for 3D surface modelling purposes. The main distortions that hamper 3D reconstruction from 2D imagery are image dissimilarities, concealed areas, shadows, height discontinuities and discrepancies between smooth terrain and man-made features. A methodology is proposed to improve automatic photogrammetric extraction of an urban surface model from high resolution satellite imagery with the emphasis on strategies to reduce the effects of the cited distortions and to make image matching more robust. Instead of a standard stereoscopic approach, a digital surface model is derived from tri-stereoscopic satellite imagery. This is based on an extensive multi-image matching strategy that fully benefits from the geometric and radiometric information contained in the three images. The bundled triplet consists of an IKONOS along-track pair and an additional near-nadir IKONOS image. For the tri-stereoscopic study a densely built-up area, extending from the centre of Istanbul to the urban fringe, is selected. The accuracy of the model extracted from the IKONOS triplet, as well as the model extracted from only the along-track stereopair, are assessed by comparison with 3D check points and 3D building vector data

Process of image super-resolution

In this paper we explain a process of super-resolution reconstruction allowing to increase the resolution of an image.The need for high-resolution digital images exists in diverse domains, for example the medical and spatial domains. The obtaining of high-resolution digital images can be made at the time of the shooting, but it is often synonymic of important costs because of the necessary material to avoid such costs, it is known how to use methods of super-resolution reconstruction, consisting from one or several low resolution images to obtain a high-resolution image. The american patent US 9208537 describes such an algorithm. A zone of one low-resolution image is isolated and categorized according to the information contained in pixels forming the borders of the zone. The category of it zone determines the type of interpolation used to add pixels in aforementioned zone, to increase the neatness of the images. It is also known how to reconstruct a low-resolution image there high-resolution image by using a model of super-resolution reconstruction whose learning is based on networks of neurons and on image or a picture library. The demand of chinese patent CN 107563965 and the scientist publication "Pixel Recursive Super Resolution", R. Dahl, M. Norouzi, J. Shlens propose such methods. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct coherent human faces from very degraded pixelated images with a very fast algorithm, more faster than compressed sensing (CS), easier to compute and without deep learning, so without important technology resources, i.e. a large database of thousands training images (see arXiv:2003.13063). This technological breakthrough has been patented in 2018 with the demand of French patent FR 1855485 (https://patents.google.com/patent/FR3082980A1, see the HAL reference https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01875898v1).Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Level-Set Based Artery-Vein Separation in Blood Pool Agent CE-MR Angiograms

Blood pool agents (BPAs) for contrast-enhanced (CE) magnetic-resonance angiography (MRA) allow prolonged imaging times for higher contrast and resolution. Imaging is performed during the steady state when the contrast agent is distributed through the complete vascular system. However, simultaneous venous and arterial enhancement in this steady state hampers interpretation. In order to improve visualization of the arteries and veins from steady-state BPA data, a semiautomated method for artery-vein separation is presented. In this method, the central arterial axis and central venous axis are used as initializations for two surfaces that simultaneously evolve in order to capture the arterial and venous parts of the vasculature using the level-set framework. Since arteries and veins can be in close proximity of each other, leakage from the evolving arterial (venous) surface into the venous (arterial) part of the vasculature is inevitable. In these situations, voxels are labeled arterial or venous based on the arrival time of the respective surface. The evolution is steered by external forces related to feature images derived from the image data and by internal forces related to the geometry of the level sets. In this paper, the robustness and accuracy of three external forces (based on image intensity, image gradient, and vessel-enhancement filtering) and combinations of them are investigated and tested on seven patient datasets. To this end, results with the level-set-based segmentation are compared to the reference-standard manually obtained segmentations. Best results are achieved by applying a combination of intensity- and gradient-based forces and a smoothness constraint based on the curvature of the surface. By applying this combination to the seven datasets, it is shown that, with minimal user interaction, artery-vein separation for improved arterial and venous visualization in BPA CE-MRA can be achieved