Object Segmentation in Images using EEG Signals

This paper explores the potential of brain-computer interfaces in segmenting objects from images. Our approach is centered around designing an effective method for displaying the image parts to the users such that they generate measurable brain reactions. When an image region, specifically a block of pixels, is displayed we estimate the probability of the block containing the object of interest using a score based on EEG activity. After several such blocks are displayed, the resulting probability map is binarized and combined with the GrabCut algorithm to segment the image into object and background regions. This study shows that BCI and simple EEG analysis are useful in locating object boundaries in images.Comment: This is a preprint version prior to submission for peer-review of the paper accepted to the 22nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (November 3-7, 2014, Orlando, Florida, USA) for the High Risk High Reward session. 10 page

Review of Person Re-identification Techniques

Person re-identification across different surveillance cameras with disjoint fields of view has become one of the most interesting and challenging subjects in the area of intelligent video surveillance. Although several methods have been developed and proposed, certain limitations and unresolved issues remain. In all of the existing re-identification approaches, feature vectors are extracted from segmented still images or video frames. Different similarity or dissimilarity measures have been applied to these vectors. Some methods have used simple constant metrics, whereas others have utilised models to obtain optimised metrics. Some have created models based on local colour or texture information, and others have built models based on the gait of people. In general, the main objective of all these approaches is to achieve a higher-accuracy rate and lowercomputational costs. This study summarises several developments in recent literature and discusses the various available methods used in person re-identification. Specifically, their advantages and disadvantages are mentioned and compared.Comment: Published 201

Adaptive Nonparametric Image Parsing

In this paper, we present an adaptive nonparametric solution to the image parsing task, namely annotating each image pixel with its corresponding category label. For a given test image, first, a locality-aware retrieval set is extracted from the training data based on super-pixel matching similarities, which are augmented with feature extraction for better differentiation of local super-pixels. Then, the category of each super-pixel is initialized by the majority vote of the $k$-nearest-neighbor super-pixels in the retrieval set. Instead of fixing $k$ as in traditional non-parametric approaches, here we propose a novel adaptive nonparametric approach which determines the sample-specific k for each test image. In particular, $k$ is adaptively set to be the number of the fewest nearest super-pixels which the images in the retrieval set can use to get the best category prediction. Finally, the initial super-pixel labels are further refined by contextual smoothing. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of the new solution over other state-of-the-art nonparametric solutions.Comment: 11 page

Automatic region-of-interest extraction in low depth-of-field images

PhD ThesisAutomatic extraction of focused regions from images with low depth-of-field (DOF) is a problem without an efficient solution yet. The capability of extracting focused regions can help to bridge the semantic gap by integrating image regions which are meaningfully relevant and generally do not exhibit uniform visual characteristics. There exist two main difficulties for extracting focused regions from low DOF images using high-frequency based techniques: computational complexity and performance. A novel unsupervised segmentation approach based on ensemble clustering is proposed to extract the focused regions from low DOF images in two stages. The first stage is to cluster image blocks in a joint contrast-energy feature space into three constituent groups. To achieve this, we make use of a normal mixture-based model along with standard expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm at two consecutive levels of block size. To avoid the common problem of local optima experienced in many models, an ensemble EM clustering algorithm is proposed. As a result, relevant blocks, i.e., block-based region-of-interest (ROI), closely conforming to image objects are extracted. In stage two, two different approaches have been developed to extract pixel-based ROI. In the first approach, a binary saliency map is constructed from the relevant blocks at the pixel level, which is based on difference of Gaussian (DOG) and binarization methods. Then, a set of morphological operations is employed to create the pixel-based ROI from the map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an average segmentation performance of 91.3% and is computationally 3 times faster than the best existing approach. In the second approach, a minimal graph cut is constructed by using the max-flow method and also by using object/background seeds provided by the ensemble clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate an average segmentation performance of 91.7% and approximately 50% reduction of the average computational time by the proposed colour based approach compared with existing unsupervised approaches