1,122 research outputs found
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
Visualization and Analysis of Flow Fields based on Clifford Convolution
Vector fields from flow visualization often containmillions of data values. It is obvious that a direct inspection of the data by the user is tedious. Therefore, an automated approach for the preselection of features is essential for a complete analysis of nontrivial flow fields. This thesis deals with automated detection, analysis, and visualization of flow features in vector fields based on techniques transfered from image processing. This work is build on rotation invariant template matching with Clifford convolution as developed in the diploma thesis of the author. A detailed analysis of the possibilities of this approach is done, and further techniques and algorithms up to a complete segmentation of vector fields are developed in the process. One of the major contributions thereby is the definition of a Clifford Fourier
transform in 2D and 3D, and the proof of a corresponding convolution theorem for the Clifford convolution as well as other major theorems. This Clifford Fourier transform allows a frequency analysis of vector fields and the behavior of vectorvalued filters, as well as an acceleration of the convolution computation as a fast transform exists. The depth and precision of flow field analysis based on template matching and Clifford convolution is studied in detail for a specific application, which are flow fields measured in the wake of a helicopter rotor. Determining the features and their parameters in this data is an important step for a better understanding of the observed flow. Specific techniques dealing with subpixel accuracy and the parameters to be determined are developed on the way. To regard the flow as a superposition of simpler features is a necessity for this application as close vortices influence each other. Convolution is a linear system, so it is suited for this kind of analysis. The suitability of other flow analysis and visualization methods for this task is studied here as well. The knowledge and techniques developed for this work are brought together in the end to compute and visualize feature based segmentations of flow fields. The resulting visualizations display important structures of the flow and highlight the interesting features. Thus, a major step towards robust and automatic detection, analysis and visualization of flow fields is taken
Convolution and Fourier Transform of Second Order Tensor Fields
The goal of this paper is to transfer convolution, correlation and Fourier transform to second order tensor fields. Convolution of two tensor fields is defined using matrix multiplication. Convolution of a tensor field with a scalar mask can thus be described by multiplying the scalars with the real unit matrix. The Fourier transform of tensor fields defined in this paper corresponds to Fourier transform of each of
the tensor components in the field. It is shown that for this convolution and Fourier transform, the well known convolution theorem holds and optimization in speed can be achieved by using Fast Fourier transform algorithms. Furthermore, pattern matching on tensor fields based on this convolution is described
Learning Discriminative Stein Kernel for SPD Matrices and Its Applications
Stein kernel has recently shown promising performance on classifying images
represented by symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. It evaluates the
similarity between two SPD matrices through their eigenvalues. In this paper,
we argue that directly using the original eigenvalues may be problematic
because: i) Eigenvalue estimation becomes biased when the number of samples is
inadequate, which may lead to unreliable kernel evaluation; ii) More
importantly, eigenvalues only reflect the property of an individual SPD matrix.
They are not necessarily optimal for computing Stein kernel when the goal is to
discriminate different sets of SPD matrices. To address the two issues in one
shot, we propose a discriminative Stein kernel, in which an extra parameter
vector is defined to adjust the eigenvalues of the input SPD matrices. The
optimal parameter values are sought by optimizing a proxy of classification
performance. To show the generality of the proposed method, three different
kernel learning criteria that are commonly used in the literature are employed
respectively as a proxy. A comprehensive experimental study is conducted on a
variety of image classification tasks to compare our proposed discriminative
Stein kernel with the original Stein kernel and other commonly used methods for
evaluating the similarity between SPD matrices. The experimental results
demonstrate that, the discriminative Stein kernel can attain greater
discrimination and better align with classification tasks by altering the
eigenvalues. This makes it produce higher classification performance than the
original Stein kernel and other commonly used methods.Comment: 13 page
Supervised learning based multimodal MRI brain tumour segmentation using texture features from supervoxels
BACKGROUND: Accurate segmentation of brain tumour in magnetic resonance images (MRI) is a difficult task due to various tumour types. Using information and features from multimodal MRI including structural MRI and isotropic (p) and anisotropic (q) components derived from the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) may result in a more accurate analysis of brain images. METHODS: We propose a novel 3D supervoxel based learning method for segmentation of tumour in multimodal MRI brain images (conventional MRI and DTI). Supervoxels are generated using the information across the multimodal MRI dataset. For each supervoxel, a variety of features including histograms of texton descriptor, calculated using a set of Gabor filters with different sizes and orientations, and first order intensity statistical features are extracted. Those features are fed into a random forests (RF) classifier to classify each supervoxel into tumour core, oedema or healthy brain tissue. RESULTS: The method is evaluated on two datasets: 1) Our clinical dataset: 11 multimodal images of patients and 2) BRATS 2013 clinical dataset: 30 multimodal images. For our clinical dataset, the average detection sensitivity of tumour (including tumour core and oedema) using multimodal MRI is 86% with balanced error rate (BER) 7%; while the Dice score for automatic tumour segmentation against ground truth is 0.84. The corresponding results of the BRATS 2013 dataset are 96%, 2% and 0.89, respectively. CONCLUSION: The method demonstrates promising results in the segmentation of brain tumour. Adding features from multimodal MRI images can largely increase the segmentation accuracy. The method provides a close match to expert delineation across all tumour grades, leading to a faster and more reproducible method of brain tumour detection and delineation to aid patient management
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