Partial shape matching using CCP map and weighted graph transformation matching

La détection de la similarité ou de la différence entre les images et leur mise en correspondance sont des problèmes fondamentaux dans le traitement de l'image. Pour résoudre ces problèmes, on utilise, dans la littérature, différents algorithmes d'appariement. Malgré leur nouveauté, ces algorithmes sont pour la plupart inefficaces et ne peuvent pas fonctionner correctement dans les situations d’images bruitées. Dans ce mémoire, nous résolvons la plupart des problèmes de ces méthodes en utilisant un algorithme fiable pour segmenter la carte des contours image, appelée carte des CCPs, et une nouvelle méthode d'appariement. Dans notre algorithme, nous utilisons un descripteur local qui est rapide à calculer, est invariant aux transformations affines et est fiable pour des objets non rigides et des situations d’occultation. Après avoir trouvé le meilleur appariement pour chaque contour, nous devons vérifier si ces derniers sont correctement appariés. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons l'approche « Weighted Graph Transformation Matching » (WGTM), qui est capable d'éliminer les appariements aberrants en fonction de leur proximité et de leurs relations géométriques. WGTM fonctionne correctement pour les objets à la fois rigides et non rigides et est robuste aux distorsions importantes. Pour évaluer notre méthode, le jeu de données ETHZ comportant cinq classes différentes d'objets (bouteilles, cygnes, tasses, girafes, logos Apple) est utilisé. Enfin, notre méthode est comparée à plusieurs méthodes célèbres proposées par d'autres chercheurs dans la littérature. Bien que notre méthode donne un résultat comparable à celui des méthodes de référence en termes du rappel et de la précision de localisation des frontières, elle améliore significativement la précision moyenne pour toutes les catégories du jeu de données ETHZ.Matching and detecting similarity or dissimilarity between images is a fundamental problem in image processing. Different matching algorithms are used in literature to solve this fundamental problem. Despite their novelty, these algorithms are mostly inefficient and cannot perform properly in noisy situations. In this thesis, we solve most of the problems of previous methods by using a reliable algorithm for segmenting image contour map, called CCP Map, and a new matching method. In our algorithm, we use a local shape descriptor that is very fast, invariant to affine transform, and robust for dealing with non-rigid objects and occlusion. After finding the best match for the contours, we need to verify if they are correctly matched. For this matter, we use the Weighted Graph Transformation Matching (WGTM) approach, which is capable of removing outliers based on their adjacency and geometrical relationships. WGTM works properly for both rigid and non-rigid objects and is robust to high order distortions. For evaluating our method, the ETHZ dataset including five diverse classes of objects (bottles, swans, mugs, giraffes, apple-logos) is used. Finally, our method is compared to several famous methods proposed by other researchers in the literature. While our method shows a comparable result to other benchmarks in terms of recall and the precision of boundary localization, it significantly improves the average precision for all of the categories in the ETHZ dataset

Part-to-whole Registration of Histology and MRI using Shape Elements

Image registration between histology and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a challenging task due to differences in structural content and contrast. Too thick and wide specimens cannot be processed all at once and must be cut into smaller pieces. This dramatically increases the complexity of the problem, since each piece should be individually and manually pre-aligned. To the best of our knowledge, no automatic method can reliably locate such piece of tissue within its respective whole in the MRI slice, and align it without any prior information. We propose here a novel automatic approach to the joint problem of multimodal registration between histology and MRI, when only a fraction of tissue is available from histology. The approach relies on the representation of images using their level lines so as to reach contrast invariance. Shape elements obtained via the extraction of bitangents are encoded in a projective-invariant manner, which permits the identification of common pieces of curves between two images. We evaluated the approach on human brain histology and compared resulting alignments against manually annotated ground truths. Considering the complexity of the brain folding patterns, preliminary results are promising and suggest the use of characteristic and meaningful shape elements for improved robustness and efficiency.Comment: Paper accepted at ICCV Workshop (Bio-Image Computing

Edge Potential Functions (EPF) and Genetic Algorithms (GA) for Edge-Based Matching of Visual Objects

Edges are known to be a semantically rich representation of the contents of a digital image. Nevertheless, their use in practical applications is sometimes limited by computation and complexity constraints. In this paper, a new approach is presented that addresses the problem of matching visual objects in digital images by combining the concept of Edge Potential Functions (EPF) with a powerful matching tool based on Genetic Algorithms (GA). EPFs can be easily calculated starting from an edge map and provide a kind of attractive pattern for a matching contour, which is conveniently exploited by GAs. Several tests were performed in the framework of different image matching applications. The results achieved clearly outline the potential of the proposed method as compared to state of the art methodologies. (c) 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works

Shape Recognition: A Landmark-Based Approach

Shape recognition has applications in computer vision tasks such as industrial automated inspection and automatic target recognition. When objects are occluded, many recognition methods that use global information will fail. To recognize partially occluded objects, we represent each object by a Set of landmarks. The landmarks of an object are points of interest which have important shape attributes and are usually obtained from the object boundary. In this study, we use high curvature points along an object boundary as the landmarks of the object. Given a scene consisting of partially occluded objects, the hypothesis of a model object in the scene is verified by matching the landmarks of an object with those in the scene. A measure of similarity between two landmarks, one from a model and the other from a scene, is needed to perform this matching. One such local shape measure is the sphericity of a triangular transformation mapping the model landmark and its two neighboring landmarks to the scene landmark and its two neighboring landmarks. Sphericity is in general defined for a diffeomorphism. Its invariant properties under a group of transformation, namely, translation, rotation, and scaling are derived. The sphericity of a triangular transformation is shown to be a robust local shape measure in the sense that minor distortion in the landmarks does not significantly alter its value. To match landmarks between a model and a scene, a table of compatibility, where each entry of the table is the sphericity value derived from the mapping of a model landmark to a scene landmark, is constructed. A hopping dynamic programming procedure which switches between a forward and a backward dynamic programming procedure is applied to guide the landmark matching through the compatibility table. The location of the model in the scene is estimated with a least squares fit among the matched landmarks. A heuristic measure is then computed to decide if the model is in the scene

Image processing for plastic surgery planning

This thesis presents some image processing tools for plastic surgery planning. In particular, it presents a novel method that combines local and global context in a probabilistic relaxation framework to identify cephalometric landmarks used in Maxillofacial plastic surgery. It also uses a method that utilises global and local symmetry to identify abnormalities in CT frontal images of the human body. The proposed methodologies are evaluated with the help of several clinical data supplied by collaborating plastic surgeons

Shape-based invariant features extraction for object recognition

International audienceThe emergence of new technologies enables generating large quantity of digital information including images; this leads to an increasing number of generated digital images. Therefore it appears a necessity for automatic systems for image retrieval. These systems consist of techniques used for query specification and re-trieval of images from an image collection. The most frequent and the most com-mon means for image retrieval is the indexing using textual keywords. But for some special application domains and face to the huge quantity of images, key-words are no more sufficient or unpractical. Moreover, images are rich in content; so in order to overcome these mentioned difficulties, some approaches are pro-posed based on visual features derived directly from the content of the image: these are the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approaches. They allow users to search the desired image by specifying image queries: a query can be an exam-ple, a sketch or visual features (e.g., colour, texture and shape). Once the features have been defined and extracted, the retrieval becomes a task of measuring simi-larity between image features. An important property of these features is to be in-variant under various deformations that the observed image could undergo. In this chapter, we will present a number of existing methods for CBIR applica-tions. We will also describe some measures that are usually used for similarity measurement. At the end, and as an application example, we present a specific ap-proach, that we are developing, to illustrate the topic by providing experimental results