LAR Video: Hierarchical Representation for Low Bit-Rate Color Image Sequence Coding

LAR video is a low complexity system for low bit-rate color image sequence encoding. It aims to propose a joint solution for coding and representation of the frame content. In particular, it allows to provide a compressed description of both chromatic components and motion information at a region level without region partition encoding. Initialy proposed in the LAR coder, used principle has proved to be efficient for still color image encoding. Resulting from a hierarchical spatio-temporal segmentation, a Partition Tree (PT) is transmitted to the decoder with a controlled coding cost. Presented results show interesting performances considering both content representation and compression ratios

Monte Carlo-based Noise Compensation in Coil Intensity Corrected Endorectal MRI

Background: Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer found in males making early diagnosis important. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been useful in visualizing and localizing tumor candidates and with the use of endorectal coils (ERC), the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved. The coils introduce intensity inhomogeneities and the surface coil intensity correction built into MRI scanners is used to reduce these inhomogeneities. However, the correction typically performed at the MRI scanner level leads to noise amplification and noise level variations. Methods: In this study, we introduce a new Monte Carlo-based noise compensation approach for coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI which allows for effective noise compensation and preservation of details within the prostate. The approach accounts for the ERC SNR profile via a spatially-adaptive noise model for correcting non-stationary noise variations. Such a method is useful particularly for improving the image quality of coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original raw data is not available. Results: SNR and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) analysis in patient experiments demonstrate an average improvement of 11.7 dB and 11.2 dB respectively over uncorrected endorectal MRI, and provides strong performance when compared to existing approaches. Conclusions: A new noise compensation method was developed for the purpose of improving the quality of coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level. We illustrate that promising noise compensation performance can be achieved for the proposed approach, which is particularly important for processing coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original raw data is not available.Comment: 23 page

Deep learning in computational microscopy

We propose to use deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to perform 2D and 3D computational imaging. Specifically, we investigate three different applications. We first try to solve the 3D inverse scattering problem based on learning a huge number of training target and speckle pairs. We also demonstrate a new DCNN architecture to perform Fourier ptychographic Microscopy (FPM) reconstruction, which achieves high-resolution phase recovery with considerably less data than standard FPM. Finally, we employ DCNN models that can predict focused 2D fluorescent microscopic images from blurred images captured at overfocused or underfocused planes.Published versio

Deep learning approach to Fourier ptychographic microscopy

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained tremendous success in solving complex inverse problems. The aim of this work is to develop a novel CNN framework to reconstruct video sequence of dynamic live cells captured using a computational microscopy technique, Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM). The unique feature of the FPM is its capability to reconstruct images with both wide field-of-view (FOV) and high resolution, i.e. a large space-bandwidth-product (SBP), by taking a series of low resolution intensity images. For live cell imaging, a single FPM frame contains thousands of cell samples with different morphological features. Our idea is to fully exploit the statistical information provided by this large spatial ensemble so as to make predictions in a sequential measurement, without using any additional temporal dataset. Specifically, we show that it is possible to reconstruct high-SBP dynamic cell videos by a CNN trained only on the first FPM dataset captured at the beginning of a time-series experiment. Our CNN approach reconstructs a 12800X10800 pixels phase image using only ~25 seconds, a 50X speedup compared to the model-based FPM algorithm. In addition, the CNN further reduces the required number of images in each time frame by ~6X. Overall, this significantly improves the imaging throughput by reducing both the acquisition and computational times. The proposed CNN is based on the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) framework. Additionally, we also exploit transfer learning so that our pre-trained CNN can be further optimized to image other cell types. Our technique demonstrates a promising deep learning approach to continuously monitor large live-cell populations over an extended time and gather useful spatial and temporal information with sub-cellular resolution

Deep learning approach to Fourier ptychographic microscopy

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained tremendous success in solving complex inverse problems. The aim of this work is to develop a novel CNN framework to reconstruct video sequences of dynamic live cells captured using a computational microscopy technique, Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM). The unique feature of the FPM is its capability to reconstruct images with both wide field-of-view (FOV) and high resolution, i.e. a large space-bandwidth-product (SBP), by taking a series of low resolution intensity images. For live cell imaging, a single FPM frame contains thousands of cell samples with different morphological features. Our idea is to fully exploit the statistical information provided by these large spatial ensembles so as to make predictions in a sequential measurement, without using any additional temporal dataset. Specifically, we show that it is possible to reconstruct high-SBP dynamic cell videos by a CNN trained only on the first FPM dataset captured at the beginning of a time-series experiment. Our CNN approach reconstructs a 12800×10800 pixel phase image using only ∼25 seconds, a 50× speedup compared to the model-based FPM algorithm. In addition, the CNN further reduces the required number of images in each time frame by ∼ 6×. Overall, this significantly improves the imaging throughput by reducing both the acquisition and computational times. The proposed CNN is based on the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) framework. We further propose a mixed loss function that combines the standard image domain loss and a weighted Fourier domain loss, which leads to improved reconstruction of the high frequency information. Additionally, we also exploit transfer learning so that our pre-trained CNN can be further optimized to image other cell types. Our technique demonstrates a promising deep learning approach to continuously monitor large live-cell populations over an extended time and gather useful spatial and temporal information with sub-cellular resolution.We would like to thank NVIDIA Corporation for supporting us with the GeForce Titan Xp through the GPU Grant Program. (NVIDIA Corporation; GeForce Titan Xp through the GPU Grant Program)First author draf

A Review: Person Identification using Retinal Fundus Images

In this paper a review on biometric person identification has been discussed using features from retinal fundus image. Retina recognition is claimed to be the best person identification method among the biometric recognition systems as the retina is practically impossible to forge. It is found to be most stable, reliable and most secure among all other biometric systems. Retina inherits the property of uniqueness and stability. The features used in the recognition process are either blood vessel features or non-blood vessel features. But the vascular pattern is the most prominent feature utilized by most of the researchers for retina based person identification. Processes involved in this authentication system include pre-processing, feature extraction and feature matching. Bifurcation and crossover points are widely used features among the blood vessel features. Non-blood vessel features include luminance, contrast, and corner points etc. This paper summarizes and compares the different retina based authentication system. Researchers have used publicly available databases such as DRIVE, STARE, VARIA, RIDB, ARIA, AFIO, DRIDB, and SiMES for testing their methods. Various quantitative measures such as accuracy, recognition rate, false rejection rate, false acceptance rate, and equal error rate are used to evaluate the performance of different algorithms. DRIVE database provides 100\% recognition for most of the methods. Rest of the database the accuracy of recognition is more than 90\%

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field