Particle detection and tracking in fluorescence time-lapse imaging: a contrario approach

This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for the detection and the tracking of particles in fluorescent time-lapse imaging. In the presence of a very noised and poor-quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a contrario model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads to algorithms that neither require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious parameter tuning and are very robust to noise. Comparative evaluations against a well-established baseline show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art.Comment: Published in Journal of Machine Vision and Application

Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio

Cortical Dynamics of Navigation and Steering in Natural Scenes: Motion-Based Object Segmentation, Heading, and Obstacle Avoidance

Visually guided navigation through a cluttered natural scene is a challenging problem that animals and humans accomplish with ease. The ViSTARS neural model proposes how primates use motion information to segment objects and determine heading for purposes of goal approach and obstacle avoidance in response to video inputs from real and virtual environments. The model produces trajectories similar to those of human navigators. It does so by predicting how computationally complementary processes in cortical areas MT-/MSTv and MT+/MSTd compute object motion for tracking and self-motion for navigation, respectively. The model retina responds to transients in the input stream. Model V1 generates a local speed and direction estimate. This local motion estimate is ambiguous due to the neural aperture problem. Model MT+ interacts with MSTd via an attentive feedback loop to compute accurate heading estimates in MSTd that quantitatively simulate properties of human heading estimation data. Model MT interacts with MSTv via an attentive feedback loop to compute accurate estimates of speed, direction and position of moving objects. This object information is combined with heading information to produce steering decisions wherein goals behave like attractors and obstacles behave like repellers. These steering decisions lead to navigational trajectories that closely match human performance.National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378, BCS-0235398); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624); National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NMA201-01-1-2016

A statistical analysis of particle trajectories in living cells

Recent advances in molecular biology and fluorescence microscopy imaging have made possible the inference of the dynamics of single molecules in living cells. Such inference allows to determine the organization and function of the cell. The trajectories of particles in the cells, computed with tracking algorithms, can be modelled with diffusion processes. Three types of diffusion are considered : (i) free diffusion; (ii) subdiffusion or (iii) superdiffusion. The Mean Square Displacement (MSD) is generally used to determine the different types of dynamics of the particles in living cells (Qian, Sheetz and Elson 1991). We propose here a non-parametric three-decision test as an alternative to the MSD method. The rejection of the null hypothesis -- free diffusion -- is accompanied by claims of the direction of the alternative (subdiffusion or a superdiffusion). We study the asymptotic behaviour of the test statistic under the null hypothesis, and under parametric alternatives which are currently considered in the biophysics literature, (Monnier et al,2012) for example. In addition, we adapt the procedure of Benjamini and Hochberg (2000) to fit with the three-decision test setting, in order to apply the test procedure to a collection of independent trajectories. The performance of our procedure is much better than the MSD method as confirmed by Monte Carlo experiments. The method is demonstrated on real data sets corresponding to protein dynamics observed in fluorescence microscopy.Comment: Revised introduction. A clearer and shorter description of the model (section 2

Unsupervised learning of human motion

An unsupervised learning algorithm that can obtain a probabilistic model of an object composed of a collection of parts (a moving human body in our examples) automatically from unlabeled training data is presented. The training data include both useful "foreground" features as well as features that arise from irrelevant background clutter - the correspondence between parts and detected features is unknown. The joint probability density function of the parts is represented by a mixture of decomposable triangulated graphs which allow for fast detection. To learn the model structure as well as model parameters, an EM-like algorithm is developed where the labeling of the data (part assignments) is treated as hidden variables. The unsupervised learning technique is not limited to decomposable triangulated graphs. The efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated by applying it to generate models of human motion automatically from unlabeled image sequences, and testing the learned models on a variety of sequences

Learning, Categorization, Rule Formation, and Prediction by Fuzzy Neural Networks

National Science Foundation (IRI 94-01659); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-92-J-4015) Air Force Office of Scientific Research (90-0083, N00014-92-J-4015