A comparative evaluation of interactive segmentation algorithms

In this paper we present a comparative evaluation of four popular interactive segmentation algorithms. The evaluation was carried out as a series of user-experiments, in which participants were tasked with extracting 100 objects from a common dataset: 25 with each algorithm, constrained within a time limit of 2 min for each object. To facilitate the experiments, a “scribble-driven” segmentation tool was developed to enable interactive image segmentation by simply marking areas of foreground and background with the mouse. As the participants refined and improved their respective segmentations, the corresponding updated segmentation mask was stored along with the elapsed time. We then collected and evaluated each recorded mask against a manually segmented ground truth, thus allowing us to gauge segmentation accuracy over time. Two benchmarks were used for the evaluation: the well-known Jaccard index for measuring object accuracy, and a new fuzzy metric, proposed in this paper, designed for measuring boundary accuracy. Analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of the suggested measures and provides valuable insights into the performance and characteristics of the evaluated algorithms

Feature Driven Learning Techniques for 3D Shape Segmentation

Segmentation is a fundamental problem in 3D shape analysis and machine learning. The abil-ity to partition a 3D shape into meaningful or functional parts is a vital ingredient of many down stream applications like shape matching, classification and retrieval. Early segmentation methods were based on approaches like fitting primitive shapes to parts or extracting segmen-tations from feature points. However, such methods had limited success on shapes with more complex geometry. Observing this, research began using geometric features to aid the segmen-tation, as certain features (e.g. Shape Diameter Function (SDF)) are less sensitive to complex geometry. This trend was also incorporated in the shift to set-wide segmentations, called co-segmentation, which provides a consistent segmentation throughout a shape dataset, meaning similar parts have the same segment identifier. The idea of co-segmentation is that a set of same class shapes (i.e. chairs) contain more information about the class than a single shape would, which could lead to an overall improvement to the segmentation of the individual shapes. Over the past decade many different approaches of co-segmentation have been explored covering supervised, unsupervised and even user-driven active learning. In each of the areas, there has been widely adopted use of geometric features to aid proposed segmentation algorithms, with each method typically using different combinations of features. The aim of this thesis is to ex-plore these different areas of 3D shape segmentation, perform an analysis of the effectiveness of geometric features in these areas and tackle core issues that currently exist in the literature.Initially, we explore the area of unsupervised segmentation, specifically looking at co-segmentation, and perform an analysis of several different geometric features. Our analysis is intended to compare the different features in a single unsupervised pipeline to evaluate their usefulness and determine their strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis also includes several features that have not yet been explored in unsupervised segmentation but have been shown effective in other areas.Later, with the ever increasing popularity of deep learning, we explore the area of super-vised segmentation and investigate the current state of Neural Network (NN) driven techniques. We specifically observe limitations in the current state-of-the-art and propose a novel Convolu-tional Neural Network (CNN) based method which operates on multi-scale geometric features to gain more information about the shapes being segmented. We also perform an evaluation of several different supervised segmentation methods using the same input features, but with vary-ing complexity of model design. This is intended to see if the more complex models provide a significant performance increase.Lastly, we explore the user-driven area of active learning, to tackle the large amounts of inconsistencies in current ground truth segmentation, which are vital for most segmentation methods. Active learning has been used to great effect for ground truth generation in the past, so we present a novel active learning framework using deep learning and geometric features to assist the user in co-segmentation of a dataset. Our method emphasises segmentation accu-racy while minimising user effort, providing an interactive visualisation for co-segmentation analysis and the application of automated optimisation tools.In this thesis we explore the effectiveness of different geometric features across varying segmentation tasks, providing an in-depth analysis and comparison of state-of-the-art methods

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

Compression of MRI brain images based on automatic extraction of tumor region

In the compression of medical images, region of interest (ROI) based techniques seem to be promising, as they can result in high compression ratios while maintaining the quality of region of diagnostic importance, the ROI, when image is reconstructed. In this article, we propose a set-up for compression of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images based on automatic extraction of tumor. Our approach is to first separate the tumor, the ROI in our case, from brain image, using support vector machine (SVM) classification and region extraction step. Then, tumor region (ROI) is compressed using Arithmetic coding, a lossless compression technique. The non-tumorous region, non-region of interest (NROI), is compressed using a lossy compression technique formed by a combination of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) and arithmetic coding (AC). The classification performance parameters, like, dice coefficient, sensitivity, positive predictive value and accuracy are tabulated. In the case of compression, we report, performance parameters like mean square error and peak signal to noise ratio for a given set of bits per pixel (bpp) values. We found that the compression scheme considered in our setup gives promising results as compared to other schemes

A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain

Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was 0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Radio Galaxy Zoo: Knowledge Transfer Using Rotationally Invariant Self-Organising Maps

With the advent of large scale surveys the manual analysis and classification of individual radio source morphologies is rendered impossible as existing approaches do not scale. The analysis of complex morphological features in the spatial domain is a particularly important task. Here we discuss the challenges of transferring crowdsourced labels obtained from the Radio Galaxy Zoo project and introduce a proper transfer mechanism via quantile random forest regression. By using parallelized rotation and flipping invariant Kohonen-maps, image cubes of Radio Galaxy Zoo selected galaxies formed from the FIRST radio continuum and WISE infrared all sky surveys are first projected down to a two-dimensional embedding in an unsupervised way. This embedding can be seen as a discretised space of shapes with the coordinates reflecting morphological features as expressed by the automatically derived prototypes. We find that these prototypes have reconstructed physically meaningful processes across two channel images at radio and infrared wavelengths in an unsupervised manner. In the second step, images are compared with those prototypes to create a heat-map, which is the morphological fingerprint of each object and the basis for transferring the user generated labels. These heat-maps have reduced the feature space by a factor of 248 and are able to be used as the basis for subsequent ML methods. Using an ensemble of decision trees we achieve upwards of 85.7% and 80.7% accuracy when predicting the number of components and peaks in an image, respectively, using these heat-maps. We also question the currently used discrete classification schema and introduce a continuous scale that better reflects the uncertainty in transition between two classes, caused by sensitivity and resolution limits