89,823 research outputs found
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
Einstein gravity as a 3D conformally invariant theory
We give an alternative description of the physical content of general
relativity that does not require a Lorentz invariant spacetime. Instead, we
find that gravity admits a dual description in terms of a theory where local
size is irrelevant. The dual theory is invariant under foliation preserving
3-diffeomorphisms and 3D conformal transformations that preserve the 3-volume
(for the spatially compact case). Locally, this symmetry is identical to that
of Horava-Lifshitz gravity in the high energy limit but our theory is
equivalent to Einstein gravity. Specifically, we find that the solutions of
general relativity, in a gauge where the spatial hypersurfaces have constant
mean extrinsic curvature, can be mapped to solutions of a particular gauge
fixing of the dual theory. Moreover, this duality is not accidental. We provide
a general geometric picture for our procedure that allows us to trade foliation
invariance for conformal invariance. The dual theory provides a new proposal
for the theory space of quantum gravity.Comment: 27 pages. Published version (minor changes and corrections
Plant image retrieval using color, shape and texture features
We present a content-based image retrieval system for plant image retrieval, intended especially for the house plant identification problem. A plant image consists of a collection of overlapping leaves and possibly flowers, which makes the problem challenging.We studied the suitability of various well-known color, shape and texture features for this problem, as well as introducing some new texture matching techniques and shape features. Feature extraction is applied after segmenting the plant region from the background using the max-flow min-cut technique. Results on a database of 380 plant images belonging to 78 different types of plants show promise of the proposed new techniques
and the overall system: in 55% of the queries, the correct plant image is retrieved among the top-15 results. Furthermore, the accuracy goes up to 73% when a 132-image subset of well-segmented plant images are considered
DART: Distribution Aware Retinal Transform for Event-based Cameras
We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware
retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar
grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is applied to four different
problems, namely object classification, tracking, detection and feature
matching: (1) The DART features are directly employed as local descriptors in a
bag-of-features classification framework and testing is carried out on four
standard event-based object datasets (N-MNIST, MNIST-DVS, CIFAR10-DVS,
NCaltech-101). (2) Extending the classification system, tracking is
demonstrated using two key novelties: (i) For overcoming the low-sample problem
for the one-shot learning of a binary classifier, statistical bootstrapping is
leveraged with online learning; (ii) To achieve tracker robustness, the scale
and rotation equivariance property of the DART descriptors is exploited for the
one-shot learning. (3) To solve the long-term object tracking problem, an
object detector is designed using the principle of cluster majority voting. The
detection scheme is then combined with the tracker to result in a high
intersection-over-union score with augmented ground truth annotations on the
publicly available event camera dataset. (4) Finally, the event context encoded
by DART greatly simplifies the feature correspondence problem, especially for
spatio-temporal slices far apart in time, which has not been explicitly tackled
in the event-based vision domain.Comment: 12 pages, revision submitted to TPAMI in Nov 201
The Link between General Relativity and Shape Dynamics
We show that one can construct two equivalent gauge theories from a linking
theory and give a general construction principle for linking theories which we
use to construct a linking theory that proves the equivalence of General
Relativity and Shape Dynamics, a theory with fixed foliation but spatial
conformal invariance. This streamlines the rather complicated construction of
this equivalence performed previously. We use this streamlined argument to
extend the result to General Relativity with asymptotically flat boundary
conditions. The improved understanding of linking theories naturally leads to
the Lagrangian formulation of Shape Dynamics, which allows us to partially
relate the degrees of freedom.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, no figure
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