6,903 research outputs found
Improving Fiber Alignment in HARDI by Combining Contextual PDE Flow with Constrained Spherical Deconvolution
We propose two strategies to improve the quality of tractography results
computed from diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) data. Both
methods are based on the same PDE framework, defined in the coupled space of
positions and orientations, associated with a stochastic process describing the
enhancement of elongated structures while preserving crossing structures. In
the first method we use the enhancement PDE for contextual regularization of a
fiber orientation distribution (FOD) that is obtained on individual voxels from
high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data via constrained
spherical deconvolution (CSD). Thereby we improve the FOD as input for
subsequent tractography. Secondly, we introduce the fiber to bundle coherence
(FBC), a measure for quantification of fiber alignment. The FBC is computed
from a tractography result using the same PDE framework and provides a
criterion for removing the spurious fibers. We validate the proposed
combination of CSD and enhancement on phantom data and on human data, acquired
with different scanning protocols. On the phantom data we find that PDE
enhancements improve both local metrics and global metrics of tractography
results, compared to CSD without enhancements. On the human data we show that
the enhancements allow for a better reconstruction of crossing fiber bundles
and they reduce the variability of the tractography output with respect to the
acquisition parameters. Finally, we show that both the enhancement of the FODs
and the use of the FBC measure on the tractography improve the stability with
respect to different stochastic realizations of probabilistic tractography.
This is shown in a clinical application: the reconstruction of the optic
radiation for epilepsy surgery planning
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Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Signal Belief in Choice Accuracy during a Perceptual Decision
Central to the organization of behavior is the ability to predict the values of outcomes to guide choices. The accuracy of such predictions is honed by a teaching signal that indicates how incorrect a prediction was (“reward prediction error,” RPE). In several reinforcement learning contexts, such as Pavlovian conditioning and decisions guided by reward history, this RPE signal is provided by midbrain dopamine neurons. In many situations, however, the stimuli predictive of outcomes are perceptually ambiguous. Perceptual uncertainty is known to influence choices, but it has been unclear whether or how dopamine neurons factor it into their teaching signal. To cope with uncertainty, we extended a reinforcement learning model with a belief state about the perceptually ambiguous stimulus; this model generates an estimate of the probability of choice correctness, termed decision confidence. We show that dopamine responses in monkeys performing a perceptually ambiguous decision task comply with the model’s predictions. Consequently, dopamine responses did not simply reflect a stimulus’ average expected reward value but were predictive of the trial-to-trial fluctuations in perceptual accuracy. These confidence-dependent dopamine responses emerged prior to monkeys’ choice initiation, raising the possibility that dopamine impacts impending decisions, in addition to encoding a post-decision teaching signal. Finally, by manipulating reward size, we found that dopamine neurons reflect both the upcoming reward size and the confidence in achieving it. Together, our results show that dopamine responses convey teaching signals that are also appropriate for perceptual decisions
Finding Temporally Consistent Occlusion Boundaries in Videos using Geometric Context
We present an algorithm for finding temporally consistent occlusion
boundaries in videos to support segmentation of dynamic scenes. We learn
occlusion boundaries in a pairwise Markov random field (MRF) framework. We
first estimate the probability of an spatio-temporal edge being an occlusion
boundary by using appearance, flow, and geometric features. Next, we enforce
occlusion boundary continuity in a MRF model by learning pairwise occlusion
probabilities using a random forest. Then, we temporally smooth boundaries to
remove temporal inconsistencies in occlusion boundary estimation. Our proposed
framework provides an efficient approach for finding temporally consistent
occlusion boundaries in video by utilizing causality, redundancy in videos, and
semantic layout of the scene. We have developed a dataset with fully annotated
ground-truth occlusion boundaries of over 30 videos ($5000 frames). This
dataset is used to evaluate temporal occlusion boundaries and provides a much
needed baseline for future studies. We perform experiments to demonstrate the
role of scene layout, and temporal information for occlusion reasoning in
dynamic scenes.Comment: Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2015 IEEE Winter Conference
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Vehicle detection and tracking using homography-based plane rectification and particle filtering
This paper presents a full system for vehicle detection and tracking in non-stationary settings based on computer vision. The method proposed for vehicle detection exploits the geometrical relations between the elements in the scene so that moving objects (i.e., vehicles) can be detected by analyzing motion parallax. Namely, the homography of the road plane between successive images is computed. Most remarkably, a novel probabilistic framework based on Kalman filtering is presented for reliable and accurate homography estimation. The estimated homography is used for image alignment, which in turn allows to detect the moving vehicles in the image. Tracking of vehicles is performed on the basis of a multidimensional particle filter, which also manages the exit and entries of objects. The filter involves a mixture likelihood model that allows a better adaptation of the particles to the observed measurements. The system is specially designed for highway environments, where it has been proven to yield excellent results
Unsupervised Object Discovery and Tracking in Video Collections
This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects
as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even
no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary
processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences
between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates
successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our
algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with
instances of the same object class across different videos, a role normally
left to supervisory information in the form of class labels in conventional
image and video understanding methods. Indeed, as demonstrated by our
experiments, our method can handle video collections featuring multiple object
classes, and substantially outperforms the state of the art in colocalization,
even though it tackles a broader problem with much less supervision
A Fusion Approach for Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation
To date, top-performing optical flow estimation methods only take pairs of
consecutive frames into account. While elegant and appealing, the idea of using
more than two frames has not yet produced state-of-the-art results. We present
a simple, yet effective fusion approach for multi-frame optical flow that
benefits from longer-term temporal cues. Our method first warps the optical
flow from previous frames to the current, thereby yielding multiple plausible
estimates. It then fuses the complementary information carried by these
estimates into a new optical flow field. At the time of writing, our method
ranks first among published results in the MPI Sintel and KITTI 2015
benchmarks. Our models will be available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net.Comment: Work accepted at IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer
Vision (WACV 2019
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