Boundary Extraction in Images Using Hierarchical Clustering-based Segmentation

Hierarchical organization is one of the main characteristics of human segmentation. A human subject segments a natural image by identifying physical objects and marking their boundaries up to a certain level of detail [1]. Hierarchical clustering based segmentation (HCS) process mimics this capability of the human vision. The HCS process automatically generates a hierarchy of segmented images. The hierarchy represents the continuous merging of similar, spatially adjacent or disjoint, regions as the allowable threshold value of dissimilarity between regions, for merging, is gradually increased. HCS process is unsupervised and is completely data driven. This ensures that the segmentation process can be applied to any image, without any prior information about the image data and without any need for prior training of the segmentation process with the relevant image data. The implementation details of HCS process have been described elsewhere in the author's work [2]. The purpose of the current study is to demonstrate the performance of the HCS process in outlining boundaries in images and its possible application in processing medical images. [1] P. Arbelaez. Boundary Extraction in Natural Images Using Ultrametric Contour Maps. Proceedings 5th IEEE Workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision (POCV'06). June 2006. New York, USA. [2] A. N. Selvan. Highlighting Dissimilarity in Medical Images Using Hierarchical Clustering Based Segmentation (HCS). M. Phil. dissertation, Faculty of Arts Computing Engineering and Sciences Sheffield Hallam Univ., Sheffield, UK, 2007.</p

Deep Generative Models for Reject Inference in Credit Scoring

Credit scoring models based on accepted applications may be biased and their consequences can have a statistical and economic impact. Reject inference is the process of attempting to infer the creditworthiness status of the rejected applications. In this research, we use deep generative models to develop two new semi-supervised Bayesian models for reject inference in credit scoring, in which we model the data generating process to be dependent on a Gaussian mixture. The goal is to improve the classification accuracy in credit scoring models by adding reject applications. Our proposed models infer the unknown creditworthiness of the rejected applications by exact enumeration of the two possible outcomes of the loan (default or non-default). The efficient stochastic gradient optimization technique used in deep generative models makes our models suitable for large data sets. Finally, the experiments in this research show that our proposed models perform better than classical and alternative machine learning models for reject inference in credit scoring

Empirical techniques and algorithms to develop a resilient non-supervised touch-based authentication system

Touch dynamics (or touch based authentication) refers to a behavioral biometric for touchscreen devices wherein a user is authenticated based on his/her executed touch gestures. This work addresses two research topics. We first present a series of empirical techniques to detect habituation in the user’s touch profile, its detrimental effect on authentication accuracy and strategies to overcome these effects. Habituation here refers to changes in the user’s profile and/or noise within it due to the user’s familiarization with the device and software application. With respect to habituation, we show that habituation causes the user’s touch profile to evolve significantly and irrevocably over time even after the user is familiar with the device and software application. This phenomenon considerably degrades classifier accuracy. We demonstrate techniques that lower the error rate to 3.68% and sets the benchmark in this field for a realistic test setup. Finally, we quantify the benefits of vote-based reclassification of predicted class labels and show that this technique is vital for achieving high accuracy in realistic touch-based authentication systems. In the second half, we implement the first ever non-supervised classification algorithm in touch based continual authentication. This scheme incorporates clustering into the traditional supervised algorithm. We reduce the mis-classification rate by fusing supervised random forest algorithm and non-supervised clustering (either Bayesian learning or simple rule of combinations). Fusing with Bayesian clustering reduced the mis-classification rate by 50% while fusing with simple rule of combination reduced the mis-classification rate by as much as 59.5% averaged over all the users.Master of ScienceComputer Science & Information SystemsUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134750/1/Palaskar2016.pdfDescription of Palaskar2016.pdf : Main articl

Automatic image segmentation with superpixels and image-level labels.

Automatically and ideally segmenting the semantic region of each object in an image will greatly improve the precision and efficiency of subsequent image processing. We propose an automatic image segmentation algorithm based on superpixels and image-level labels. The proposed algorithm consists of three stages. At the stage of superpixel segmentation, we adaptively generate the initial number of superpixels using the minimum spatial distance and the total number of pixels in the image. At the stage of superpixel merging, we define small superpixels and directly merge the most similar superpixel pairs without considering the adjacency, until the number of superpixels equals the number of groupings contained in image-level labels. Furthermore, we add a stage of reclassification of disconnected regions after superpixel merging to enhance the connectivity of segmented regions. On the widely used Microsoft Research Cambridge data set and Berkeley segmentation data set, we demonstrate that our algorithm can produce high-precision image segmentation results compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms