Shape-based invariant features extraction for object recognition

International audienceThe emergence of new technologies enables generating large quantity of digital information including images; this leads to an increasing number of generated digital images. Therefore it appears a necessity for automatic systems for image retrieval. These systems consist of techniques used for query specification and re-trieval of images from an image collection. The most frequent and the most com-mon means for image retrieval is the indexing using textual keywords. But for some special application domains and face to the huge quantity of images, key-words are no more sufficient or unpractical. Moreover, images are rich in content; so in order to overcome these mentioned difficulties, some approaches are pro-posed based on visual features derived directly from the content of the image: these are the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approaches. They allow users to search the desired image by specifying image queries: a query can be an exam-ple, a sketch or visual features (e.g., colour, texture and shape). Once the features have been defined and extracted, the retrieval becomes a task of measuring simi-larity between image features. An important property of these features is to be in-variant under various deformations that the observed image could undergo. In this chapter, we will present a number of existing methods for CBIR applica-tions. We will also describe some measures that are usually used for similarity measurement. At the end, and as an application example, we present a specific ap-proach, that we are developing, to illustrate the topic by providing experimental results

An overview of view-based 2D-3D indexing methods

International audienceThis paper proposes a comprehensive overview of state of the art 2D/3D, view-based indexing methods. The principle of 2D/3D indexing methods consists of describing 3D models by means of a set of 2D shape descriptors, associated with a set of corresponding 2D views (under the assumption of a given projection model). Notably, such an approach makes it possible to identify 3D objects of interest from 2D images/videos. An experimental evaluation is also proposed, in order to examine the influence of the number of views and of the associated viewing angle selection strategies on the retrieval results. Experiments concern both 3D model retrieval and image recognition from a single view. Results obtained show promising performances, with recognition rates from a single view higher then 66%, which opens interesting perspectives in terms of semantic metadata extraction from still images/videos

Geometric guides for interactive evolutionary design

This thesis describes the addition of novel Geometric Guides to a generative Computer-Aided Design (CAD) application that supports early-stage concept generation. The application generates and evolves abstract 3D shapes, used to inspire the form of new product concepts. It was previously a conventional Interactive Evolutionary system where users selected shapes from evolving populations. However, design industry users wanted more control over the shapes, for example by allowing the system to influence the proportions of evolving forms. The solution researched, developed, integrated and tested is a more cooperative human-machine system combining classic user interaction with innovative geometric analysis. In the literature review, different types of Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC), Pose Normalisation (PN), Shape Comparison, and Minimum-Volume Bounding Box approaches are compared, with some of these technologies identified as applicable for this research. Using its Application Programming Interface, add-ins for the Siemens NX CAD system have been developed and integrated with an existing Interactive Evolutionary CAD system. These add-ins allow users to create a Geometric Guide (GG) at the start of a shape exploration session. Before evolving shapes can be compared with the GG, they must be aligned and scaled (known as Pose Normalisation in the literature). Computationally-efficient PN has been achieved using geometric functions such as Bounding Box for translation and scaling, and Principle Axes for the orientation. A shape comparison algorithm has been developed that is based on the principle of non-intersecting volumes. This algorithm is also implemented with standard, readily available geometric functions, is conceptually simple, accessible to other researchers and also offers appropriate efficacy. Objective geometric testing showed that the PN and Shape Comparison methods developed are suitable for this guiding application and can be efficiently adapted to enhance an Interactive Evolutionary Design system. System performance with different population sizes was examined to indicate how best to use the new guiding capabilities to assist users in evolutionary shape searching. This was backed up by participant testing research into two user interaction strategies. A Large Background Population (LBP) approach where the GG is used to select a sub-set of shapes to show to the user was shown to be the most effective. The inclusion of Geometric Guides has taken the research from the existing aesthetic focused tool to a system capable of application to a wider range of engineering design problems. This system supports earlier design processes and ideation in conceptual design and allows a designer to experiment with ideas freely to interactively explore populations of evolving solutions. The design approach has been further improved, and expanded beyond the previous quite limited scope of form exploration

On the Dynamic Time Warping of Cyclic Sequences for Shape Retrieval

In the last years, in shape retrieval, methods based on Dynamic Time Warping and sequences where each point of the contour is represented by elements of several dimensions have had a significant presence. In this approach each point of the closed contour contains information with respect to the other ones, this global information is very discriminant. The current state-of-the-art shape retrieval is based on the analysis of these distances to learn better ones. These methods are robust to noise and invariant to transformations, but, they obtain the invariance to the starting point with a brute force cyclic alignment which has a high computational time. In this work, we present the Cyclic Dynamic Time Warping. It can obtain the cyclic alignment in O(n2 log n) time, where n is the size of both sequences. Experimental results show that our proposal is a better alternative than the brute force cyclic alignment and other heuristics for obtaining this invariance

An Exploration of MPEG-7 Shape Descriptors

The Multimedia Content Description Interface (ISO/IEC 15938), commonly known to as MPEG-7, became a standard as of September of 2001. Unlike its predecessors, MPEG- 7 standardizes multimedia metadata description. By providing robust descriptors and an effective system for storing them, MPEG-7 is designed to provide a means of navigation through audio-visual content. In particular, MPEG-7 provides two two-dimensional shape descriptors, the Angular Radial Transform (ART) and Curvature Scaled Space (CSS), for use in image and video annotation and retrieval. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have a very general structure and are made up of programmable switches that allow the end-user, rather than the manufacturer, to configure these switches for whatever design is needed by their application. This flexibly has led to the use of FPGAs for prototyping and implementing circuit designs as well as their use being suggesting as part of reconfigurable computing. For this work, an FPGA based ART extractor was designed and simulated for a Xilinx Virtex-E XCV300e in order to provide a speedup over software based extraction. The design created is capable of processing over 69,4400 pixels a minute. This design utilizes 99% of the FPGA\u27s logical resources and operates at a clock rate of 25 MHz. Along with the proposed design, the MPEG-7 shape descriptors were explored as to how well they retrieved similar objects and how these objects matched up to what a human would expect. Results showed that the majority of the retrievals made using the MPEG-7 shape descriptors returned visually acceptable results. It should be noted that even the human results had a high amount of variance. Finally, this thesis briefly explored the potential of utilizing the ART descriptor for optical character recognition (OCR) in the context of image retrieval from databases. It was demonstrated that the ART has potential for use in OCR, however there is still research to be performed in this area

Image Processing Algorithms for Detection of Anomalies in Orthopedic Surgery Implants

Orthopedic implant procedures for hip implants are performed on 300,000 patients annually in the United States, with 22.3 million procedures worldwide. While most such operations are successfully performed to relieve pain and restore joint function for the duration of the patient\u27s life, advances in medicine have enabled patients to outlive the life of their implant, increasing the likelihood of implant failure. There is significant advantage to the patient, the surgeon, and the medical community in early detection of implant failures.The research work presented in this thesis demonstrates a non-invasive digital image processing technique for the automated detection of specific arthroplasty failures before requiring revision surgery. This thesis studies hip implant loosening as the primary cause of failure. A combination of digital image segmentation, representation and numerical description is employed and validated on 2-D X-ray images of hip implant phantoms to detect 3-D rotations of the implant, with the support of radial basis function neural networks to accomplish this task. A successful clinical implementation of the methods developed in this thesis can eliminate the need for revision surgery and prolong the life of the orthopedic implant

3-D Content-Based Retrieval and Classification with Applications to Museum Data

There is an increasing number of multimedia collections arising in areas once only the domain of text and 2-D images. Richer types of multimedia such as audio, video and 3-D objects are becoming more and more common place. However, current retrieval techniques in these areas are not as sophisticated as textual and 2-D image techniques and in many cases rely upon textual searching through associated keywords. This thesis is concerned with the retrieval of 3-D objects and with the application of these techniques to the problem of 3-D object annotation. The majority of the work in this thesis has been driven by the European project, SCULPTEUR. This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of a range of 3-D shape descriptors for their suitability for general purpose and specific retrieval tasks using a publicly available data set, the Princeton Shape Benchmark, and using real world museum objects evaluated using a variety of performance metrics. This thesis also investigates the use of 3-D shape descriptors as inputs to popular classification algorithms and a novel classifier agent for use with the SCULPTEUR system is designed and developed and its performance analysed. Several techniques are investigated to improve individual classifier performance. One set of techniques combines several classifiers whereas the other set of techniques aim to find the optimal training parameters for a classifier. The final chapter of this thesis explores a possible application of these techniques to the problem of 3-D object annotation

Pattern Recognition

A wealth of advanced pattern recognition algorithms are emerging from the interdiscipline between technologies of effective visual features and the human-brain cognition process. Effective visual features are made possible through the rapid developments in appropriate sensor equipments, novel filter designs, and viable information processing architectures. While the understanding of human-brain cognition process broadens the way in which the computer can perform pattern recognition tasks. The present book is intended to collect representative researches around the globe focusing on low-level vision, filter design, features and image descriptors, data mining and analysis, and biologically inspired algorithms. The 27 chapters coved in this book disclose recent advances and new ideas in promoting the techniques, technology and applications of pattern recognition

How automated image analysis techniques help scientists in species identification and classification?

Identification of taxonomy at a specific level is time consuming and reliant upon expert ecologists. Hence the demand for automated species identification incre­ased over the last two decades. Automation of data classification is primarily focussed on images while incorporating and analysing image data has recently become easier due to developments in computational technology. Research ef­forts on identification of species include specimens’ image processing, extraction of identical features, followed by classifying them into correct categories. In this paper, we discuss recent automated species identification systems, mainly for categorising and evaluating their methods. We reviewed and compared different methods in step by step scheme of automated identification and classification systems of species images. The selection of methods is influenced by many variables such as level of classification, number of training data and complexity of images. The aim of writing this paper is to provide researchers and scientists an extensive background study on work related to automated species identification, focusing on pattern recognition techniques in building such systems for biodiversity studies. (Folia Morphol 2018; 77, 2: 179–193