Motion Segmentation Aided Super Resolution Image Reconstruction

This dissertation addresses Super Resolution (SR) Image Reconstruction focusing on motion segmentation. The main thrust is Information Complexity guided Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) for Statistical Background Modeling. In the process of developing our framework we also focus on two other topics; motion trajectories estimation toward global and local scene change detections and image reconstruction to have high resolution (HR) representations of the moving regions. Such a framework is used for dynamic scene understanding and recognition of individuals and threats with the help of the image sequences recorded with either stationary or non-stationary camera systems. We introduce a new technique called Information Complexity guided Statistical Background Modeling. Thus, we successfully employ GMMs, which are optimal with respect to information complexity criteria. Moving objects are segmented out through background subtraction which utilizes the computed background model. This technique produces superior results to competing background modeling strategies. The state-of-the-art SR Image Reconstruction studies combine the information from a set of unremarkably different low resolution (LR) images of static scene to construct an HR representation. The crucial challenge not handled in these studies is accumulating the corresponding information from highly displaced moving objects. In this aspect, a framework of SR Image Reconstruction of the moving objects with such high level of displacements is developed. Our assumption is that LR images are different from each other due to local motion of the objects and the global motion of the scene imposed by non-stationary imaging system. Contrary to traditional SR approaches, we employed several steps. These steps are; the suppression of the global motion, motion segmentation accompanied by background subtraction to extract moving objects, suppression of the local motion of the segmented out regions, and super-resolving accumulated information coming from moving objects rather than the whole scene. This results in a reliable offline SR Image Reconstruction tool which handles several types of dynamic scene changes, compensates the impacts of camera systems, and provides data redundancy through removing the background. The framework proved to be superior to the state-of-the-art algorithms which put no significant effort toward dynamic scene representation of non-stationary camera systems

PointGMM: a Neural GMM Network for Point Clouds

Point clouds are a popular representation for 3D shapes. However, they encode a particular sampling without accounting for shape priors or non-local information. We advocate for the use of a hierarchical Gaussian mixture model (hGMM), which is a compact, adaptive and lightweight representation that probabilistically defines the underlying 3D surface. We present PointGMM, a neural network that learns to generate hGMMs which are characteristic of the shape class, and also coincide with the input point cloud. PointGMM is trained over a collection of shapes to learn a class-specific prior. The hierarchical representation has two main advantages: (i) coarse-to-fine learning, which avoids converging to poor local-minima; and (ii) (an unsupervised) consistent partitioning of the input shape. We show that as a generative model, PointGMM learns a meaningful latent space which enables generating consistent interpolations between existing shapes, as well as synthesizing novel shapes. We also present a novel framework for rigid registration using PointGMM, that learns to disentangle orientation from structure of an input shape.Comment: CVPR 2020 -- final versio

Filter-Based Probabilistic Markov Random Field Image Priors: Learning, Evaluation, and Image Analysis

Markov random fields (MRF) based on linear filter responses are one of the most popular forms for modeling image priors due to their rigorous probabilistic interpretations and versatility in various applications. In this dissertation, we propose an application-independent method to quantitatively evaluate MRF image priors using model samples. To this end, we developed an efficient auxiliary-variable Gibbs samplers for a general class of MRFs with flexible potentials. We found that the popular pairwise and high-order MRF priors capture image statistics quite roughly and exhibit poor generative properties. We further developed new learning strategies and obtained high-order MRFs that well capture the statistics of the inbuilt features, thus being real maximum-entropy models, and other important statistical properties of natural images, outlining the capabilities of MRFs. We suggest a multi-modal extension of MRF potentials which not only allows to train more expressive priors, but also helps to reveal more insights of MRF variants, based on which we are able to train compact, fully-convolutional restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) that can model visual repetitive textures even better than more complex and deep models. The learned high-order MRFs allow us to develop new methods for various real-world image analysis problems. For denoising of natural images and deconvolution of microscopy images, the MRF priors are employed in a pure generative setting. We propose efficient sampling-based methods to infer Bayesian minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates, which substantially outperform maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimates and can compete with state-of-the-art discriminative methods. For non-rigid registration of live cell nuclei in time-lapse microscopy images, we propose a global optical flow-based method. The statistics of noise in fluorescence microscopy images are studied to derive an adaptive weighting scheme for increasing model robustness. High-order MRFs are also employed to train image filters for extracting important features of cell nuclei and the deformation of nuclei are then estimated in the learned feature spaces. The developed method outperforms previous approaches in terms of both registration accuracy and computational efficiency

Deformable Shape Completion with Graph Convolutional Autoencoders

The availability of affordable and portable depth sensors has made scanning objects and people simpler than ever. However, dealing with occlusions and missing parts is still a significant challenge. The problem of reconstructing a (possibly non-rigidly moving) 3D object from a single or multiple partial scans has received increasing attention in recent years. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based method for the completion of partial shapes. Unlike the majority of existing approaches, our method focuses on objects that can undergo non-rigid deformations. The core of our method is a variational autoencoder with graph convolutional operations that learns a latent space for complete realistic shapes. At inference, we optimize to find the representation in this latent space that best fits the generated shape to the known partial input. The completed shape exhibits a realistic appearance on the unknown part. We show promising results towards the completion of synthetic and real scans of human body and face meshes exhibiting different styles of articulation and partiality.Comment: CVPR 201

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