10,943 research outputs found
Identification of Gastroenteric Viruses by Electron Microscopy Using Higher Order Spectral Features
Background: Many paediatric illnesses are caused by viral agents, for example, acute gastroenteritis. Electron microscopy can provide images of viral particles and can be used to identify the agents. Objectives: The use of electron microscopy as a diagnostic tool is limited by the need for high level of expertise in interpreting these images and the time required. A semi-automated method is proposed in this paper. Study design: The method is based on bispectal features that capture contour and texture information while providing robustness to shift, rotation, changes in size and noise. The magnification or true size of the viral particles need not be known precisely, but if available can be used additionally for improved classification. Viral particles from one or more images are segmented and analyzed to verify whether they belong to a particular class (such as Adenovirus, Rotavirus, etc.) or not. Two experiments were conducted—depending on the populations from which virus particle images were collected for training and testing, respectively. In the first, disjoint subsets from a pooled population of virus particles obtained from several images were used. In the second, separate populations from separate images were used. The performance of the method on viruses of similar size was separately evaluated using Astrovirus, HAV and Poliovirus. A Gaussian Mixture Model was used for the probability density of the features. A threshold on the log-likelihood is varied to study false alarm and false rejection trade-off. Features from many particles and/or likelihoods from independent tests are averaged to yield better performance. Results: An equal error rate (EER) of 2% is obtained for verification of Rotavirus (tested against three other viruses) when features from 15 viral particle images are averaged. It drops further to less than 0.2% when scores from two tests are averaged to make a decision. For verification of Astrovirus (tested against two others of the same size) the EER was less than 2% when 20 particles and two tests were used. Conclusion: Bispectral features and Gaussian mixture modelling of their probability density are shown to be effective in identifying viruses from electron microscope images. With the use of digital imaging in electron microscopes, this method can be fully automated
Improved texture image classification through the use of a corrosion-inspired cellular automaton
In this paper, the problem of classifying synthetic and natural texture
images is addressed. To tackle this problem, an innovative method is proposed
that combines concepts from corrosion modeling and cellular automata to
generate a texture descriptor. The core processes of metal (pitting) corrosion
are identified and applied to texture images by incorporating the basic
mechanisms of corrosion in the transition function of the cellular automaton.
The surface morphology of the image is analyzed before and during the
application of the transition function of the cellular automaton. In each
iteration the cumulative mass of corroded product is obtained to construct each
of the attributes of the texture descriptor. In a final step, this texture
descriptor is used for image classification by applying Linear Discriminant
Analysis. The method was tested on the well-known Brodatz and Vistex databases.
In addition, in order to verify the robustness of the method, its invariance to
noise and rotation were tested. To that end, different variants of the original
two databases were obtained through addition of noise to and rotation of the
images. The results showed that the method is effective for texture
classification according to the high success rates obtained in all cases. This
indicates the potential of employing methods inspired on natural phenomena in
other fields.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure
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