Advancements and Breakthroughs in Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasonic imaging is a powerful diagnostic tool available to medical practitioners, engineers and researchers today. Due to the relative safety, and the non-invasive nature, ultrasonic imaging has become one of the most rapidly advancing technologies. These rapid advances are directly related to the parallel advancements in electronics, computing, and transducer technology together with sophisticated signal processing techniques. This book focuses on state of the art developments in ultrasonic imaging applications and underlying technologies presented by leading practitioners and researchers from many parts of the world

Car make and model recognition under limited lighting conditions at night

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyCar make and model recognition (CMMR) has become an important part of intelligent transport systems. Information provided by CMMR can be utilized when licence plate numbers cannot be identified or fake number plates are used. CMMR can also be used when automatic identification of a certain model of a vehicle by camera is required. The majority of existing CMMR methods are designed to be used only in daytime when most car features can be easily seen. Few methods have been developed to cope with limited lighting conditions at night where many vehicle features cannot be detected. This work identifies car make and model at night by using available rear view features. A binary classifier ensemble is presented, designed to identify a particular car model of interest from other models. The combination of salient geographical and shape features of taillights and licence plates from the rear view are extracted and used in the recognition process. The majority vote of individual classifiers, support vector machine, decision tree, and k-nearest neighbours is applied to verify a target model in the classification process. The experiments on 100 car makes and models captured under limited lighting conditions at night against about 400 other car models show average high classification accuracy about 93%. The classification accuracy of the presented technique, 93%, is a bit lower than the daytime technique, as reported at 98 % tested on 21 CMMs (Zhang, 2013). However, with the limitation of car appearances at night, the classification accuracy of the car appearances gained from the technique used in this study is satisfied

Enhanced change detection performance based on deep despeckling of synthetic aperture radar images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection (CD) focuses on identifying changes between two images at different times for the same geographical region. Recently, several deep learning methods have been proposed for performing SAR based CD. However, speckle noise remains a major challenge for these methods. To address this, we propose a despeckling model (DM) that effectively suppresses speckle noise and enhances the performance of the existing CD methods. The proposed despeckling architecture is not only resilient to multi-temporal SAR acquired from one SAR imaging process (i.e., the same number of SAR images looks before and after the change) but also deals with any combination of single or multi-look images acquired prior and after the change. Moreover, as a second contribution, we have also proposed a loss function that effectively suppresses speckle noise, thereby improving the change detection accuracy. Both the despeckling model and the proposed tolerant noise loss function are evaluated extensively on three public real SAR datasets, achieving superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art SAR CD methods in all datasets

A Hybrid Multibiometric System for Personal Identification Based on Face and Iris Traits. The Development of an automated computer system for the identification of humans by integrating facial and iris features using Localization, Feature Extraction, Handcrafted and Deep learning Techniques.

Multimodal biometric systems have been widely applied in many real-world applications due to its ability to deal with a number of significant limitations of unimodal biometric systems, including sensitivity to noise, population coverage, intra-class variability, non-universality, and vulnerability to spoofing. This PhD thesis is focused on the combination of both the face and the left and right irises, in a unified hybrid multimodal biometric identification system using different fusion approaches at the score and rank level. Firstly, the facial features are extracted using a novel multimodal local feature extraction approach, termed as the Curvelet-Fractal approach, which based on merging the advantages of the Curvelet transform with Fractal dimension. Secondly, a novel framework based on merging the advantages of the local handcrafted feature descriptors with the deep learning approaches is proposed, Multimodal Deep Face Recognition (MDFR) framework, to address the face recognition problem in unconstrained conditions. Thirdly, an efficient deep learning system is employed, termed as IrisConvNet, whose architecture is based on a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Softmax classifier to extract discriminative features from an iris image. Finally, The performance of the unimodal and multimodal systems has been evaluated by conducting a number of extensive experiments on large-scale unimodal databases: FERET, CAS-PEAL-R1, LFW, CASIA-Iris-V1, CASIA-Iris-V3 Interval, MMU1 and IITD and MMU1, and SDUMLA-HMT multimodal dataset. The results obtained have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed systems compared to the previous works by achieving new state-of-the-art recognition rates on all the employed datasets with less time required to recognize the person’s identity.Multimodal biometric systems have been widely applied in many real-world applications due to its ability to deal with a number of significant limitations of unimodal biometric systems, including sensitivity to noise, population coverage, intra-class variability, non-universality, and vulnerability to spoofing. This PhD thesis is focused on the combination of both the face and the left and right irises, in a unified hybrid multimodal biometric identification system using different fusion approaches at the score and rank level. Firstly, the facial features are extracted using a novel multimodal local feature extraction approach, termed as the Curvelet-Fractal approach, which based on merging the advantages of the Curvelet transform with Fractal dimension. Secondly, a novel framework based on merging the advantages of the local handcrafted feature descriptors with the deep learning approaches is proposed, Multimodal Deep Face Recognition (MDFR) framework, to address the face recognition problem in unconstrained conditions. Thirdly, an efficient deep learning system is employed, termed as IrisConvNet, whose architecture is based on a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Softmax classifier to extract discriminative features from an iris image. Finally, The performance of the unimodal and multimodal systems has been evaluated by conducting a number of extensive experiments on large-scale unimodal databases: FERET, CAS-PEAL-R1, LFW, CASIA-Iris-V1, CASIA-Iris-V3 Interval, MMU1 and IITD and MMU1, and SDUMLA-HMT multimodal dataset. The results obtained have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed systems compared to the previous works by achieving new state-of-the-art recognition rates on all the employed datasets with less time required to recognize the person’s identity.Higher Committee for Education Development in Ira

A Review and Analysis of Automatic Optical Inspection and Quality Monitoring Methods in Electronics Industry

Electronics industry is one of the fastest evolving, innovative, and most competitive industries. In order to meet the high consumption demands on electronics components, quality standards of the products must be well-maintained. Automatic optical inspection (AOI) is one of the non-destructive techniques used in quality inspection of various products. This technique is considered robust and can replace human inspectors who are subjected to dull and fatigue in performing inspection tasks. A fully automated optical inspection system consists of hardware and software setups. Hardware setup include image sensor and illumination settings and is responsible to acquire the digital image, while the software part implements an inspection algorithm to extract the features of the acquired images and classify them into defected and non-defected based on the user requirements. A sorting mechanism can be used to separate the defective products from the good ones. This article provides a comprehensive review of the various AOI systems used in electronics, micro-electronics, and opto-electronics industries. In this review the defects of the commonly inspected electronic components, such as semiconductor wafers, flat panel displays, printed circuit boards and light emitting diodes, are first explained. Hardware setups used in acquiring images are then discussed in terms of the camera and lighting source selection and configuration. The inspection algorithms used for detecting the defects in the electronic components are discussed in terms of the preprocessing, feature extraction and classification tools used for this purpose. Recent articles that used deep learning algorithms are also reviewed. The article concludes by highlighting the current trends and possible future research directions.Framework of the IQONIC Project; European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a very wide research field. It involves factors as diverse as sensors, feature extraction, pattern classification, decision fusion, applications and others. The signals processed are commonly one, two or three dimensional, the processing is done in real- time or takes hours and days, some systems look for one narrow object class, others search huge databases for entries with at least a small amount of similarity. No single person can claim expertise across the whole field, which develops rapidly, updates its paradigms and comprehends several philosophical approaches. This book reflects this diversity by presenting a selection of recent developments within the area of pattern recognition and related fields. It covers theoretical advances in classification and feature extraction as well as application-oriented works. Authors of these 25 works present and advocate recent achievements of their research related to the field of pattern recognition

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

The accelerating power of deep learning in diagnosing diseases will empower physicians and speed up decision making in clinical environments. Applications of modern medical instruments and digitalization of medical care have generated enormous amounts of medical images in recent years. In this big data arena, new deep learning methods and computational models for efficient data processing, analysis, and modeling of the generated data are crucially important for clinical applications and understanding the underlying biological process. This book presents and highlights novel algorithms, architectures, techniques, and applications of deep learning for medical image analysis