4,537 research outputs found
Image resizing using saliency strength map and seam carving for white blood cell analysis
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A new image-resizing method using seam carving and a Saliency Strength Map (SSM) is proposed to preserve important contents, such as white blood cells included in blood cell images.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To apply seam carving to cell images, a SSM is initially generated using a visual attention model and the structural properties of white blood cells are then used to create an energy map for seam carving. As a result, the energy map maximizes the energies of the white blood cells, while minimizing the energies of the red blood cells and background. Thus, the use of a SSM allows the proposed method to reduce the image size efficiently, while preserving the important white blood cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Experimental results using the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and ROD (Ratio of Distortion) of blood cell images confirm that the proposed method is able to produce better resizing results than conventional methods, as the seam carving is performed based on an SSM and energy map.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>For further improvement, a faster medical image resizing method is currently being investigated to reduce the computation time, while maintaining the same image quality.</p
Search Tracker: Human-derived object tracking in-the-wild through large-scale search and retrieval
Humans use context and scene knowledge to easily localize moving objects in
conditions of complex illumination changes, scene clutter and occlusions. In
this paper, we present a method to leverage human knowledge in the form of
annotated video libraries in a novel search and retrieval based setting to
track objects in unseen video sequences. For every video sequence, a document
that represents motion information is generated. Documents of the unseen video
are queried against the library at multiple scales to find videos with similar
motion characteristics. This provides us with coarse localization of objects in
the unseen video. We further adapt these retrieved object locations to the new
video using an efficient warping scheme. The proposed method is validated on
in-the-wild video surveillance datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art
appearance-based trackers. We also introduce a new challenging dataset with
complex object appearance changes.Comment: Under review with the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for
Video Technolog
Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
We present a deep neural network-based approach to image quality assessment
(IQA). The network is trained end-to-end and comprises ten convolutional layers
and five pooling layers for feature extraction, and two fully connected layers
for regression, which makes it significantly deeper than related IQA models.
Unique features of the proposed architecture are that: 1) with slight
adaptations it can be used in a no-reference (NR) as well as in a
full-reference (FR) IQA setting and 2) it allows for joint learning of local
quality and local weights, i.e., relative importance of local quality to the
global quality estimate, in an unified framework. Our approach is purely
data-driven and does not rely on hand-crafted features or other types of prior
domain knowledge about the human visual system or image statistics. We evaluate
the proposed approach on the LIVE, CISQ, and TID2013 databases as well as the
LIVE In the wild image quality challenge database and show superior performance
to state-of-the-art NR and FR IQA methods. Finally, cross-database evaluation
shows a high ability to generalize between different databases, indicating a
high robustness of the learned features
FOVQA: Blind Foveated Video Quality Assessment
Previous blind or No Reference (NR) video quality assessment (VQA) models
largely rely on features drawn from natural scene statistics (NSS), but under
the assumption that the image statistics are stationary in the spatial domain.
Several of these models are quite successful on standard pictures. However, in
Virtual Reality (VR) applications, foveated video compression is regaining
attention, and the concept of space-variant quality assessment is of interest,
given the availability of increasingly high spatial and temporal resolution
contents and practical ways of measuring gaze direction. Distortions from
foveated video compression increase with increased eccentricity, implying that
the natural scene statistics are space-variant. Towards advancing the
development of foveated compression / streaming algorithms, we have devised a
no-reference (NR) foveated video quality assessment model, called FOVQA, which
is based on new models of space-variant natural scene statistics (NSS) and
natural video statistics (NVS). Specifically, we deploy a space-variant
generalized Gaussian distribution (SV-GGD) model and a space-variant
asynchronous generalized Gaussian distribution (SV-AGGD) model of mean
subtracted contrast normalized (MSCN) coefficients and products of neighboring
MSCN coefficients, respectively. We devise a foveated video quality predictor
that extracts radial basis features, and other features that capture
perceptually annoying rapid quality fall-offs. We find that FOVQA achieves
state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the new 2D LIVE-FBT-FCVR database, as
compared with other leading FIQA / VQA models. we have made our implementation
of FOVQA available at: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/FOVQA.zip
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