A Convolutional Neural Network for the Automatic Diagnosis of Collagen VI related Muscular Dystrophies

The development of machine learning systems for the diagnosis of rare diseases is challenging mainly due the lack of data to study them. Despite this challenge, this paper proposes a system for the Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) of low-prevalence, congenital muscular dystrophies from confocal microscopy images. The proposed CAD system relies on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which performs an independent classification for non-overlapping patches tiling the input image, and generates an overall decision summarizing the individual decisions for the patches on the query image. This decision scheme points to the possibly problematic areas in the input images and provides a global quantitative evaluation of the state of the patients, which is fundamental for diagnosis and to monitor the efficiency of therapies.Comment: Submitted for review to Expert Systems With Application

GASP : Geometric Association with Surface Patches

A fundamental challenge to sensory processing tasks in perception and robotics is the problem of obtaining data associations across views. We present a robust solution for ascertaining potentially dense surface patch (superpixel) associations, requiring just range information. Our approach involves decomposition of a view into regularized surface patches. We represent them as sequences expressing geometry invariantly over their superpixel neighborhoods, as uniquely consistent partial orderings. We match these representations through an optimal sequence comparison metric based on the Damerau-Levenshtein distance - enabling robust association with quadratic complexity (in contrast to hitherto employed joint matching formulations which are NP-complete). The approach is able to perform under wide baselines, heavy rotations, partial overlaps, significant occlusions and sensor noise. The technique does not require any priors -- motion or otherwise, and does not make restrictive assumptions on scene structure and sensor movement. It does not require appearance -- is hence more widely applicable than appearance reliant methods, and invulnerable to related ambiguities such as textureless or aliased content. We present promising qualitative and quantitative results under diverse settings, along with comparatives with popular approaches based on range as well as RGB-D data.Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision, 201

Image Reconstruction from Bag-of-Visual-Words

The objective of this work is to reconstruct an original image from Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW). Image reconstruction from features can be a means of identifying the characteristics of features. Additionally, it enables us to generate novel images via features. Although BoVW is the de facto standard feature for image recognition and retrieval, successful image reconstruction from BoVW has not been reported yet. What complicates this task is that BoVW lacks the spatial information for including visual words. As described in this paper, to estimate an original arrangement, we propose an evaluation function that incorporates the naturalness of local adjacency and the global position, with a method to obtain related parameters using an external image database. To evaluate the performance of our method, we reconstruct images of objects of 101 kinds. Additionally, we apply our method to analyze object classifiers and to generate novel images via BoVW