2,123 research outputs found
A Fully Unsupervised Texture Segmentation Algorithm
This paper presents a fully unsupervised texture segmentation algorithm by using a modified discrete wavelet frames decomposition and a mean shift algorithm. By fully unsupervised, we mean the algorithm does not require any knowledge of the type of texture present nor the number of textures in the image to be segmented. The basic idea of the proposed method is to use the modified discrete wavelet frames to extract useful information from the image. Then, starting from the lowest level, the mean shift algorithm is used together with the fuzzy c-means clustering to divide the data into an appropriate number of clusters. The data clustering process is then refined at every level by taking into account the data at that particular level. The final crispy segmentation is obtained at the root level. This approach is applied to segment a variety of composite texture images into homogeneous texture areas and very good segmentation results are reported
A Fusion Framework for Camouflaged Moving Foreground Detection in the Wavelet Domain
Detecting camouflaged moving foreground objects has been known to be
difficult due to the similarity between the foreground objects and the
background. Conventional methods cannot distinguish the foreground from
background due to the small differences between them and thus suffer from
under-detection of the camouflaged foreground objects. In this paper, we
present a fusion framework to address this problem in the wavelet domain. We
first show that the small differences in the image domain can be highlighted in
certain wavelet bands. Then the likelihood of each wavelet coefficient being
foreground is estimated by formulating foreground and background models for
each wavelet band. The proposed framework effectively aggregates the
likelihoods from different wavelet bands based on the characteristics of the
wavelet transform. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method
significantly outperformed existing methods in detecting camouflaged foreground
objects. Specifically, the average F-measure for the proposed algorithm was
0.87, compared to 0.71 to 0.8 for the other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by IEEE TI
Content-based image retrieval of museum images
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is becoming more and more important with the advance of multimedia and imaging technology. Among many retrieval features associated with CBIR, texture retrieval is one of the most difficult. This is mainly because no satisfactory quantitative definition of texture exists at this time, and also because of the complex nature of the texture itself. Another difficult problem in CBIR is query by low-quality images, which means attempts to retrieve images using a poor quality image as a query. Not many content-based retrieval systems have addressed the problem of query by low-quality images. Wavelet analysis is a relatively new and promising tool for signal and image analysis. Its time-scale representation provides both spatial and frequency information, thus giving extra information compared to other image representation schemes. This research aims to address some of the problems of query by texture and query by low quality images by exploiting all the advantages that wavelet analysis has to offer, particularly in the context of museum image collections. A novel query by low-quality images algorithm is presented as a solution to the problem of poor retrieval performance using conventional methods. In the query by texture problem, this thesis provides a comprehensive evaluation on wavelet-based texture method as well as comparison with other techniques. A novel automatic texture segmentation algorithm and an improved block oriented decomposition is proposed for use in query by texture. Finally all the proposed techniques are integrated in a content-based image retrieval application for museum image collections
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An Alternative Approach to Spectrum-Based Atherosclerotic Plaque Characterization Techniques Using Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) Backscattered Signals
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Automatic detection of blood versus non-blood regions on intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images using wavelet packet signatures
Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) has been proven a reliable imaging modality that is widely employed in cardiac interventional procedures. It can provide morphologic as well as pathologic information on the occluded plaques in the coronary arteries. In this paper, we present a new technique using wavelet packet analysis that differentiates between blood and non-blood regions on the IVUS images. We utilized the multi-channel texture segmentation algorithm based on the discrete wavelet packet frames (DWPF). A k-mean clustering algorithm was deployed to partition the extracted textural features into blood and non-blood in an unsupervised fashion. Finally, the geometric and statistical information of the segmented regions was used to estimate the closest set of pixels to the lumen border and a spline curve was fitted to the set. The presented algorithm may be helpful in delineating the lumen border automatically and more reliably prior to the process of plaque characterization, especially with 40 MHz transducers, where appearance of the red blood cells renders the border detection more challenging, even manually. Experimental results are shown and they are quantitatively compared with manually traced borders by an expert. It is concluded that our two dimensional (2-D) algorithm, which is independent of the cardiac and catheter motions performs well in both in-vivo and in-vitro cases
Model-based learning of local image features for unsupervised texture segmentation
Features that capture well the textural patterns of a certain class of images
are crucial for the performance of texture segmentation methods. The manual
selection of features or designing new ones can be a tedious task. Therefore,
it is desirable to automatically adapt the features to a certain image or class
of images. Typically, this requires a large set of training images with similar
textures and ground truth segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework to
learn features for texture segmentation when no such training data is
available. The cost function for our learning process is constructed to match a
commonly used segmentation model, the piecewise constant Mumford-Shah model.
This means that the features are learned such that they provide an
approximately piecewise constant feature image with a small jump set. Based on
this idea, we develop a two-stage algorithm which first learns suitable
convolutional features and then performs a segmentation. We note that the
features can be learned from a small set of images, from a single image, or
even from image patches. The proposed method achieves a competitive rank in the
Prague texture segmentation benchmark, and it is effective for segmenting
histological images
Automatic region-of-interest extraction in low depth-of-field images
PhD ThesisAutomatic extraction of focused regions from images with low depth-of-field
(DOF) is a problem without an efficient solution yet. The capability of
extracting focused regions can help to bridge the semantic gap by integrating
image regions which are meaningfully relevant and generally do not exhibit
uniform visual characteristics. There exist two main difficulties for extracting
focused regions from low DOF images using high-frequency based techniques:
computational complexity and performance.
A novel unsupervised segmentation approach based on ensemble clustering is
proposed to extract the focused regions from low DOF images in two stages.
The first stage is to cluster image blocks in a joint contrast-energy feature space
into three constituent groups. To achieve this, we make use of a normal
mixture-based model along with standard expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm at two consecutive levels of block size. To avoid the common
problem of local optima experienced in many models, an ensemble EM
clustering algorithm is proposed. As a result, relevant blocks, i.e., block-based
region-of-interest (ROI), closely conforming to image objects are extracted.
In stage two, two different approaches have been developed to extract
pixel-based ROI. In the first approach, a binary saliency map is constructed
from the relevant blocks at the pixel level, which is based on difference of
Gaussian (DOG) and binarization methods. Then, a set of morphological
operations is employed to create the pixel-based ROI from the map.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an
average segmentation performance of 91.3% and is computationally 3 times
faster than the best existing approach. In the second approach, a minimal graph
cut is constructed by using the max-flow method and also by using
object/background seeds provided by the ensemble clustering algorithm.
Experimental results demonstrate an average segmentation performance of 91.7%
and approximately 50% reduction of the average computational time by the
proposed colour based approach compared with existing unsupervised
approaches
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