Fuzzy motion adaptive algorithm and its hardware implementation for video de-interlacing

Interlacing techniques were introduced in the early analog TV transmission systems as an efficient mechanism capable of halving the video bandwidth. Currently, interlacing is also used by some modern digital TV transmission systems, however, there is a problem at the receiver side since the majority of modern display devices require a progressive scanning. De-interlacing algorithms convert an interlaced video signal into a progressive one by performing interpolation. To achieve good de-interlacing results, dynamical and local image features should be considered. The gradual adaptation of the de-interlacing technique as a function of the level of motion detected in each pixel is a powerful method that can be carried out by means of fuzzy inference. The starting point of our study is an algorithm that uses a fuzzy inference system to evaluate motion locally (FMA algorithm). Our approach is based on convolution techniques to process a fuzzy rulebase for motion-adaptive de-interlacing. Different strategies based on bi-dimensional convolution techniques are proposed. In particular, the algorithm called 'single convolution algorithm' introduces significant advantages: a more accurate measurement of the level of motion using a matrix of weights, and a unique fuzzification process after the global estimation, which reduces the computational cost. Different architectures for the hardware implementation of this algorithm are described in VHDL language. The physical realization is carried out on a RC100 Celoxica FPGA development board. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.Comunidad Europea FP7-INFSO-ICT-248858Gobierno de España TIN2005-08943-C02-01 y TEC2008-04920Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-0367

Framework for the detection and classification of colorectal polyps

In this thesis we propose a framework for the detection and classification of colorectal polyps to assist endoscopists in bowel cancer screening. Such a system will help reduce not only the miss rate of possibly malignant polyps during screening but also reduce the number of unnecessary polypectomies where the histopathologic analysis could be spared. Our polyp detection scheme is based on a cascade filter to pre-process the incoming video frames, select a group of candidate polyp regions and then proceed to algorithmically isolate the most probable polyps based on their geometry. We also tested this system on a number of endoscopic and capsule endoscopy videos collected with the help of our clinical collaborators. Furthermore, we developed and tested a classification system for distinguishing cancerous colorectal polyps from non-cancerous ones. By analyzing the surface vasculature of high magnification polyp images from two endoscopic platforms we extracted a number of features based primarily on the vessel contrast, orientation and colour. The feature space was then filtered as to leave only the most relevant subset and this was subsequently used to train our classifier. In addition, we examined the scenario of splitting up the polyp surface into patches and including only the most feature rich areas into our classifier instead of the surface as a whole. The stability of our feature space relative to patch size was also examined to ensure reliable and robust classification. In addition, we devised a scale selection strategy to minimize the effect of inconsistencies in magnification and geometric polyp size between samples. Lastly, several techniques were also employed to ensure that our results will generalise well in real world practise. We believe this to be a solid step in forming a toolbox designed to aid endoscopists not only in the detection but also in the optical biopsy of colorectal polyps during in vivo colonoscopy.Open Acces

Fuzzy metrics and fuzzy logic for colour image filtering

El filtrado de imagen es una tarea fundamental para la mayoría de los sistemas de visión por computador cuando las imágenes se usan para análisis automático o, incluso, para inspección humana. De hecho, la presencia de ruido en una imagen puede ser un grave impedimento para las sucesivas tareas de procesamiento de imagen como, por ejemplo, la detección de bordes o el reconocimiento de patrones u objetos y, por lo tanto, el ruido debe ser reducido. En los últimos años el interés por utilizar imágenes en color se ha visto incrementado de forma significativa en una gran variedad de aplicaciones. Es por esto que el filtrado de imagen en color se ha convertido en un área de investigación interesante. Se ha observado ampliamente que las imágenes en color deben ser procesadas teniendo en cuenta la correlación existente entre los distintos canales de color de la imagen. En este sentido, la solución probablemente más conocida y estudiada es el enfoque vectorial. Las primeras soluciones de filtrado vectorial, como por ejemplo el filtro de mediana vectorial (VMF) o el filtro direccional vectorial (VDF), se basan en la teoría de la estadística robusta y, en consecuencia, son capaces de realizar un filtrado robusto. Desafortunadamente, estas técnicas no se adaptan a las características locales de la imagen, lo que implica que usualmente los bordes y detalles de las imágenes se emborronan y pierden calidad. A fin de solventar este problema, varios filtros vectoriales adaptativos se han propuesto recientemente. En la presente Tesis doctoral se han llevado a cabo dos tareas principales: (i) el estudio de la aplicabilidad de métricas difusas en tareas de procesamiento de imagen y (ii) el diseño de nuevos filtros para imagen en color que sacan provecho de las propiedades de las métricas difusas y la lógica difusa. Los resultados experimentales presentados en esta Tesis muestran que las métricas difusas y la lógica difusa son herramientas útiles para diseñar técnicas de filtrado,Morillas Gómez, S. (2007). Fuzzy metrics and fuzzy logic for colour image filtering [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1879Palanci

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

Automatic video segmentation employing object/camera modeling techniques

Practically established video compression and storage techniques still process video sequences as rectangular images without further semantic structure. However, humans watching a video sequence immediately recognize acting objects as semantic units. This semantic object separation is currently not reflected in the technical system, making it difficult to manipulate the video at the object level. The realization of object-based manipulation will introduce many new possibilities for working with videos like composing new scenes from pre-existing video objects or enabling user-interaction with the scene. Moreover, object-based video compression, as defined in the MPEG-4 standard, can provide high compression ratios because the foreground objects can be sent independently from the background. In the case that the scene background is static, the background views can even be combined into a large panoramic sprite image, from which the current camera view is extracted. This results in a higher compression ratio since the sprite image for each scene only has to be sent once. A prerequisite for employing object-based video processing is automatic (or at least user-assisted semi-automatic) segmentation of the input video into semantic units, the video objects. This segmentation is a difficult problem because the computer does not have the vast amount of pre-knowledge that humans subconsciously use for object detection. Thus, even the simple definition of the desired output of a segmentation system is difficult. The subject of this thesis is to provide algorithms for segmentation that are applicable to common video material and that are computationally efficient. The thesis is conceptually separated into three parts. In Part I, an automatic segmentation system for general video content is described in detail. Part II introduces object models as a tool to incorporate userdefined knowledge about the objects to be extracted into the segmentation process. Part III concentrates on the modeling of camera motion in order to relate the observed camera motion to real-world camera parameters. The segmentation system that is described in Part I is based on a background-subtraction technique. The pure background image that is required for this technique is synthesized from the input video itself. Sequences that contain rotational camera motion can also be processed since the camera motion is estimated and the input images are aligned into a panoramic scene-background. This approach is fully compatible to the MPEG-4 video-encoding framework, such that the segmentation system can be easily combined with an object-based MPEG-4 video codec. After an introduction to the theory of projective geometry in Chapter 2, which is required for the derivation of camera-motion models, the estimation of camera motion is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. It is important that the camera-motion estimation is not influenced by foreground object motion. At the same time, the estimation should provide accurate motion parameters such that all input frames can be combined seamlessly into a background image. The core motion estimation is based on a feature-based approach where the motion parameters are determined with a robust-estimation algorithm (RANSAC) in order to distinguish the camera motion from simultaneously visible object motion. Our experiments showed that the robustness of the original RANSAC algorithm in practice does not reach the theoretically predicted performance. An analysis of the problem has revealed that this is caused by numerical instabilities that can be significantly reduced by a modification that we describe in Chapter 4. The synthetization of static-background images is discussed in Chapter 5. In particular, we present a new algorithm for the removal of the foreground objects from the background image such that a pure scene background remains. The proposed algorithm is optimized to synthesize the background even for difficult scenes in which the background is only visible for short periods of time. The problem is solved by clustering the image content for each region over time, such that each cluster comprises static content. Furthermore, it is exploited that the times, in which foreground objects appear in an image region, are similar to the corresponding times of neighboring image areas. The reconstructed background could be used directly as the sprite image in an MPEG-4 video coder. However, we have discovered that the counterintuitive approach of splitting the background into several independent parts can reduce the overall amount of data. In the case of general camera motion, the construction of a single sprite image is even impossible. In Chapter 6, a multi-sprite partitioning algorithm is presented, which separates the video sequence into a number of segments, for which independent sprites are synthesized. The partitioning is computed in such a way that the total area of the resulting sprites is minimized, while simultaneously satisfying additional constraints. These include a limited sprite-buffer size at the decoder, and the restriction that the image resolution in the sprite should never fall below the input-image resolution. The described multisprite approach is fully compatible to the MPEG-4 standard, but provides three advantages. First, any arbitrary rotational camera motion can be processed. Second, the coding-cost for transmitting the sprite images is lower, and finally, the quality of the decoded sprite images is better than in previously proposed sprite-generation algorithms. Segmentation masks for the foreground objects are computed with a change-detection algorithm that compares the pure background image with the input images. A special effect that occurs in the change detection is the problem of image misregistration. Since the change detection compares co-located image pixels in the camera-motion compensated images, a small error in the motion estimation can introduce segmentation errors because non-corresponding pixels are compared. We approach this problem in Chapter 7 by integrating risk-maps into the segmentation algorithm that identify pixels for which misregistration would probably result in errors. For these image areas, the change-detection algorithm is modified to disregard the difference values for the pixels marked in the risk-map. This modification significantly reduces the number of false object detections in fine-textured image areas. The algorithmic building-blocks described above can be combined into a segmentation system in various ways, depending on whether camera motion has to be considered or whether real-time execution is required. These different systems and example applications are discussed in Chapter 8. Part II of the thesis extends the described segmentation system to consider object models in the analysis. Object models allow the user to specify which objects should be extracted from the video. In Chapters 9 and 10, a graph-based object model is presented in which the features of the main object regions are summarized in the graph nodes, and the spatial relations between these regions are expressed with the graph edges. The segmentation algorithm is extended by an object-detection algorithm that searches the input image for the user-defined object model. We provide two objectdetection algorithms. The first one is specific for cartoon sequences and uses an efficient sub-graph matching algorithm, whereas the second processes natural video sequences. With the object-model extension, the segmentation system can be controlled to extract individual objects, even if the input sequence comprises many objects. Chapter 11 proposes an alternative approach to incorporate object models into a segmentation algorithm. The chapter describes a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm, in which the user coarsely marks the object and the computer refines this to the exact object boundary. Afterwards, the object is tracked automatically through the sequence. In this algorithm, the object model is defined as the texture along the object contour. This texture is extracted in the first frame and then used during the object tracking to localize the original object. The core of the algorithm uses a graph representation of the image and a newly developed algorithm for computing shortest circular-paths in planar graphs. The proposed algorithm is faster than the currently known algorithms for this problem, and it can also be applied to many alternative problems like shape matching. Part III of the thesis elaborates on different techniques to derive information about the physical 3-D world from the camera motion. In the segmentation system, we employ camera-motion estimation, but the obtained parameters have no direct physical meaning. Chapter 12 discusses an extension to the camera-motion estimation to factorize the motion parameters into physically meaningful parameters (rotation angles, focal-length) using camera autocalibration techniques. The speciality of the algorithm is that it can process camera motion that spans several sprites by employing the above multi-sprite technique. Consequently, the algorithm can be applied to arbitrary rotational camera motion. For the analysis of video sequences, it is often required to determine and follow the position of the objects. Clearly, the object position in image coordinates provides little information if the viewing direction of the camera is not known. Chapter 13 provides a new algorithm to deduce the transformation between the image coordinates and the real-world coordinates for the special application of sport-video analysis. In sport videos, the camera view can be derived from markings on the playing field. For this reason, we employ a model of the playing field that describes the arrangement of lines. After detecting significant lines in the input image, a combinatorial search is carried out to establish correspondences between lines in the input image and lines in the model. The algorithm requires no information about the specific color of the playing field and it is very robust to occlusions or poor lighting conditions. Moreover, the algorithm is generic in the sense that it can be applied to any type of sport by simply exchanging the model of the playing field. In Chapter 14, we again consider panoramic background images and particularly focus ib their visualization. Apart from the planar backgroundsprites discussed previously, a frequently-used visualization technique for panoramic images are projections onto a cylinder surface which is unwrapped into a rectangular image. However, the disadvantage of this approach is that the viewer has no good orientation in the panoramic image because he looks into all directions at the same time. In order to provide a more intuitive presentation of wide-angle views, we have developed a visualization technique specialized for the case of indoor environments. We present an algorithm to determine the 3-D shape of the room in which the image was captured, or, more generally, to compute a complete floor plan if several panoramic images captured in each of the rooms are provided. Based on the obtained 3-D geometry, a graphical model of the rooms is constructed, where the walls are displayed with textures that are extracted from the panoramic images. This representation enables to conduct virtual walk-throughs in the reconstructed room and therefore, provides a better orientation for the user. Summarizing, we can conclude that all segmentation techniques employ some definition of foreground objects. These definitions are either explicit, using object models like in Part II of this thesis, or they are implicitly defined like in the background synthetization in Part I. The results of this thesis show that implicit descriptions, which extract their definition from video content, work well when the sequence is long enough to extract this information reliably. However, high-level semantics are difficult to integrate into the segmentation approaches that are based on implicit models. Intead, those semantics should be added as postprocessing steps. On the other hand, explicit object models apply semantic pre-knowledge at early stages of the segmentation. Moreover, they can be applied to short video sequences or even still pictures since no background model has to be extracted from the video. The definition of a general object-modeling technique that is widely applicable and that also enables an accurate segmentation remains an important yet challenging problem for further research

Elastic image registration using parametric deformation models

The main topic of this thesis is elastic image registration for biomedical applications. We start with an overview and classification of existing registration techniques. We revisit the landmark interpolation which appears in the landmark-based registration techniques and add some generalizations. We develop a general elastic image registration algorithm. It uses a grid of uniform B-splines to describe the deformation. It also uses B-splines for image interpolation. Multiresolution in both image and deformation model spaces yields robustness and speed. First we describe a version of this algorithm targeted at finding unidirectional deformation in EPI magnetic resonance images. Then we present the enhanced and generalized version of this algorithm which is significantly faster and capable of treating multidimensional deformations. We apply this algorithm to the registration of SPECT data and to the motion estimation in ultrasound image sequences. A semi-automatic version of the registration algorithm is capable of accepting expert hints in the form of soft landmark constraints. Much fewer landmarks are needed and the results are far superior compared to pure landmark registration. In the second part of this thesis, we deal with the problem of generalized sampling and variational reconstruction. We explain how to reconstruct an object starting from several measurements using arbitrary linear operators. This comprises the case of traditional as well as generalized sampling. Among all possible reconstructions, we choose the one minimizing an a priori given quadratic variational criterion. We give an overview of the method and present several examples of applications. We also provide the mathematical details of the theory and discuss the choice of the variational criterion to be used