Artery/vein classification using reflection features in retina fundus images

Automatic artery/vein (A/V) classification is one of the important topics in retinal image analysis. It allows the researchers to investigate the association between biomarkers and disease progression on a huge amount of data for arteries and veins separately. Recent proposed methods, which employ contextual information of vessels to achieve better A/V classification accuracy, still rely on the performance of pixel-wise classification, which has received limited attention in recent years. In this paper, we show that these classification methods can be markedly improved. We propose a new normalization technique for extracting four new features which are associated with the lightness reflection of vessels. The accuracy of a linear discriminate analysis classifier is used to validate these features. Accuracy rates of 85.1, 86.9 and 90.6% were obtained on three datasets using only local information. Based on the introduced features, the advanced graph-based methods will achieve a better performance on A/V classification.</p

Invertible Orientation Scores as an Application of Generalized Wavelet Theory,”

Abstract -Inspired by the visual system of many mammals, we consider the construction of-and reconstruction from-an orientation score of an image, via a wavelet transform corresponding to the left-regular representation of the Euclidean motion group in ‫ތ‬ 2 ( ‫ޒ‬ 2 ) and oriented wavelet ψ ∈ ‫ތ‬ 2 ( ‫ޒ‬ 2 ). Because this representation is reducible, the general wavelet reconstruction theorem does not apply. By means of reproducing kernel theory, we formulate a new and more general wavelet theory, which is applied to our specific case. As a result we can quantify the well-posedness of the reconstruction given the wavelet ψ and deal with the question of which oriented wavelet ψ is practically desirable in the sense that it both allows a stable reconstruction and a proper detection of local elongated structures. This enables image enhancement by means of left-invariant operators on orientation scores

Stability of Top-Points in Scale Space

Abstract. This paper presents an algorithm for computing stability of top-points in scale-space. The potential usefulness of top-points in scalespace has already been shown for a number of applications, such as image reconstruction and image retrieval. In order to improve results only reliable top-points should be used. The algorithm is based on perturbation theory and noise propagation

Task-Dependent Inhomogeneous Muscle Activities within the Bi-Articular Human Rectus Femoris Muscle

The motor nerve of the bi-articular rectus femoris muscle is generally split from the femoral nerve trunk into two sub-branches just before it reaches the distal and proximal regions of the muscle. In this study, we examined whether the regional difference in muscle activities exists within the human rectus femoris muscle during maximal voluntary isometric contractions of knee extension and hip flexion. Surface electromyographic signals were recorded from the distal, middle, and proximal regions. In addition, twitch responses were evoked by stimulating the femoral nerve with supramaximal intensity. The root mean square value of electromyographic amplitude during each voluntary task was normalized to the maximal compound muscle action potential amplitude (M-wave) for each region. The electromyographic amplitudes were significantly smaller during hip flexion than during knee extension task for all regions. There was no significant difference in the normalized electromyographic amplitude during knee extension among regions within the rectus femoris muscle, whereas those were significantly smaller in the distal than in the middle and proximal regions during hip flexion task. These results indicate that the bi-articular rectus femoris muscle is differentially controlled along the longitudinal direction and that in particular the distal region of the muscle cannot be fully activated during hip flexion

Linear Scale-Space I : Basic Theory

Vision deals with the problem of deriving information about the world from the light reflected from it. Although the active and task-oriented nature of vision is only implicit in this formulation, this view captures several of the essential aspects of vision. As Marr (1982) phrased it in his book Vision, vision is an information processing task, in which an internal representation of information is of utmost importance. Only by representation information can be captured and made available to decision processes. The purpose of a representation is to make certain aspects of the information content explicit, that is, immediately accessible without any need for additional processing. This introductory chapter deals with a fundamental aspect of early image representation---the notion of scale. As Koenderink (1984) emphasizes, the problem of scale must be faced in any imaging situation. An inherent property of objects in the world and details in images is that they only exist as meaningful entities over certain ranges of scale. A simple example of this is the concept of a branch of a tree, which makes sense only at a scale from, say, a few centimeters to at most a few meters. It is meaningless to discuss the tree concept at the nanometer or the kilometer level. At those scales it is more relevant to talk about the molecules that form the leaves of the tree, or the forest in which the tree grows. Consequently, a multi-scale representation is of crucial importance if one aims at describing the structure of the world, or more specifically the structure of projections of the three-dimensional world onto two-dimensional images. The need for multi-scale representation is well understood, for example, in cartography; maps are produced at different degrees of abstraction. A map of the world contains the largest countries and islands, and possibly, some of the major cities, whereas towns and smaller islands appear at first in a map of a country. In a city guide, the level of abstraction is changed considerably to include streets and buildings etc. In other words, maps constitute symbolic multi-scale representations of the world around us, although constructed manually and with very specific purposes in mind. To compute any type of representation from image data, it is necessary to extract information, and hence interact with the data using certain operators. Some of the most fundamental problems in low-level vision and image analysis concern: what operators to use, where to apply them, and how large they should be. If these problems are not appropriately addressed, the task of interpreting the output results can be very hard. Ultimately, the task of extracting information from real image data is severely influenced by the inherent measurement problem that real-world structures, in contrast to certain ideal mathematical entities, such as ``points'' or ``lines'', appear in different ways depending upon the scale of observation. Phrasing the problem in this way shows the intimate relation to physics. Any physical observation by necessity has to be done through some finite aperture, and the result will, in general, depend on the aperture of observation. This holds for any device that registers physical entities from the real world including a vision system based on brightness data. Whereas constant size aperture functions may be sufficient in many (controlled) physical applications, e.g., fixed measurement devices, and also the aperture functions of the basic sensors in a camera (or retina) may have to determined a priori because of practical design constraints, it is far from clear that registering data at a fixed level of resolution is sufficient. A vision system for handling objects of different sizes and at difference distances needs a way to control the scale(s) at which the world is observed. The goal of this chapter is to review some fundamental results concerning a framework known as scale-space that has been developed by the computer vision community for controlling the scale of observation and representing the multi-scale nature of image data. Starting from a set of basic constraints (axioms) on the first stages of visual processing it will be shown that under reasonable conditions it is possible to substantially restrict the class of possible operations and to derive a (unique) set of weighting profiles for the aperture functions. In fact, the operators that are obtained bear qualitative similarities to receptive fields at the very earliest stages of (human) visual processing (Koenderink 1992). We shall mainly be concerned with the operations that are performed directly on raw image data by the processing modules are collectively termed the visual front-end. The purpose of this processing is to register the information on the retina, and to make important aspects of it explicit that are to be used in later stage processes. If the operations are to be local, they have to preserve the topology at the retina; for this reason the processing can be termed retinotopic processing. Early visual operationsAn obvious problem concerns what information should be extracted and what computations should be performed at these levels. Is any type of operation feasible? An axiomatic approach that has been adopted in order to restrict the space of possibilities is to assume that the very first stages of visual processing should be able to function without any direct knowledge about what can be expected to be in the scene. As a consequence, the first stages of visual processing should be as uncommitted and make as few irreversible decisions or choices as possible. The Euclidean nature of the world around us and the perspective mapping onto images impose natural constraints on a visual system. Objects move rigidly, the illumination varies, the size of objects at the retina changes with the depth from the eye, view directions may change etc. Hence, it is natural to require early visual operations to be unaffected by certain primitive transformations (e.g. translations, rotations, and grey-scale transformations). In other words, the visual system should extract properties that are invariant with respect to these transformations. As we shall see below, these constraints leads to operations that correspond to spatio-temporal derivatives which are then used for computing (differential) geometric descriptions of the incoming data flow. Based on the output of these operations, in turn, a large number of feature detectors can be expressed as well as modules for computing surface shape. The subject of this chapter is to present a tutorial overview on the historical and current insights of linear scale-space theories as a paradigm for describing the structure of scalar images and as a basis for early vision. For other introductory texts on scale-space; see the monographs by Lindeberg (1991, 1994) and Florack (1993) as well as the overview articles by ter Haar Romeny and Florack (1993) and Lindeberg (1994).QC 20111028</p