Fundamentals of cone regression

Cone regression is a particular case of quadratic programming that minimizes a weighted sum of squared residuals under a set of linear inequality constraints. Several important statistical problems such as isotonic, concave regression or ANOVA under partial orderings, just to name a few, can be considered as particular instances of the cone regression problem. Given its relevance in Statistics, this paper aims to address the fundamentals of cone regression from a theoretical and practical point of view. Several formulations of the cone regression problem are considered and, focusing on the particular case of concave regression as example, several algorithms are analyzed and compared both qualitatively and quantitatively through numerical simulations. Several improvements to enhance numerical stability and bound the computational cost are proposed. For each analyzed algorithm, the pseudo-code and its corresponding code in Scilab are provided. The results from this study demonstrate that the choice of the optimization approach strongly impacts the numerical performances. It is also shown that methods are not currently available to solve efficiently cone regression problems with large dimension (more than many thousands of points). We suggest further research to fill this gap by exploiting and adapting classical multi-scale strategy to compute an approximate solution

Smartphone picture organization: a hierarchical approach

We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.Peer ReviewedPreprin

All the people around me: face discovery in egocentric photo-streams

Given an unconstrained stream of images captured by a wearable photo-camera (2fpm), we propose an unsupervised bottom-up approach for automatic clustering appearing faces into the individual identities present in these data. The problem is challenging since images are acquired under real world conditions; hence the visible appearance of the people in the images undergoes intensive variations. Our proposed pipeline consists of first arranging the photo-stream into events, later, localizing the appearance of multiple people in them, and finally, grouping various appearances of the same person across different events. Experimental results performed on a dataset acquired by wearing a photo-camera during one month, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the considered purpose.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted in IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2017

Active skeleton for bacteria modeling

The investigation of spatio-temporal dynamics of bacterial cells and their molecular components requires automated image analysis tools to track cell shape properties and molecular component locations inside the cells. In the study of bacteria aging, the molecular components of interest are protein aggregates accumulated near bacteria boundaries. This particular location makes very ambiguous the correspondence between aggregates and cells, since computing accurately bacteria boundaries in phase-contrast time-lapse imaging is a challenging task. This paper proposes an active skeleton formulation for bacteria modeling which provides several advantages: an easy computation of shape properties (perimeter, length, thickness, orientation), an improved boundary accuracy in noisy images, and a natural bacteria-centered coordinate system that permits the intrinsic location of molecular components inside the cell. Starting from an initial skeleton estimate, the medial axis of the bacterium is obtained by minimizing an energy function which incorporates bacteria shape constraints. Experimental results on biological images and comparative evaluation of the performances validate the proposed approach for modeling cigar-shaped bacteria like Escherichia coli. The Image-J plugin of the proposed method can be found online at http://fluobactracker.inrialpes.fr.Comment: Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging and Visualizationto appear i

Particle detection and tracking in fluorescence time-lapse imaging: a contrario approach

This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for the detection and the tracking of particles in fluorescent time-lapse imaging. In the presence of a very noised and poor-quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a contrario model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads to algorithms that neither require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious parameter tuning and are very robust to noise. Comparative evaluations against a well-established baseline show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art.Comment: Published in Journal of Machine Vision and Application