Classification of lung disease in HRCT scans using integral geometry measures and functional data analysis

A framework for classification of chronic lung disease from high-resolution CT scans is presented. We use a set of features which measure the local morphology and topology of the 3D voxels within the lung parenchyma and apply functional data classification to the extracted features. We introduce the measures, Minkowski functionals, which derive from integral geometry and show results of classification on lungs containing various stages of chronic lung disease: emphysema, fibrosis and honey-combing. Once trained, the presented method is shown to be efficient and specific at characterising the distribution of disease in HRCT slices

Multi-frame scene-flow estimation using a patch model and smooth motion prior

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the dense 3D motion of a scene over several frames using a set of calibrated cameras. Most current 3D motion estimation techniques are limited to estimating the motion over a single frame, unless a strong prior model of the scene (such as a skeleton) is introduced. Estimating the 3D motion of a general scene is difficult due to untextured surfaces, complex movements and occlusions. In this paper, we show that it is possible to track the surfaces of a scene over several frames, by introducing an effective prior on the scene motion. Experimental results show that the proposed method estimates the dense scene-flow over multiple frames, without the need for multiple-view reconstructions at every frame. Furthermore, the accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing the estimated motion against a ground truth

Loglet SIFT for part description in deformable part models : application to face alignment

We focus on a novel loglet-SIFT descriptor for the parts representation in the De- formable Part Models (DPM). We manipulate the feature scales in the Fourier domain and decompose the image into multi-scale oriented gradient components for computing SIFT. The scale selection is controlled explicitly by tiling Log-wavelet functions (loglets) on the spectrum. Then oriented gradients are obtained by adding imaginary odd parts to the loglets, converting them into differential filters. Coherent feature scales and domain sizes are further generated by spectrum cropping. Our loglet gradient filters are shown to compare favourably against spatial differential operators, and have a straightforward and efficient implementation. We present experiments to validate the performance of the loglet-SIFT descriptor which show it to improve the DPM using a supervised descent method by a significant margin

Person re-identification using deep foreground appearance modeling

Person reidentification is the process of matching individuals from images taken of them at different times and often with different cameras. To perform matching, most methods extract features from the entire image; however, this gives no consideration to the spatial context of the information present in the image. We propose using a convolutional neural network approach based on ResNet-50 to predict the foreground of an image: the parts with the head, torso, and limbs of a person. With this information, we use the LOMO and salient color name feature descriptors to extract features primarily from the foreground areas. In addition, we use a distance metric learning technique (XQDA), to calculate optimally weighted distances between the relevant features. We evaluate on the VIPeR, QMUL GRID, and CUHK03 data sets and compare our results against a linear foreground estimation method, and show competitive or better overall matching performance

Lane Change Classification and Prediction with Action Recognition Networks

Anticipating lane change intentions of surrounding vehicles is crucial for efficient and safe driving decision making in an autonomous driving system. Previous works often adopt physical variables such as driving speed, acceleration and so forth for lane change classification. However, physical variables do not contain semantic information. Although 3D CNNs have been developing rapidly, the number of methods utilising action recognition models and appearance feature for lane change recognition is low, and they all require additional information to pre-process data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework including two action recognition methods for lane change recognition, using video data collected by cameras. Our method achieves the best lane change classification results using only the RGB video data of the PREVENTION dataset. Class activation maps demonstrate that action recognition models can efficiently extract lane change motions. A method to better extract motion clues is also proposed in this paper.Comment: Accepted by ECC

Deformable appearance pyramids for anatomy representation, landmark detection and pathology classification

Purpose Representation of anatomy appearance is one of the key problems in medical image analysis. An appearance model represents the anatomies with parametric forms, which are then vectorised for prior learning, segmentation and classification tasks. Methods We propose a part-based parametric appearance model we refer to as a deformable appearance pyramid (DAP). The parts are delineated by multi-scale local feature pyramids extracted from an image pyramid. Each anatomy is represented by an appearance pyramid, with the variability within a population approximated by local translations of the multi-scale parts and linear appearance variations in the assembly of the parts. We introduce DAPs built on two types of image pyramids, namely Gaussian and wavelet pyramids, and present two approaches to model the prior and fit the model, one explicitly using a subspace Lucas–Kanade algorithm and the other implicitly using the supervised descent method (SDM). Results We validate the performance of the DAP instances with difference configurations on the problem of lumbar spinal stenosis for localising the landmarks and classifying the pathologies. We also compare them with classic methods such as active shape models, active appearance models and constrained local models. Experimental results show that the DAP built on wavelet pyramids and fitted with SDM gives the best results in both landmark localisation and classification. Conclusion A new appearance model is introduced with several configurations presented and evaluated. The DAPs can be readily applied for other clinical problems for the tasks of prior learning, landmark detection and pathology classification

Weakly-supervised evidence pinpointing and description

We propose a learning method to identify which specific regions and features of images contribute to a certain classification. In the medical imaging context, they can be the evidence regions where the abnormalities are most likely to appear, and the discriminative features of these regions supporting the pathology classification. The learning is weakly-supervised requiring only the pathological labels and no other prior knowledge. The method can also be applied to learn the salient description of an anatomy discriminative from its background, in order to localise the anatomy before a classification step. We formulate evidence pinpointing as a sparse descriptor learning problem. Because of the large computational complexity, the objective function is composed in a stochastic way and is optimised by the Regularised Dual Averaging algorithm. We demonstrate that the learnt feature descriptors contain more specific and better discriminative information than hand-crafted descriptors contributing to superior performance for the tasks of anatomy localisation and pathology classification respectively. We apply our method on the problem of lumbar spinal stenosis for localising and classifying vertebrae in MRI images. Experimental results show that our method when trained with only target labels achieves better or competitive performance on both tasks compared with strongly-supervised methods requiring labels and multiple landmarks. A further improvement is achieved with training on additional weakly annotated data, which gives robust localisation with average error within 2 mm and classification accuracies close to human performance

Redundant feature selection using permutation methods

Automatic feature selection aims to select the features with highest performance when used in a classifier. One popular measure for estimating feature relevancy and redundancy is Mutual Information (MI), although it is biased toward features with multiple values. Permutation methods have been successfully applied in normalizing for numerous biases including that of MI; however they are computationally expensive and complete redundancy computation is infeasible. In this paper, we introduce a measure that can be used to approximate all m2 redundancies between m features, while performing only m permutation methods for their relevancies. We then show using simulated data that this permutation redundancy measure holds similar properties to normalized MI and apply it in selecting features from example datasets using minimal Redundancy Maximal Relevancy (mRMR)

Fast Re-Rendering of Volume and Surface Graphics by Depth, Color, and Opacity Buffering

A method for quickly re-rendering volume data consisting of several distinct materials and intermixed with moving geometry is presented. The technique works by storing depth, color and opacity information, to a given approximation, which facilitates accelerated rendering of fixed views at moderate storage overhead without re-scanning the entire volume. Storage information in the ray direction (what we have called super-z depth buffering), allows rapid transparency and color changes of materials, position changes of sub-objects, dealing explicitly with regions of overlap, and the intermixing or separately rendered geometry. The rendering quality can be traded-off against the relative storage cost and we present an empirical analysis of output error together with typical figures for its storage complexity. The method has been applied to the visualization of medical image data for surgical planning and guidance, and presented results include typical clinical data. We discuss the implications of our method for haptic (or tactile) rendering systems, such as for surgical simulation, and present preliminary results of rendering polygonal objects in the volume rendered scene.Engineering and Applied Science

Person re-identification combining deep features and attribute detection

Attributes-Based Re-Identification is a way of identifying individuals when presented with multiple pictures taken under varying conditions. The method typically builds a classifier to detect the presence of certain appearance characteristics in an image, and creates feature descriptors based on the output of the classifier. We improve attribute detection through spatial segregation of a person’s limbs using a skeleton prediction method. After a skeleton has been predicted, it is used to crop the image into three parts - top, middle and bottom. We then pass these images to an attribute prediction network to generate robust feature descriptors. We evaluate the performance of our method on the VIPeR, PRID2011 and i-LIDS data sets, comparing our results against the state-of-the-art to demonstrate competitive overall matching performance