Robust Facial Features Tracking Using Geometric Constraints and Relaxation

International audienceThis work presents a robust technique for tracking a set of detected points on a human face. Facial features can be manually selected or automatically detected. We present a simple and efficient method for detecting facial features such as eyes and nose in a color face image. We then introduce a tracking method which, by employing geometric constraints based on knowledge about the configuration of facial features, avoid the loss of points caused by error accumulation and tracking drift. Experiments with different sequences and comparison with other tracking algorithms, show that the proposed method gives better results with a comparable processing time

Automatic Discrimination of Color Retinal Images using the Bag of Words Approach

International audienceDiabetic retinopathy (DR) and age related macular degeneration (ARMD) are among the major causes of visual impairment all over the world. DR is mainly characterized by small red spots, namely microaneurysms and bright lesions, specifically exudates. However, ARMD is mainly identified by tiny yellow or white deposits called drusen. Since exudates might be the only visible signs of the early diabetic retinopathy, there is an increase demand for automatic diagnosis of retinopathy. Exudates and drusen may share similar appearances; as a result discriminating between them plays a key role in improving screening performance. In this research, we investigative the role of bag of words approach in the automatic diagnosis of retinopathy diabetes. Initially, the color retinal images are preprocessed in order to reduce the intra and inter patient variability. Subsequently, SURF (Speeded up Robust Features), HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradients), and LBP (Local Binary Patterns) descriptors are extracted. We proposed to use single-based and multiple-based methods to construct the visual dictionary by combining the histogram of word occurrences from each dictionary and building a single histogram. Finally, this histogram representation is fed into a support vector machine with linear kernel for classification. The introduced approach is evaluated for automatic diagnosis of normal and abnormal color retinal images with bright lesions such as drusen and exudates. This approach has been implemented on 430 color retinal images, including six publicly available datasets, in addition to one local dataset. The mean accuracies achieved are 97.2% and 99.77% for single-based and multiple-based dictionaries respectively

On Spatio-Temporal Saliency Detection in Videos using Multilinear PCA

International audienceVisual saliency is an attention mechanism which helps to focus on regions of interest instead of processing the whole image or video data. Detecting salient objects in still images has been widely addressed in literature with several formulations and methods. However, visual saliency detection in videos has attracted little attention, although motion information is an important aspect of visual perception. A common approach for obtaining a spatio-temporal saliency map is to combine a static saliency map and a dynamic saliency map. In this paper, we extend a recent saliency detection approach based on principal component analysis (PCA) which have shwon good results when applied to static images. In particular, we explore different strategies to include temporal information into the PCA-based approach. The proposed models have been evaluated on a publicly available dataset which contain several videos of dynamic scenes with complex background, and the results show that processing the spatio-tempral data with multilinear PCA achieves competitive results against state-of-the-art methods

Control of a PTZ camera in a hybrid vision system

In this paper, we propose a new approach to steer a PTZ camera in the direction of a detected object visible from another fixed camera equipped with a fisheye lens. This heterogeneous association of two cameras having different characteristics is called a hybrid stereo-vision system. The presented method employs epipolar geometry in a smart way in order to reduce the range of search of the desired region of interest. Furthermore, we proposed a target recognition method designed to cope with the illumination problems, the distortion of the omnidirectional image and the inherent dissimilarity of resolution and color responses between both cameras. Experimental results with synthetic and real images show the robustness of the proposed method

DH-PTAM: A Deep Hybrid Stereo Events-Frames Parallel Tracking And Mapping System

This paper presents a robust approach for a visual parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) system that excels in challenging environments. Our proposed method combines the strengths of heterogeneous multi-modal visual sensors, including stereo event-based and frame-based sensors, in a unified reference frame through a novel spatio-temporal synchronization of stereo visual frames and stereo event streams. We employ deep learning-based feature extraction and description for estimation to enhance robustness further. We also introduce an end-to-end parallel tracking and mapping optimization layer complemented by a simple loop-closure algorithm for efficient SLAM behavior. Through comprehensive experiments on both small-scale and large-scale real-world sequences of VECtor and TUM-VIE benchmarks, our proposed method (DH-PTAM) demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and accuracy in adverse conditions. Our implementation's research-based Python API is publicly available on GitHub for further research and development: https://github.com/AbanobSoliman/DH-PTAM.Comment: Submitted for publication in IEEE RA-

Classification of SD-OCT Volumes with LBP: Application to DME Detection

This paper addresses the problem of automatic classification of Spectral Domain OCT (SD-OCT) data for automatic identification of patients with Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) versus normal subjects. Our method is based on Local Binary Patterns (LBP) features to describe the texture of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images and we compare different LBP features extraction approaches to compute a single signature for the whole OCT volume. Experimental results with two datasets of respectively 32 and 30 OCT volumes show that regardless of using low or high level representations, features derived from LBP texture have highly discriminative power. Moreover, the experiments show that the proposed method achieves better classification performances than other recent published works

Myocardial Infarction Quantification From Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI Using Top-hat Transforms and Neural Networks

Significance: Late gadolinium enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) is the gold standard technique for myocardial viability assessment. Although the technique accurately reflects the damaged tissue, there is no clinical standard for quantifying myocardial infarction (MI), demanding most algorithms to be expert dependent. Objectives and Methods: In this work a new automatic method for MI quantification from LGE-MRI is proposed. Our novel segmentation approach is devised for accurately detecting not only hyper-enhanced lesions, but also microvascular-obstructed areas. Moreover, it includes a myocardial disease detection step which extends the algorithm for working under healthy scans. The method is based on a cascade approach where firstly, diseased slices are identified by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Secondly, by means of morphological operations a fast coarse scar segmentation is obtained. Thirdly, the segmentation is refined by a boundary-voxel reclassification strategy using an ensemble of CNNs. For its validation, reproducibility and further comparison against other methods, we tested the method on a big multi-field expert annotated LGE-MRI database including healthy and diseased cases. Results and Conclusion: In an exhaustive comparison against nine reference algorithms, the proposal achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performances and showed to be the only method agreeing in volumetric scar quantification with the expert delineations. Moreover, the method was able to reproduce the intra- and inter-observer variability ranges. It is concluded that the method could suitably be transferred to clinical scenarios.Comment: Submitted to IEE

Classification of SD-OCT Volumes for DME Detection: An Anomaly Detection Approach

International audienceDiabetic Macular Edema (DME) is the leading cause of blindness amongst diabetic patients worldwide. It is characterized by accumulation of water molecules in the macula leading to swelling. Early detection of the disease helps prevent further loss of vision. Naturally, automated detection of DME from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) volumes plays a key role. To this end, a pipeline for detecting DME diseases in OCT volumes is proposed in this paper. The method is based on anomaly detection using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). It starts with pre-processing the B-scans by resizing, flattening, filtering and extracting features from them. Both intensity and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are considered. The dimensionality of the extracted features is reduced using PCA. As the last stage, a GMM is fitted with features from normal volumes. During testing, features extracted from the test volume are evaluated with the fitted model for anomaly and classification is made based on the number of B-scans detected as outliers. The proposed method is tested on two OCT datasets and achieved a sensitivity and a specificity of 80% and 93% on the first dataset, and 100% and 80% on the second one. Moreover, the experiments show that the proposed method achieves better classification performances than other recently published works

Classifying DME vs Normal SD-OCT volumes: A review

International audienceThis article reviews the current state of automatic classification methodologies to identify Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) versus normal subjects based on Spectral Domain OCT (SD-OCT) data. Addressing this classification problem has valuable interest since early detection and treatment of DME play a major role to prevent eye adverse effects such as blindness. The main contribution of this article is to cover the lack of a public dataset and benchmark suited for classifying DME and normal SD-OCT volumes, providing our own implementation of the most relevant methodologies in the literature. Subsequently, 6 different methods were implemented and evaluated using this common benchmark and dataset to produce reliable comparison

Classification of Melanoma Lesions Using Sparse Coded Features and Random Forests

International audienceMalignant melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer, yet it is the most treatable kind of cancer, conditioned by its early diagnosis which is a challenging task for clinicians and dermatologists. In this regard, CAD systems based on machine learning and image processing techniques are developed to differentiate melanoma lesions from benign and dysplastic nevi using dermoscopic images. Generally, these frameworks are composed of sequential processes: pre-processing, segmentation, and classification. This architecture faces mainly two challenges: (i) each process is complex with the need to tune a set of parameters, and is specific to a given dataset; (ii) the performance of each process depends on the previous one, and the errors are accumulated throughout the framework. In this paper, we propose a framework for melanoma classification based on sparse coding which does not rely on any pre-processing or lesion segmentation. Our framework uses Random Forests classifier and sparse representation of three features: SIFT, Hue and Opponent angle histograms, and RGB intensities. The experiments are carried out on the public PH 2 dataset using a 10-fold cross-validation. The results show that SIFT sparse-coded feature achieves the highest performance with sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 90.3% respectively, with a dictionary size of 800 atoms and a sparsity level of 2. Furthermore, the descriptor based on RGB intensities achieves similar results with sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 71.3%, respectively for a smaller dictionary size of 100 atoms. In conclusion, dictionary learning techniques encode strong structures of dermoscopic images and provide discriminant descriptors