543 research outputs found
Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments
Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used
to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line
connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered
images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but
lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many
realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are
corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a
line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process.
This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in
increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content
agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call
STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the
longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating
into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment
extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding
hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We
present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how
STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where
current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
Revisiting Complex Moments For 2D Shape Representation and Image Normalization
When comparing 2D shapes, a key issue is their normalization. Translation and
scale are easily taken care of by removing the mean and normalizing the energy.
However, defining and computing the orientation of a 2D shape is not so simple.
In fact, although for elongated shapes the principal axis can be used to define
one of two possible orientations, there is no such tool for general shapes. As
we show in the paper, previous approaches fail to compute the orientation of
even noiseless observations of simple shapes. We address this problem. In the
paper, we show how to uniquely define the orientation of an arbitrary 2D shape,
in terms of what we call its Principal Moments. We show that a small subset of
these moments suffice to represent the underlying 2D shape and propose a new
method to efficiently compute the shape orientation: Principal Moment Analysis.
Finally, we discuss how this method can further be applied to normalize
grey-level images. Besides the theoretical proof of correctness, we describe
experiments demonstrating robustness to noise and illustrating the method with
real images.Comment: 69 pages, 20 figure
Distributed Optimization With Local Domains: Applications in MPC and Network Flows
In this paper we consider a network with nodes, where each node has
exclusive access to a local cost function. Our contribution is a
communication-efficient distributed algorithm that finds a vector
minimizing the sum of all the functions. We make the additional assumption that
the functions have intersecting local domains, i.e., each function depends only
on some components of the variable. Consequently, each node is interested in
knowing only some components of , not the entire vector. This allows
for improvement in communication-efficiency. We apply our algorithm to model
predictive control (MPC) and to network flow problems and show, through
experiments on large networks, that our proposed algorithm requires less
communications to converge than prior algorithms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Aut. Contro
D-ADMM: A Communication-Efficient Distributed Algorithm For Separable Optimization
We propose a distributed algorithm, named Distributed Alternating Direction
Method of Multipliers (D-ADMM), for solving separable optimization problems in
networks of interconnected nodes or agents. In a separable optimization problem
there is a private cost function and a private constraint set at each node. The
goal is to minimize the sum of all the cost functions, constraining the
solution to be in the intersection of all the constraint sets. D-ADMM is proven
to converge when the network is bipartite or when all the functions are
strongly convex, although in practice, convergence is observed even when these
conditions are not met. We use D-ADMM to solve the following problems from
signal processing and control: average consensus, compressed sensing, and
support vector machines. Our simulations show that D-ADMM requires less
communications than state-of-the-art algorithms to achieve a given accuracy
level. Algorithms with low communication requirements are important, for
example, in sensor networks, where sensors are typically battery-operated and
communicating is the most energy consuming operation.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
Distributed Basis Pursuit
We propose a distributed algorithm for solving the optimization problem Basis
Pursuit (BP). BP finds the least L1-norm solution of the underdetermined linear
system Ax = b and is used, for example, in compressed sensing for
reconstruction. Our algorithm solves BP on a distributed platform such as a
sensor network, and is designed to minimize the communication between nodes.
The algorithm only requires the network to be connected, has no notion of a
central processing node, and no node has access to the entire matrix A at any
time. We consider two scenarios in which either the columns or the rows of A
are distributed among the compute nodes. Our algorithm, named D-ADMM, is a
decentralized implementation of the alternating direction method of
multipliers. We show through numerical simulation that our algorithm requires
considerably less communications between the nodes than the state-of-the-art
algorithms.Comment: Preprint of the journal version of the paper; IEEE Transactions on
Signal Processing, Vol. 60, Issue 4, April, 201
Analysis of some factors and COVID-19 mortality in the population of 0 to 24 years in 29 countries: open schools could be a protection
Background. It is limited literature on the possible factors related to mortality by COVID-19 in minors. Children and young people are generally considered vulnerable, especially in low-income countries, whereby consistent evidence must arise to protect them and avoid mortality. Methods. A multiple linear regression model was fit to evaluate the relationship between deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and pandemic containment policies, the duration of totally closed schools, and GDP in 29 countries under study. Results. Linear regression analysis shows that the association between deaths per 100k and the number of weeks of closed schools had a coef B=0.355, [CI 0.010; 0.699], and it is statistically significant (P-value =0.044). Similarly, the association between deaths per 100K and GDP was -0.001, [CI -0.003; 0.001], and is not statistically associated (P-value 0.633). Conclusions. This study suggests that open schools could be a protective space for COVID-19 mortality in the child and youth population and that each country should implement studies on the subject at the local level
1H high resolution magic-angle coil spinning (HR-MACS) μNMR metabolic profiling of whole Saccharomyces cervisiae cells: a demonstrative study
International audienceThe low sensitivity and thus need for large sample volume is one of the major drawbacks of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This is especially problematic for performing rich metabolic profiling of scarce samples such as whole cells or living organisms. This study evaluates a 1H HR-MAS approach for metabolic profiling of small volumes (250 nl) of whole cells. We have applied an emerging micro-NMR technology, high-resolution magic-angle coil spinning (HR-MACS), to study whole Saccharomyces cervisiae cells. We find that high-resolution high-sensitivity spectra can be obtained with only 19 million cells and, as a demonstration of the metabolic profiling potential, we perform two independent metabolomics studies identifying the significant metabolites associated with osmotic stress and agin
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