An Inhomogeneous Bayesian Texture Model for Spatially Varying Parameter Estimation

In statistical model based texture feature extraction, features based on spatially varying parameters achievehigher discriminative performances compared to spatially constant parameters. In this paper we formulate anovel Bayesian framework which achieves texture characterization by spatially varying parameters based onGaussian Markov random fields. The parameter estimation is carried out by Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.The distributions of estimated spatially varying parameters are then used as successful discriminant texturefeatures in classification and segmentation. Results show that novel features outperform traditional GaussianMarkov random field texture features which use spatially constant parameters. These features capture bothpixel spatial dependencies and structural properties of a texture giving improved texture features for effectivetexture classification and segmentation

3-D Shape Matching for Face Analysis and Recognition

The aims of this paper are to introduce a 3-D shape matching scheme for automatic face recognition and to demonstrate its invariance to pose and facial expressions. The core of this scheme lies on the combination of non-rigid deformation registration and statistical shape modelling. While the former matches 3-D faces regardless of facial expression variations, the latter provides a low-dimensional feature vector that describes the deformation after the shape matching process, thereby enabling robust identification of 3-D faces. In order to assist establishment of accurate dense point correspondences, an isometric embedding shape representation is introduced, which is able to transform 3-D faces to a canonical form that retains the intrinsic geometric structure and achieve shape alignment of 3-D faces independent from individual’s facial expression. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method was investigated using standard publicly available Gavab and BU-3DFE databases, which contain faces expressions and pose variations. The performance of the system was compared with the existing benchmark approaches and it demonstrates that the proposed scheme provides a competitive solution for the face recognition task with real-world practicality

An Unsupervised Method for Suspicious Regions Detection in Mammogram Images

Over the past years many researchers proposed biomedical imaging methods for computer-aided detection and classification of suspicious regions in mammograms. Mammogram interpretation is performed by radiologists by visual inspection. The large volume of mammograms to be analyzed makes such readings labour intensive and often inaccurate. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a new unsupervised method to automatically detect suspicious regions in mammogram images. The method consists mainly of two steps: preprocessing; feature extraction and selection. Preprocessing steps allow to separate background region from the breast profile region. In greater detail, gray levels mapping transform and histogram specifications are used to enhance the visual representation of mammogram details. Then, local keypoints and descriptors such as SURF have been extracted in breast profile region. The extracted keypoints are filtered by proper parameters tuning to detect suspicious regions. The results, in terms of sensitivity and confidence interval are very encouraging

Fourier spectral of PalmCode as descriptor for palmprint recognition

Study on automatic person recognition by palmprint is currently a hot topic. In this paper, we propose a novel palmprint recognition method by transforming the typical palmprint phase code feature into its Fourier frequency domain. The resulting real-valued Fourier spectral features are further processed by horizontal and vertical 2DPCA method, which proves highly efficient in terms of computational complexity, storage requirement and recognition accuracy. This paper also gives a contrast study on palm code and competitive code under the proposed feature extraction framework. Besides, experimental results on the Hongkong PolyU Palmprint database demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many currently reported local Gabor pattern approaches for palmprint recognition

Keyword Based Keyframe Extraction in Online Video Collections

Keyframe extraction methods aim to find in a video sequence the most significant frames, according to specific criteria. In this paper we propose a new method to search, in a video database, for frames that are related to a given keyword, and to extract the best ones, according to a proposed quality factor. We first exploit a speech to text algorithm to extract automatic captions from all the video in a specific domain database. Then we select only those sequences (clips), whose captions include a given keyword, thus discarding a lot of information that is useless for our purposes. Each retrieved clip is then divided into shots, using a video segmentation method, that is based on the SURF descriptors and keypoints. The sentence of the caption is projected onto the segmented clip, and we select the shot that includes the input keyword. The selected shot is further inspected to find good quality and stable parts, and the frame which maximizes a quality metric is selected as the best and the most significant frame. We compare the proposed algorithm with another keyframe extraction method based on local features, in terms of Significance and Quality