3D anatomical shape atlas construction using mesh quality preserved deformable models

3D anatomical shape atlas construction has been extensively studied in medical image analysis research, owing to its importance in model-based image segmentation, longitudinal studies and populational statistical analysis, etc. Among multiple steps of 3D shape atlas construction, establishing anatomical correspondences across subjects, i.e., surface registration, is probably the most critical but challenging one. Adaptive focus deformable model (AFDM) [1] was proposed to tackle this problem by exploiting cross-scale geometry characteristics of 3D anatomy surfaces. Although the effectiveness of AFDM has been proved in various studies, its performance is highly dependent on the quality of 3D surface meshes, which often degrades along with the iterations of deformable surface registration (the process of correspondence matching). In this paper, we propose a new framework for 3D anatomical shape atlas construction. Our method aims to robustly establish correspondences across different subjects and simultaneously generate high-quality surface meshes without removing shape details. Mathematically, a new energy term is embedded into the original energy function of AFDM to preserve surface mesh qualities during deformable surface matching. More specifically, we employ the Laplacian representation to encode shape details and smoothness constraints. An expectation–maximization style algorithm is designed to optimize multiple energy terms alternatively until convergence. We demonstrate the performance of our method via a set of diverse applications, including a population of sparse cardiac MRI slices with 2D labels, 3D high resolution CT cardiac images and rodent brain MRIs with multiple structures. The constructed shape atlases exhibit good mesh qualities and preserve fine shape details. The constructed shape atlases can further benefit other research topics such as segmentation and statistical analysis.     

Shape of Elastic Strings in Euclidean Space

We construct a 1-parameter family of geodesic shape metrics on a space of closed parametric curves in Euclidean space of any dimension. The curves are modeled on homogeneous elastic strings whose elasticity properties are described in terms of their tension and rigidity coefficients. As we change the elasticity properties, we obtain the various elastic models. The metrics are invariant under reparametrizations of the curves and induce metrics on shape space. Analysis of the geometry of the space of elastic strings and path spaces of elastic curves enables us to develop a computational model and algorithms for the estimation of geodesics and geodesic distances based on energy minimization. We also investigate a curve registration procedure that is employed in the estimation of shape distances and can be used as a general method for matching the geometric features of a family of curves. Several examples of geodesics are given and experiments are carried out to demonstrate the discriminative quality of the elastic metrics.     

Discriminative Sketch‐based 3D Model Retrieval via Robust Shape Matching

We propose a sketch‐based 3D shape retrieval system that is substantially more discriminative and robust than existing systems, especially for complex models. The power of our system comes from a combination of a contour‐based 2D shape representation and a robust sampling‐based shape matching scheme. They are defined over discriminative local features and applicable for partial sketches; robust to noise and distortions in hand drawings; and consistent when strokes are added progressively. Our robust shape matching, however, requires dense sampling and registration and incurs a high computational cost. We thus devise critical acceleration methods to achieve interactive performance: precomputing kNN graphs that record transformations between neighboring contour images and enable fast online shape alignment; pruning sampling and shape registration strategically and hierarchically; and parallelizing shape matching on multi‐core platforms or GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through various experiments, comparisons, and user studies.     

基于谱对称的形状配准方法

针对现有三维形状配准方法中存在左右翻转的错误匹配问题,提出了基于内蕴对称特征检测的高效形状配准算法。首先,通过热核与几何约束构建模型的内蕴自对称点对;其次,基于谱嵌入特征空间分析提取模型的内蕴对称平面,并依据模型表面法向量有效识别模型的左右结构属性;然后,根据内蕴对称点对获得模型的一致性谱对称结构描述;最后,引入一致性点漂移算法(CPD),实现基于谱对称的非刚性模型的形状配准,有效避免了模型配准中的左右结构翻转问题。实验进一步论证了这种方法不仅有效提高了模型匹配的效率,而且能有效识别同类模型的结构特征,对于非刚性模型的配准具有较强的鲁棒性。     

一种基于属性分割的产生式/判别式混合分类器

为了利用产生式和判别式方法各自的优势,研究了基于属性分割的产生式/判别式混合分类模型框架,提出了一种基于属性分割的产生式/判别式混合分类器学习算法GDGA。其利用遗传算法,将属性集X划分为两个子集XG和XD,并相应地将训练集D垂直分割为两个子集DG和DD,在两个训练子集上分别学习产生式分类器和判别式分类器;最后将两个分类器合并形成一个混合分类器。实验结果表明,在大多数数据集上,混合分类器的分类正确率优于其成员分类器。在训练数据不足或数据属性分布不清楚的情况下,该混合分类器具有特别的优势。     

Generative and discriminative learning by CL-Net.

This correspondence presents a two-stage classification learning algorithm. The first stage approximates the class-conditional distribution of a discrete space using a separate mixture model, and the second stage investigates the class posterior probabilities by training a network. The first stage explores the generative information that is inherent in each class by using the Chow-Liu (CL) method, which approximates high-dimensional probability with a tree structure, namely, a dependence tree, whereas the second stage concentrates on discriminative learning to distinguish between classes. The resulting learning algorithm integrates the advantages of both generative learning and discriminative learning. Because it uses CL dependence-tree estimation, we call our algorithm CL-Net. Empirical tests indicate that the proposed learning algorithm makes significant improvements when compared with the related classifiers that are constructed by either generative learning or discriminative learning.     

A new graph matching method for point-set correspondence using the EM algorithm and Softassign

Finding correspondences between two point-sets is a common step in many vision applications (e.g., image matching or shape retrieval). We present a graph matching method to solve the point-set correspondence problem, which is posed as one of mixture modelling. Our mixture model encompasses a model of structural coherence and a model of affine-invariant geometrical errors. Instead of absolute positions, the geometrical positions are represented as relative positions of the points with respect to each other. We derive the Expectation–Maximization algorithm for our mixture model. In this way, the graph matching problem is approximated, in a principled way, as a succession of assignment problems which are solved using Softassign. Unlike other approaches, we use a true continuous underlying correspondence variable. We develop effective mechanisms to detect outliers. This is a useful technique for improving results in the presence of clutter. We evaluate the ability of our method to locate proper matches as well as to recognize object categories in a series of registration and recognition experiments. Our method compares favourably to other graph matching methods as well as to point-set registration methods and outlier rejectors.     

Semisupervised learning for a hybrid generative/discriminative classifier based on the maximum entropy principle

This paper presents a method for designing semi-supervised classifiers trained on labeled and unlabeled samples. We focus on probabilistic semi-supervised classifier design for multi-class and single-labeled classification problems, and propose a hybrid approach that takes advantage of generative and discriminative approaches. In our approach, we first consider a generative model trained by using labeled samples and introduce a bias correction model, where these models belong to the same model family, but have different parameters. Then, we construct a hybrid classifier by combining these models based on the maximum entropy principle. To enable us to apply our hybrid approach to text classification problems, we employed naive Bayes models as the generative and bias correction models. Our experimental results for four text data sets confirmed that the generalization ability of our hybrid classifier was much improved by using a large number of unlabeled samples for training when there were too few labeled samples to obtain good performance. We also confirmed that our hybrid approach significantly outperformed generative and discriminative approaches when the performance of the generative and discriminative approaches was comparable. Moreover, we examined the performance of our hybrid classifier when the labeled and unlabeled data distributions were different.     

A hybrid probabilistic framework for content-based image retrieval with feature weighting

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework for efficient retrieval and indexing of image collections. This framework uncovers the hierarchical structure underlying the collection from image features based on a hybrid model that combines both generative and discriminative learning. We adopt the generalized Dirichlet mixture and maximum likelihood for the generative learning in order to estimate accurately the statistical model of the data. Then, the resulting model is refined by a new discriminative likelihood that enhances the power of relevant features. Consequently, this new model is suitable for modeling high-dimensional data described by both semantic and low-level (visual) features. The semantic features are defined according to a known ontology while visual features represent the visual appearance such as color, shape, and texture. For validation purposes, we propose a new visual feature which has nice invariance properties to image transformations. Experiments on the Microsoft's collection (MSRCID) show clearly the merits of our approach in both retrieval and indexing.     

产生式与判别式线性混合分类器

产生式方法和判别式方法是解决分类问题的两种不同框架,具有各自的优势。为利用两种方法各自的优势,文中提出一种产生式与判别式线性混合分类模型,并设计一种基于遗传算法的产生式与判别式线性混合分类模型的学习算法。该算法将线性混合分类器混合参数的学习看作一个最优化问题,以两个基分类器对每个训练数据的后验概率值为数据依据,用遗传算法找出线性混合分类器混合参数的最优值。实验结果表明,在大多数数据集上,产生式与判别式线性混合分类器的分类准确率优于或近似于它的两个基分类器中的优者。     

Non‐Rigid Puzzles

Shape correspondence is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and vision, with applications in various problems including animation, texture mapping, robotic vision, medical imaging, archaeology and many more. In settings where the shapes are allowed to undergo non‐rigid deformations and only partial views are available, the problem becomes very challenging. To this end, we present a non‐rigid multi‐part shape matching algorithm. We assume to be given a reference shape and its multiple parts undergoing a non‐rigid deformation. Each of these query parts can be additionally contaminated by clutter, may overlap with other parts, and there might be missing parts or redundant ones. Our method simultaneously solves for the segmentation of the reference model, and for a dense correspondence to (subsets of) the parts. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real scans demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in dealing with this challenging matching scenario.     

Beyond Bag-of-Words: combining generative and discriminative models for scene categorization

This paper proposes an efficient framework for scene categorization by combining generative model and discriminative model. A state-of-the-art approach for scene categorization is the Bag-of-Words (BoW) framework. However, there exist many categories in scenes. Generally when a new category is considered, the codebook in BoW framework needs to be re-generated, which will involve exhaustive computation. In view of this, this paper tries to address the issue by designing a new framework with good scalability. When an additional category is considered, much lower computational cost is needed while the resulting image signatures are still discriminative. The image signatures for training discriminative model are carefully designed based on the generative model. The soft relevance value of the extracted image signatures are estimated by image signature space modeling and are incorporated in Fuzzy Support Vector Machine (FSVM). The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on UIUC Scene-15 dataset and NTU-25 dataset, and it is shown to outperform other state-of-the-art approaches for scene categorization.     

A two-level model for automatic image annotation

Image automatic annotation is a significant and challenging problem in pattern recognition and computer vision. Current image annotation models almost used all the training images to estimate joint generation probabilities between images and keywords, which would inevitably bring a lot of irrelevant images. To solve the above problem, we propose a hierarchical image annotation model which combines advantages of discriminative model and generative model. In first annotation layer, discriminative model is used to assign topic annotations to unlabeled images, and then relevant image set corresponding to each unlabeled image is obtained. In second annotation layer, we propose a keywords-oriented method to establish links between images and keywords, and then our iterative algorithm is used to expand relevant image sets. Candidate labels will be given higher weights by using our method based on visual keywords. Finally, generative model is used to assign detailed annotations to unlabeled images on expanded relevant image sets. Experiments conducted on Corel 5K datasets verify the effectiveness of our hierarchical image annotation model.     

Planar shape matching based on binary tree shape representation

In this paper we suggest a new way of representing planar two-dimensional shapes and a shape matching method which utilizes the new representation. Through merging of the neighboring boundary runs, a shape can be partitioned into a set of triangles. These triangles are inherently connected according to a binary tree structure. Here we use the binary tree with the triangles as its nodes to represent the shape. This representation is found to be insensitive to shape translation, rotation, scaling and skewing changes due to viewer's location changes (or the object's pose changes). Furthermore, the representation is of multiresolution.

In shape matching we compare the two trees representing two given shapes node by node according to the breadth-first tree traversing sequence. The comparison is done from top of the tree and moving downward, which means that we first compare the lower resolution approximations of the two shapes. If the two approximations are different, the comparison stops. Otherwise, it goes on and compares the finer details of the two shapes. Only when the two shapes are very similar, will the two corresponding trees be compared entirely. Thus, the matching algorithm utilizes the multiresolution characteristic of the tree representation and appears to be very efficient.     

基于显著特征谱嵌入的三维模型相似性分析*

面向快速、高效的三维模型检索技术的迫切需求,提出基于显著特征谱嵌入的三维模型相似性分析方法.首先通过局部曲率及凸凹性检测,有效提取模型的显著特征点,构建模型的显著特征描述算子.然后基于拉普拉斯映射及谱分析原理进一步提取模型的内蕴形状特征.最后,结合薄板样条函数实现模型间的配准与相似性分析.通过实验验证文中方法不仅有效提高模型匹配的效率,而且能有效识别同一类模型的结构特征,同时对于残缺模型间的匹配具有较强的鲁棒性.     

An activity monitoring system for elderly care using generative and discriminative models

An activity monitoring system allows many applications to assist in care giving for elderly in their homes. In this paper we present a wireless sensor network for unintrusive observations in the home and show the potential of generative and discriminative models for recognizing activities from such observations. Through a large number of experiments using four real world datasets we show the effectiveness of the generative hidden Markov model and the discriminative conditional random fields in activity recognition.