Unsupervised image-set clustering using an information theoretic framework.

In this paper, we combine discrete and continuous image models with information-theoretic-based criteria for unsupervised hierarchical image-set clustering. The continuous image modeling is based on mixture of Gaussian densities. The unsupervised image-set clustering is based on a generalized version of a recently introduced information-theoretic principle, the information bottleneck principle. Images are clustered such that the mutual information between the clusters and the image content is maximally preserved. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework for image clustering on a large image set. Information theoretic tools are used to evaluate cluster quality. Particular emphasis is placed on the application of the clustering for efficient image search and retrieval.     

DTI segmentation by statistical surface evolution

We address the problem of the segmentation of cerebral white matter structures from diffusion tensor images (DTI). A DTI produces, from a set of diffusion-weighted MR images, tensor-valued images where each voxel is assigned with a 3 x 3 symmetric, positive-definite matrix. This second order tensor is simply the covariance matrix of a local Gaussian process, with zero-mean, modeling the average motion of water molecules. As we will show in this paper, the definition of a dissimilarity measure and statistics between such quantities is a nontrivial task which must be tackled carefully. We claim and demonstrate that, by using the theoretically well-founded differential geometrical properties of the manifold of multivariate normal distributions, it is possible to improve the quality of the segmentation results obtained with other dissimilarity measures such as the Euclidean distance or the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The main goal of this paper is to prove that the choice of the probability metric, i.e., the dissimilarity measure, has a deep impact on the tensor statistics and, hence, on the achieved results. We introduce a variational formulation, in the level-set framework, to estimate the optimal segmentation of a DTI according to the following hypothesis: Diffusion tensors exhibit a Gaussian distribution in the different partitions. We must also respect the geometric constraints imposed by the interfaces existing among the cerebral structures and detected by the gradient of the DTI. We show how to express all the statistical quantities for the different probability metrics. We validate and compare the results obtained on various synthetic data-sets, a biological rat spinal cord phantom and human brain DTIs.     

Segmenting object with ambiguous boundary using information theoretic rough sets

In image segmentation, image is divided into regions of similar pixels that satisfy a defined notion of similarity. The complexity of image segmentation is further increased when the separation between neighboring regions is ambiguous. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses the information theoretic rough sets concept (ITRS) to model the ambiguous boundary of the object for further segmentation. The advantage of this approach is incorporating the prior knowledge of the object for effective extraction despite its ambiguous boundary. This approach starts with an assumption that seed points of the regions are available. It then computes the probability of association of the pixels with the seed points. Rough sets theory is invoked on this probability or likelihood map to identify positive, negative, and boundary states of the object. Optimal threshold for the boundary region is determined using histogram based segmentation algorithm for final object extraction. The main contribution relies on the application of ITRS in categorizing the object by combining both the prior and image information. The proposed approach, ITRS segmentation, is compared with different image segmentation methods on simulated brain images, and the result is encouraging with its state-of-the-art performance.     

应用颜色信息的图像分割研究

提出了一种在RGB颜色空间中颜色距离定义的方式,并根据颜色距离,用Roberts梯度算子得到颜色距离直方图,确定图像边缘信息的阈值。通过Roberts算子,使用此阈值得到图像的边缘信息。这种方式,充分考虑了图像中的颜色信息,与灰度图的处理方式相比,减少了计算量,提高了具有相似亮度的不同颜色之间边缘信息的提取成功率。     

Characterization of event related potentials using information theoretic distance measures

Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) using signal processing tools has become extremely widespread in recent years. Nonstationary signal processing tools such as wavelets and time-frequency distributions have proven to be especially effective in characterizing the transient phenomena encountered in event-related potentials. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of event-related potentials collected during a psychological experiment where two groups of subjects, spider phobics and snake phobics, are shown the same set of stimulus: A blank stimulus, a neutral stimulus and a spider stimulus. We introduce a new approach, based on time-frequency distributions, for analyzing the ERPs. The difference in brain activity before and after a stimulus is presented is quantified using distance measures as adapted to the time-frequency plane. Three different distance measures, including a new information theoretic distance measure, are applied on the time-frequency plane to discriminate between the responses of the two groups of subjects. The results illustrate the effectiveness of using distance measures combined with time-frequency distributions in differentiating between the two classes of subjects and the different regions of the brain.     

Morphological segmentation of sport scenes using color information

We propose a new method for segmenting image sequences in sports scenes containing brisk movement. An important feature of this method is the computation of color histograms in the areas for the turf, which is done interactively during rehearsal. Another important feature is automatic morphological segmentation during broadcast. The morphological segmentation consists of two operations: coarse segmentation by binary reconstruction based on the areas detected by thresholding the color histogram, and fine segmentation by watershed transformation with markers. It is shown that this new method achieves accurate segmentation in sport scenes     

Fluid registration of diffusion tensor images using information theory

We apply an information-theoretic cost metric, the symmetrized Kullback-Leibler (sKL) divergence, or J-divergence, to fluid registration of diffusion tensor images. The difference between diffusion tensors is quantified based on the sKL-divergence of their associated probability density functions (PDFs). Three-dimensional DTI data from 34 subjects were fluidly registered to an optimized target image. To allow large image deformations but preserve image topology, we regularized the flow with a large-deformation diffeomorphic mapping based on the kinematics of a Navier-Stokes fluid. A driving force was developed to minimize the J-divergence between the deforming source and target diffusion functions, while reorienting the flowing tensors to preserve fiber topography. In initial experiments, we showed that the sKL-divergence based on full diffusion PDFs is adaptable to higher-order diffusion models, such as high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI). The sKL-divergence was sensitive to subtle differences between two diffusivity profiles, showing promise for nonlinear registration applications and multisubject statistical analysis of HARDI data.     

Gradient descent approach for minimizing dissimilarity measure in log-polarimagery

The information received by the visual cortex is theresult of a log-polar conformal mapping of the retinalsti mulus[1].Indeed,the log-polar transformation hasbeen adoptedin numerous applications andisthe subjectof current research interest[2].Log-polar i …     

Modified foreground segmentation for object tracking using wavelets in a tensor framework

Subspace-based techniques have become important in behaviour analysis, appearance modelling and tracking. Various vector and tensor subspace learning techniques are already known that perform their operations in offline as well as in an online manner. In this work, we have improved upon a tensor-based subspace learning by using fourth-order decomposition and wavelets so as to have an advanced adaptive algorithm for robust and efficient background modelling and tracking in coloured video sequences. The proposed algorithm known as fourth-order incremental tensor subspace learning algorithm uses the spatio-colour-temporal information by adaptive online update of the means and the eigen basis for each unfolding matrix using tensor decomposition to fourth-order image tensors. The proposed method employs the wavelet transformation to an optimum decomposition level in order to reduce the computational complexity by working on the approximate counterpart of the original scenes and also reduces noise in the given scene. Our tracking method is an unscented particle filter that utilises appearance knowledge and estimates the new state of the intended object. Various experiments have been performed to demonstrate the promising and convincing nature of the proposed method and the method works better than existing methods.     

LS-SVM based image segmentation using color and texture information

Image segmentation partitions an image into nonoverlapping regions, which ideally should be meaningful for a certain purpose. Automatic segmentation of images is a very challenging fundamental task in computer vision and one of the most crucial steps toward image understanding. In recent years, many image segmentation algorithms have been developed, but they are often very complex and some undesired results occur frequently. In this paper, we present an effective color image segmentation approach based on pixel classification with least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). Firstly, the pixel-level color feature, Homogeneity, is extracted in consideration of local human visual sensitivity for color pattern variation in HSV color space. Secondly, the image pixel’s texture features, Maximum local energy, Maximum gradient, and Maximum second moment matrix, are represented via Gabor filter. Then, both the pixel-level color feature and texture feature are used as input of LS-SVM model (classifier), and the LS-SVM model (classifier) is trained by selecting the training samples with Arimoto entropy thresholding. Finally, the color image is segmented with the trained LS-SVM model (classifier). This image segmentation not only can fully take advantage of the local information of color image, but also the ability of LS-SVM classifier. Experimental evidence shows that the proposed method has very effective segmentation results and computational behavior, and decreases the time and increases the quality of color image segmentation in comparison with the state-of-the-art segmentation methods recently proposed in the literature.     

Set theoretic signal restoration using an error in variablescriterion

The restoration of a signal degraded by a stochastic impulse response is formulated as a problem with uncertainties in both the measurements and the impulse response. The method of total least squares, and variants thereof, are effective techniques for solving this class of problems. However, unlike set theoretic estimation schemes, these methods do not allow the incorporation of other a priori information in the estimate. In this correspondence, two new sets motivated by total least squares are introduced for set theoretic estimation. The convexity of these sets is established and the projection operators onto these sets are given. Through simulations, the advantages of the new technique over conventional and older set theoretic schemes for restoration are demonstrated.     

A noise-filtering method using a local information measure

A nonlinear-noise filtering method for image processing, based on the entropy concept is developed and compared to the well-known median filter and to the center weighted median filter (CWM). The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through subjective and objective criteria. It is shown that this method performs better than the classical median for different types of noise and can perform better than the CWM filter in some cases.     

Improved watershed transform for medical image segmentation using prior information

The watershed transform has interesting properties that make it useful for many different image segmentation applications: it is simple and intuitive, can be parallelized, and always produces a complete division of the image. However, when applied to medical image analysis, it has important drawbacks (oversegmentation, sensitivity to noise, poor detection of thin or low signal to noise ratio structures). We present an improvement to the watershed transform that enables the introduction of prior information in its calculation. We propose to introduce this information via the use of a previous probability calculation. Furthermore, we introduce a method to combine the watershed transform and atlas registration, through the use of markers. We have applied our new algorithm to two challenging applications: knee cartilage and gray matter/white matter segmentation in MR images. Numerical validation of the results is provided, demonstrating the strength of the algorithm for medical image segmentation.     

An information theoretic foundation of synchronized detection

The constrained capacity of a coherent coded modulation (CM) digital communication system with data-aided channel estimation and a discrete, equiprobable symbol alphabet is derived under the assumption that the system operates on a flat fading channel and uses an interleaver to combat the bursty nature of the channel. It is shown that linear minimum mean square error channel estimation directly follows from the derivation and links average mutual information to the channel dynamics. Based on the assumption that known training symbols are transmitted, the achievable rate of the system is optimized with respect to the amount of training information needed. Furthermore, the results are compared to the additive white Gaussian noise channel, and the case when ideal channel state information is available at the receiver     

Evaluation and protection of multi-level location privacy based on an information theoretic approach

A privacy metric based on mutual information was proposed to measure the privacy leakage occurred when location data owner trust data users at different levels and need to publish the distorted location data to each user according to her trust level,based on which an location privacy protection mechanism (LPPM)was generated to protect user’s location privacy.In addition,based on mutual information,a metric was proposed to measure the privacy leakage caused by attackers obtaining different levels of distorted location data and then performing inference attack on the original location data more accurately.Another privacy metric was also proposed to quantify the information leakage occurred in the scenario based on mutual information.In particular,the proposed privacy mechanism was designed by modifying Blahut-Arimoto algorithm in rate-distortion theory.Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed LPPM over an existing LPPM in terms of location privacyutility tradeoff in both scenarios,which is more conspicuous when there are highly popular locations.     

Parsimonious model selection for tissue segmentation and classification applications: a study using simulated and experimental DTI data

One aim of this work is to investigate the feasibility of using a hierarchy of models to describe diffusion tensor magnetic resonance (MR) data in fixed tissue. Parsimonious model selection criteria are used to choose among different models of diffusion within tissue. Using this information, we assess whether we can perform simultaneous tissue segmentation and classification. Both numerical phantoms and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data obtained from excised pig spinal cord are used to test and validate this model selection framework. Three hierarchical approaches are used for parsimonious model selection: the Schwarz criterion (SC), the F-test t-test (F- t), proposed by Hext, and the F-test F-test (F-F), adapted from Snedecor. The F - t approach is more robust than the others for selecting between isotropic and general anisotropic (full tensor) models. However, due to its high sensitivity to the variance estimate and bias in sorting eigenvalues, the F-F and SC are preferred for segmenting models with transverse isotropy (cylindrical symmetry). Additionally, the SC method is easier to implement than the F - t and F - F methods and has better performance. As such, this approach can be efficiently used for evaluating large MRI data sets. In addition, the proposed voxel-by-voxel segmentation framework is not susceptible to artifacts caused by the inhomogeneity of the variance in neighboring voxels with different degrees of anisotropy, which might contaminate segmentation results obtained with the techniques based on voxel averaging.     

GrabCut image segmentation algorithm based on structure tensor

This paper attempts to present an interactive color natural images segmentation method. This method extracts the feature of images by using the nonlinear compact structure tensor (NCST) and then uses GrabCut method to obtain the segmentation. This method not only realizes the non-parametric fusion of texture information and color information, but also improves the efficiency of the calculation. Then, the improved GrabCut algorithm is used to evaluate the foreground target segmentation. In order to calculate the simplicity and efficiency, this paper also extends the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) constructed base on the GrabCut to the tensor space, and uses the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence instead of the usual Riemannian geometry. Lastly, an iteration convergence criterion is proposed to reduce the time of the iteration of GrabCut algorithm dramatically with satisfied segmentation accuracy. After conducting a large number of experiments on synthetic texture images and natural images, the results demonstrate that this method has a more accurate segmentation effect.     

Evaluation of segmentation techniques using region area and boundary matching information

Evaluation techniques play an important role while picking a suitable segmentation scheme out of a number of alternatives. In this paper, a novel supervised segmentation evaluation scheme is proposed that is designed by combining segment area and boundary information. Using the evaluation metric, a ranking of the popular segmentation algorithms is carried out. A comparative analysis with existing supervised metrics that are commonly used for grading segmentation schemes is performed. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed measure is promising.     

Layered moving-object segmentation for stereoscopic video using motion and depth information

A novel layered stereoscopic moving-object segmentation method is proposed in this paper by exploiting both motion information and depth information to extract moving objects for each depth layer with high accuracy on their shape boundary. By taking a higher-order statistics on two frame-difference fields across three adjacent frames, the computed motion information are used to conduct change detection and generate one motion mask that consists of all the moving objects from all the depth layers involved at each view. It would be highly desirable, and challenging, to further differentiate them according to their residing depth layer to achieve layered segmentation. For that, multiple depth-layer masks are generated using our proposed disparity estimation method, one for each depth layer. By intersecting the motion mask and one depth-layer mask at any given layer-of-interest, the moving objects associated with the corresponding layer are then extracted. All the above-mentioned processes are repeatedly performed along the video sequence with a sliding window of three frames at a time. For demonstration, only the foreground and the background layers are considered in this paper, while the proposed method is generic and can be straightforwardly extended to more layers, once the corresponding depth-layer masks are made available. Experimental results have shown that the proposed layered moving-object segmentation method is able to segment the foreground and background moving objects separately, with high accuracy on their shape boundary. In addition, the required computational load is considered fairly inexpensive, since our design methodology is to generate masks and perform intersections for extracting the moving objects for each depth layer.     

Optimal resynchronization marker positioning method using a novel information measure

This paper presents a new resynchronization marker (RM) positioning technique to effectively block the error propagation caused by channel errors. The optimal technique can be defined as the one minimizing the information loss under an error condition. For realization of the optimal technique, the amount of the information lost by errors needs to be measured. Thus, we introduce a novel measure that is successful in reflecting the actual importance of the lost data, which is measured by using error concealment techniques. That is, the amount of information lost by an error at a certain location is numerically specified by the difference between the image recovered by the error concealment and the image normally decoded without any error. Since such a measurement method is appropriate for reflecting the actual damage by errors, it is very useful for determining the RM positions. With the new measure, the optimal RM positioning technique is proposed and verified by experiments.