A neural network system for matching dental radiographs

This paper addresses the problem of creating a postmortem identification system by matching image features extracted from dental radiographs. We lay the architecture of a prototype automated dental identification system (ADIS), which tackles the dental image matching problem by first extracting high-level features to expedite retrieval of potential matches and then by low-level image comparison using inherent features of dental images. We propose the use of learnable inherent dental image features for tooth-to-tooth image comparisons. We treat the tooth-to-tooth matching problem as a binary classification problem for which we propose probabilistic models of class-conditional densities. We also propose an adaptive strategic searching technique and use it in conjunction with back propagation in order to estimate system parameters. We present promising experimental results that reflect the value of our approach.     

A system for human identification from X-ray dental radiographs

Forensic odontology is the branch of forensics that deals with human identification based on dental features. In this paper, we present a system for automating that process by identifying people from dental X-ray images. Given a dental image of a postmortem (PM), the proposed system retrieves the best matches from an antemortem (AM) database. The system automatically segments dental X-ray images into individual teeth and extracts the contour of each tooth. Features are extracted from each tooth and are used for retrieval. We developed a new method for teeth separation based on integral projection. We also developed a new method for representing and matching teeth contours using signature vectors obtained at salient points on the contours of the teeth. During retrieval, the AM radiographs that have signatures closer to the PM are found and presented to the user. Matching scores are generated based on the distance between the signature vectors of AM and PM teeth. Experimental results on a small database of dental radiographs are encouraging.     

Dental biometrics: alignment and matching of dental radiographs

Dental biometrics utilizes dental radiographs for human identification. The dental radiographs provide information about teeth, including tooth contours, relative positions of neighboring teeth, and shapes of the dental work (e.g., crowns, fillings, and bridges). The proposed system has two main stages: feature extraction and matching. The feature extraction stage uses anisotropic diffusion to enhance the images and a mixture of Gaussians model to segment the dental work. The matching stage has three sequential steps: tooth-level matching, computation of image distances, and subject identification. In the tooth-level matching step, tooth contours are matched using a shape registration method and the dental work is matched on overlapping areas. The distance between the tooth contours and the distance between the dental works are then combined using posterior probabilities. In the second step, the tooth correspondences between the given query (postmortem) radiograph and the database (antemortem) radiograph are established. A distance based on the corresponding teeth is then used to measure the similarity between the two radiographs. Finally, all the distances between the given postmortem radiographs and the antemortem radiographs that provide candidate identities are combined to establish the identity of the subject associated with the postmortem radiographs.     

An effective classification and numbering system for dental bitewing radiographs using teeth region and contour information

We propose a dental classification and numbering system to effectively segment, classify, and number teeth in dental bitewing radiographs. An image enhancement method that combines homomorphic filtering, homogeneity-based contrast stretching, and adaptive morphological transformation is proposed to improve both contrast and illumination evenness of the radiographs simultaneously. Iterative thresholding and integral projection are adapted to isolate teeth to regions of interest (ROIs) followed by contour extraction of the tooth and the pulp (if available) from each ROI. A binary linear support vector machine using the skew-adjusted relative length/width ratios of both teeth and pulps, and crown size as features is proposed to classify each tooth to molar or premolar. Finally, a numbering scheme that combines a missing teeth detection algorithm and a simplified version of sequence alignment commonly used in bioinformatics is presented to assign each tooth a proper number. Experimental results show that our system has accuracy rates of 95.1% and 98.0% for classification and numbering, respectively, in terms of number of teeth tested, and correctly classifies and numbers the teeth in four images that were reported either misclassified or erroneously numbered, respectively.     

A simple contour matching algorithm

Two similarity measures between strings are proposed. This correspondence also describes an experiment performed to illustrate the inadequacy of a commonly used measure.     

Structure-oriented contour representation and matching for engineering shapes

Conventional shape matching for engineering models primarily considers rigid shape similarity. They do not seek global shape similarity while considering large local deformations. However, engineering models created by some parametric-based design can involve large parametric changes. As a result, they do not share similarity in their global shape. Hence our goal is to develop shape representations for global matching of part models that can have large dissimilarity through stretching and/or bending.This paper presents a strategy of an integrated shape matching for contours of engineering drawings inspired by the divide-and-conquer paradigm. The original shape is decoupled into two levels of shape representations namely, higher-level structure and lower-level geometry. The higher-level structure matching is then achieved driven by optimal integrated solutions from matching of lower-level local geometry. Feature points are first extracted using curve evolution to attain the two levels of representations. In order to suit engineering semantics, a new significance function for a point is defined to suppress small features using discrete curve evolution. To conduct the integrated shape matching, a mechanism of using lookup tables is employed to associate these two levels of representations. Dynamic Time Warping and Elastic Matching are employed at different levels of shape representations in order to achieve the optimal integration.To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed work for engineering shapes, experiments for contour evolution, feature point registration, and shape-based similarity for retrieval are conducted. They are also compared with the existing methods. The experimental results show that the structure-oriented contour representation and matching are more meaningful and consistent from an engineering perspective.     

An elastic contour matching model for tropical cyclone patternrecognition

In this paper, an elastic graph dynamic link model (EGDLM) based on elastic contour matching is proposed to automate the Dvorak technique for tropical cyclone (TC) pattern interpretation from satellite images. This method integrates traditional dynamic link architecture (DLA) for neural dynamics and the active contour model (ACM) for contour extraction of TC patterns. Using satellite pictures provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 120 tropical cyclone cases that appeared in the period from 1990 to 1998 were extracted for the study. An overall correct rate for TC classification was found to be above 95%. For hurricanes with distinct "eye" formation, the model reported a deviation within 3 km from the "actual eye" location, which was obtained from the aircraft measurement of minimum surface pressure by reconnaissance. Compared with the classical DLA model, the proposed model has simplified the feature representation, the network initialization, and the training process. This leads to a tremendous improvement of recognition performance by more than 1000 times.     

A variational method for contour tracking via covariance matching

This paper presents a novel formulation for contour tracking.We model the second-order statistics of image regions and perform covariance matching under the variational level set framework.Specifically,covariance matrix is adopted as a visual object representation for partial differential equation(PDE) based contour tracking.Log-Euclidean calculus is used as a covariance distance metric instead of Euclidean distance which is unsuitable for measuring the similarities between covariance matrices,because the matrices typically lie on a non-Euclidean manifold.A novel image energy functional is formulated by minimizing the distance metric between the candidate object region and a given template,and maximizing the one between the background region and the template.The corresponding gradient flow is then derived according to a variational approach,enabling partial differential equations(PDEs) based contour tracking.Experiments on several challenging sequences prove the validity of the proposed method.     

均衡化特征匹配的非刚体细胞形态跟踪

提出利用均衡化特征匹配来进行非刚性细胞形体跟踪的方法。采用重启动的随机游走方法建立并求解特征匹配概率模型,利用双向均衡方法对匹配邻接矩阵进行均衡化处理,得到指定目标与待跟踪目标之间的精确匹配,以获得目标的定位跟踪结果。同时利用特征匹配结果进行目标的自动标定,并应用图像分割方法进行目标的精确轮廓跟踪。实验结果表明,将该方法应用于视频中动态背景下的运动细胞形态跟踪时,在背景相似度较高及目标迅速移动的条件下,表现出了良好的性能,与同类方法相比可获得较高的定位精度以及更为准确的目标轮廓。     

Hierarchical multi-pattern matching algorithm for network content inspection

Inspection engines that can inspect network content for application-layer information are urgently required. In-depth packet inspection engines, which search the whole packet payload, can identify the interested packets that contain certain patterns. Network equipment then utilizes the searching results from the inspection engines for application-oriented management. The most important technology for fast packet inspection is an efficient multi-pattern matching algorithm to perform exact string matching between packets and a large set of patterns. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical multi-pattern matching algorithm (HMA) for packet inspection. HMA builds hierarchical index tables from the most frequent common-codes, and efficiently reduces the amount of external memory accesses and memory space by two-tier and cluster-wise matching. Analysis and simulation results reveal that HMA performs much better than state-of-the-art matching algorithms. In particular, HMA can update patterns incrementally, thus creating a reliable network system.     

A local method for contour matching and its parallel implementation

This paper presents a local approach for matching contour segments in an image sequence. This study has been primarily motivated by work concerned with the recovery of 3D structure using active vision. The method to recover the 3D structure of the scene requires to track in real-time contour segments in an image sequence. Here, we propose an original and robust approach that is ideally suited for this problem. It is also of more general interest and can be used in any context requiring matching of line boundaries over time. This method only involves local modeling and computation of moving edges dealing “virtually” with a contour segment primitive representation. Such an approach brings robustness to contour segmentation instability and to occlusion, and easiness for implementation. Parallelism has also been investigated using an SIMD-based real-time image-processing system. This method has been validated with experiments on several real-image sequences. Our results show quite satisfactory performance and the algorithm runs in a few milliseconds. Received: 11 December 1996 / Accepted: 8 August 1997     

Hierarchical chamfer matching: a parametric edge matching algorithm

The algorithm matches edges by minimizing a generalized distance between them. The matching is performed in a series of images depicting the same scene with different resolutions, i.e. in a resolution pyramid. Using this hierarchical structure reduces the computational load significantly. The algorithm is reasonably simple to implement and is insensitive to noise and other disturbances. The algorithm has been tested in several applications. Two of them are briefly presented. In the first application the outlines of common tools are matched to gray-level images of the same tools, with overlapping. In the second application lake edges from aerial photographs are matched to lake edges from a map, with translation, rotation, scale, and perspective changes. The hierarchical chamfer matching algorithm gives correct results using a reasonable amount of computational resources in all tested applications     

Mixed reality depth contour occlusion using binocular similarity matching and three-dimensional contour optimisation

Virtual Reality - Mixed reality applications often require virtual objects that are partly occluded by real objects. However, previous research and commercial products have limitations in terms of...     

基于局部模型匹配的目标轮廓跟踪

在复杂背景下,传统轮廓跟踪方法会发生漂移,甚至丢失目标。针对上述问题,提出一种基于局部模型匹配（LMM）的目标轮廓跟踪算法。利用超像素技术结合EMD相似性度量构建局部特征模型,从而进行局部模型匹配。结合粒子滤波的Snake模型作提取目标轮廓,实现目标轮廓精确跟踪。实验结果表明,该算法在目标形变、部分遮挡、复杂背景等条件下均具有较高的跟踪成功率。与多种目标轮廓跟踪算法进行对比,该算法具有较高的准确性和鲁棒性。     

仿射不变轮廓匹配的视频拼接研究

为了解决复杂场景变换时视频拼接的精度问题,提出了一种仿射不变轮廓匹配的拼接算法——利用场景中主要区域的轮廓信息对视频图像进行匹配,然后利用匹配点求解运动参数进行拼接。该方法克服了传统拼接算法在复杂的场景变化以及重叠区小的情况下拼接精度低的问题。与基于SIFT的拼接算法对比表明,该算法实现了图像序列的高精度拼接,不仅能适应仿射变换,并且对于重叠区域小,存在运动遮挡的视频具有一定的鲁棒性。     

基于轮廓矢量化的形状匹配快速算法

针对现有形状匹配算法匹配速度慢、可靠性差的问题,提出了一种基于轮廓矢量化的形状匹配算法。将轮廓曲线点集离散化,使用多组向量对轮廓线性进行逼近。匹配时,结合线段在几何中的匹配方法,通过加权求和,计算源图像与目标图像中每组对应向量的相似度,将它们的平均值作为匹配结果。以焊盘表面轮廓为实验对象,使用所提出的算法进行匹配,结果表明,通过正确选取向量组数能有效避免匹配精度所受的影响,算法对不同类型的焊盘区分性较强,且匹配速度能满足实际应用的需要。