Question: Software.zhishi.schema: A software programming classification system derived from Stackoverflow data.

In the era of digital information, the exponential increase in text documents from various sources such as the Internet, digital libraries, news outlets, and corporate intranets has necessitated the development of efficient text categorization techniques. Automatic text classification, which involves the systematic assignment of documents to predefined categories or themes, is a critical tool for managing and accessing information within these vast collections. The task of text categorization is inherently complex, given the extensive number of attributes in text data, the large volume of training samples required, and the interdependencies among these attributes. This paper delves into a straightforward yet powerful approach to text classification: the centroid-based algorithm. Despite its simplicity and robust performance, this method has received less attention and analysis compared to its more complex counterparts. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the centroid-based classifier consistently outperforms well-established algorithms such as Naive Bayesian, k-nearest-neighbors, and C4.5 across diverse datasets. Our analysis reveals that the effectiveness of the centroid-based approach stems from its unique similarity measure, which enables it to classify new documents by assessing the extent to which their behavior aligns with that of documents belonging to different classes, as quantified by average similarity. This alignment mechanism allows the classifier to dynamically adjust to varying class densities. Moreover, our investigation indicates that the similarity measure employed by the centroid-based scheme inherently accounts for term dependencies within different classes. This feature, we argue, is the key to its superior performance over classifiers that do not consider such dependencies.

An effective data collection method for evaluating software development methodologies and for studying the software development process is described. The method uses goal-directed data collection to evaluate methodologies with respect to the claims made for them. Such claims are used as a basis for defining the goals of the data collection, establishing a list of questions of interest to be answered by data analysis, defining a set of data categorization schemes, and designing a data collection form. The data to be collected are based on the changes made to the software during development, and are obtained when the changes are made. To ensure accuracy of the data, validation is performed concurrently with software development and data collection. Validation is based on interviews with those people supplying the data. Results from using the methodology show that data validation is a necessary part of change data collection. Without it, as much as 50 percent of the data may be erroneous. Feasibility of the data collection methodology was demonstrated by applying it to five different projects in two different environments. The application showed that the methodology was both feasible and useful.

Addressing unresolved questions concerning computational thinking.

Our inspiration comes from Nell (Never Ending Language Learning), a computer program running at Carnegie Mellon University to extract structured information from unstructured web pages. We consider the problem of semi-supervised learning approach to extract category instances (e.g. country(USA), city(New York)) from web pages, starting with a handful of labeled training examples of each category or relation, plus hundreds of millions of unlabeled web documents. Semisupervised approaches using a small number of labeled examples together with many unlabeled examples are often unreliable as they frequently produce an internally consistent, but nevertheless, incorrect set of extractions. We believe that this problem can be overcome by simultaneously learning independent classifiers in a new approach named Coupled Bayesian Sets algorithm, based on Bayesian Sets, for many different categories and relations (in the presence of an ontology defining constraints that couple the training of these classifiers). Experimental results show that simultaneously learning a coupled collection of classifiers for random 11 categories resulted in much more accurate extractions than training classifiers through original Bayesian Sets algorithm, Naive Bayes, BaS-all and Coupled Pattern Learner (the category extractor used in NELL).

In simulation software selection problems, packages are evaluated either on their own merits or in comparison with other packages. In either method, a comprehensive list of criteria for evaluation of simulation software is essential for proper selection. Although various simulation software evaluation checklists do exist, there are dierences in the lists provided and the terminologies used. This paper presents a hierarchical framework for simulation software evaluation consisting of seven main groups and several subgroups. An explanation for each criterion is provided and an analysis of the usability of the proposed framework is further discussed. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have been gaining a significant amount of attention from Software Engineering researchers since 2004. SLRs are considered to be a new research methodology in Software Engineering, which allow evidence to be gathered with regard to the usefulness or effectiveness of the technology proposed in Software Engineering for the development and maintenance of software products. This is demonstrated by the growing number of publications related to SLRs that have appeared in recent years. While some tools exist that can support some or all of the activities of the SLR processes defined in (Kitchenham & Charters, 2007), these are not free. The objective of this paper is to present the SLR-Tool, which is a free tool and is available on the following website: http://alarcosj.esi.uclm.es/SLRTool/, to be used by researchers from any discipline, and not only Software Engineering. SLR-Tool not only supports the process of performing SLRs proposed in (Kitchenham & Charters, 2007), but also provides additional functionalities such as: refining searches within the documents by applying text mining techniques; defining a classification schema in order to facilitate data synthesis; exporting the results obtained to the format of tables and charts; and exporting the references from the primary studies to the formats used in bibliographic packages such as EndNote, BibTeX or Ris. This tool has, to date, been used by members of the Alarcos Research Group and PhD students, and their perception of it is that it is both highly necessary and useful. Our purpose now is to circulate the use of SLR-Tool throughout the entire research community in order to obtain feedback from other users.

Model management is a new approach to meta data management that offers a higher level programming interface than current techniques. The main abstractions are models (e.g., schemas, interface definitions) and mappings between models. It treats these abstractions as bulk objects and offers such operators as Match, Merge, Diff, Compose, Apply, and ModelGen. This paper extends earlier treatments of these operators and applies them to three classical meta data management problems: schema integration, schema evolution, and round-trip engineering.

The data quality directly determines the data further analysis and other applications. With the important of data quality, data is a major asset in software applications and information systems. Getting and ensuring high quality data is critical to the software and related business operations. At present, there are many methods and techniques of data quality assessment or evaluation. Based on the evaluation criteria of data quality, the paper mainly starts from the needs of application software and uses the requirements as a guide in the evaluation process. Define evaluation criteria based on user-defined requirements. In this paper, the method proposed in a practical case has been applied, and achieved good practical results.

A consequence of the growing number of empirical studies in software engineering is the need to adopt systematic approaches to assessing and aggregating research outcomes in order to provide a balanced and objective summary of research evidence for a particular topic. The paper reports experiences with applying one such approach, the practice of systematic literature review, to the published studies relevant to topics within the software engineering domain. The systematic literature review process is summarised, a number of reviews being undertaken by the authors and others are described and some lessons about the applicability of this practice to software engineering are extracted. The basic systematic literature review process seems appropriate to software engineering and the preparation and validation of a review protocol in advance of a review activity is especially valuable. The paper highlights areas where some adaptation of the process to accommodate the domain-specific characteristics of software engineering is needed as well as areas where improvements to current software engineering infrastructure and practices would enhance its applicability. In particular, infrastructure support provided by software engineering indexing databases is inadequate. Also, the quality of abstracts is poor; it is usually not possible to judge the relevance of a study from a review of the abstract alone. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision.

A useful starting point for designing advanced graphical user interfaces is the Visual InformationSeeking Mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. But this is only a starting point in trying to understand the rich and varied set of information visualizations that have been proposed in recent years. This paper offers a task by data type taxonomy with seven data types (1-, 2-, 3-dimensional data, temporal and multi-dimensional data, and tree and network data) and seven tasks (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history, and extract).


Question: Software.zhishi.schema: A software programming classification system derived from Stackoverflow.

This paper introduces an information-based measure of semantic similarity within an is-a taxonomy, designed to address the challenge of ambiguity in natural language. The measure, grounded in shared information content, is evaluated against human judgments of similarity, outperforming the conventional edge-counting method. The paper further outlines algorithms that leverage this taxonomic similarity to resolve both syntactic and semantic ambiguities, accompanied by empirical evidence showcasing their efficacy.

**Question**: The Application of Deep Learning for the Detection of Glaucoma in Optical Coherence Tomography

**Documents**: Automatic Detection of Glaucoma Using Optical Coherence Tomography Images with a Deep Learning Approach
Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible blindness worldwide. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique that can detect glaucomatous damage at an early stage. This paper presents a deep learning approach for the automatic detection of glaucoma using OCT images. The proposed method is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) that is trained on a large dataset of OCT images of glaucomatous and normal eyes. The CNN is able to learn the features that are indicative of glaucoma and classify the images accordingly. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a test dataset of OCT images and compared to the results obtained by a group of ophthalmologists. The results show that the proposed method achieves a high accuracy in detecting glaucoma and outperforms the ophthalmologists in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

**Similar Documents**: This study introduces an automated glaucoma detection system utilizing optical coherence tomography (OCT) images through a deep learning framework. Glaucoma, a major cause of irreversible vision loss, can be identified early with OCT, a non-invasive imaging technique. The proposed methodology employs a convolutional neural network (CNN), trained on a substantial dataset of OCT images from both glaucomatous and healthy eyes, to learn and identify features indicative of glaucoma. The CNN's ability to classify OCT images is assessed on a separate test dataset and compared against the diagnostic accuracy of a panel of ophthalmologists. Results highlight the high precision of the proposed system in glaucoma detection, surpassing ophthalmologists in sensitivity and specificity metrics.

In this paper we present a method for systematically defining the process architecture of any organization. We begin by presenting a detailed interpretation of the upper levels of Zachman’s framework, providing an answer to the cell formed by the intersection of the perspective of the Planner (row 1) and the dimension of Function (column 2). Our method consists of four steps: capturing the organizational structure; exhaustively analyzing the flow of information between the different organizational units, customers, and providers, allowing for a high-level understanding of the organization’s operation; identifying and modeling the configuration of value that best adapts itself to the creation of value for the organization (value chain, workshop, or network); and, given the specified value configuration, identifying, defining, and interrelating the different essential processes.

In this paper, we conducted a comparative study of how social organization takes place in a wasp colony and OSS developer communities. Both these systems display similar global organization patterns, such as hierarchies and clear labor divisions. As our analysis shows, both systems also define interacting agent networks with similar common features that reflect limited information sharing among agents. As far as we know, this is the first research study analyzing the patterns and functional significance of these systems' weighted-interaction networks. By illuminating the extent to which self-organization is responsible for patterns such as hierarchical structure, we can gain insight into the origins of organization in OSS communities.

An evaluation of recent industrial and societal trends revealed three key factors driving software engineering's future: speed, data, and ecosystems. These factors' implications have led to guidelines for companies to evolve their software engineering practices. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.

1 Introduction Jackson (Jackson 95) recognises the vital difference between an application's domain and its code: two different worlds, each with its own language, experts, ways of thinking etc. A finished application forms the intersection between these worlds. The difficult job of the software engineer is to build a bridge between these worlds, at the same time as solving problems in both worlds.

Model management is a new approach to meta data management that offers a higher level programming interface than current techniques. The main abstractions are models (e.g., schemas, interface definitions) and mappings between models. It treats these abstractions as bulk objects and offers such operators as Match, Merge, Diff, Compose, Apply, and ModelGen. This paper extends earlier treatments of these operators and applies them to three classical meta data management problems: schema integration, schema evolution, and round-trip engineering.

Yunglung Chen, Yuping Wang, Kinshuk, Nian-Shing Chen Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, No. 70, Lienhai Rd., Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University, Nathan, 4111, Australia School of Computing and Information System, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada henryylchen@gmail.com, y.wang@griffith.edu.au, kinshuk@athabascau.ca, nschen@mis.nsysu.edu.tw

Social applications on the web let users track and follow the activities of a large number of others regardless of location or affiliation. There is a potential for this transparency to radically improve collaboration and learning in complex knowledge-based activities. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with central and peripheral GitHub users, we examined the value of transparency for large-scale distributed collaborations and communities of practice. We find that people make a surprisingly rich set of social inferences from the networked activity information in GitHub, such as inferring someone else's technical goals and vision when they edit code, or guessing which of several similar projects has the best chance of thriving in the long term. Users combine these inferences into effective strategies for coordinating work, advancing technical skills and managing their reputation.

Today's enterprises hold ever-growing amounts of public data, stemming from different organizational systems, such as development environments, CRM systems, business intelligence systems, and enterprise social media. This data unlocks rich and diverse information about entities, people, terms, and the relationships among them. A lot of insight can be gained through analyzing this knowledge graph, both by individual employees and by the organization as a whole. In this talk, I will review recent work done by the Social Technologies & Analytics group at IBM Research-Haifa to mine these relationships, represent them in a generalized model, and use the model for different aims within the enterprise, including social search [5], expertise location [1], social recommendation [2, 3], and network analysis [4].

Different from long texts, the features of Chinese short texts is much sparse, which is the primary cause of the low accuracy in the classification of short texts by using traditional classification methods. In this paper, a novel method was proposed to tackle the problem by expanding the features of short text based on Wikipedia and Word2vec. Firstly, build the semantic relevant concept sets of Wikipedia. We get the articles that have high relevancy with Wikipedia concepts and use the word2vec tools to measure the semantic relatedness between target concepts and related concepts. And then we use the relevant concept sets to extend the short texts. Compared to traditional similarity measurement between concepts using statistical method, this method can get more accurate semantic relatedness. The experimental results show that by expanding the features of short texts, the classification accuracy can be improved. Specifically, our method appeared to be more effective.

This paper gives an overview about the development of the field of Knowledge Engineering over the last 15 years. We discuss the paradigm shift from a transfer view to a modeling view and describe two approaches which considerably shaped research in Knowledge Engineering: Role-limiting Methods and Generic Tasks. To illustrate various concepts and methods which evolved in the last years we describe three modeling frameworks: CommonKADS, MIKE, and PROTÉGÉ-II. This description is supplemented by discussing some important methodological developments in more detail: specification languages for knowledge-based systems, problem-solving methods, and ontologies. We conclude with outlining the relationship of Knowledge Engineering to Software Engineering, Information Integration and Knowledge Management.


Question: Image processing techniques and feature extraction methods.

This document outlines a computational methodology for edge detection within images, emphasizing the establishment of a clear set of objectives for the computational process of identifying edge points. The effectiveness of this approach hinges on defining precise goals that delineate the detector's desired functionality while minimizing assumptions about the solution's structure. To achieve this, we outline detection and localization standards for a specific class of edges, formulating these criteria mathematically as functionals on the operator's impulse response. An additional criterion is introduced to ensure that the detector provides a singular response to a single edge. Employing these criteria within an optimization framework, we derive detectors tailored to various common image features, such as step edges. Upon focusing our analysis on step edges, we uncover a fundamental uncertainty principle that governs the trade-off between detection and localization performance, which are our primary objectives. Utilizing this principle, we ascertain a single, optimal operator shape that remains effective at any scale. This optimal detector can be approximated through a straightforward implementation, where edges are identified at the maxima of the gradient magnitude in an image smoothed by a Gaussian function. To address the varying signal-to-noise ratios encountered in images, we enhance this basic detector by employing operators of multiple widths. We introduce a technique known as feature synthesis, which facilitates the integration of information from different scales, moving from finer to coarser levels of detail. We conclude by demonstrating a substantial improvement in step edge detection performance as the operator's point spread function is expanded along the edge, thereby enhancing the detector's robustness and accuracy.

Enormous incorporation of information technologies into all aspects of recent life caused demand for processing vehicles as conceptual resources in information systems. This can be achieved by a human agent, or by special intelligent equipment which is be able to recognize vehicles by their number plates in a real environment and reflect it into conceptual resources. Because of this, various recognition techniques have been developed and number plate recognition systems are today used in various traffic and security applications, such as parking, access and border control, or tracking of stolen cars. This work deals with problematic from field of artificial intelligence, machine vision and neural networks in construction of an automatic car number plate Recognition (ACNPR). This techniques deals with enhanced shadow removal algorithm, along with horizontal and vertical projection method for number plate localization & segmentation..Work comparatively deals with methods achieving invariance of systems towards image illumination, translations and various light conditions during the capture.

This thesis focuses on the area of face processing and aims at designing a reliable framework to facilitate face, age, and gender recognition. A Bag-of-Words framework has been optimized for the task of face recognition by evaluating different feature descriptors and different bag-of-words configurations. More specifically, we choose a compact set of features (e.g., descriptors, window locations, window sizes, dictionary sizes, etc.) in order to produce the highest possible rate of accuracy. Experiments on a challenging dataset shows that our framework achieves a better level of accuracy when compared to other popular approaches such as dimension reduction techniques, edge detection operators, and texture and shape feature extractors. The second contribution of this thesis is the proposition of a general framework for age and gender classification. Although the vast majority of the existing solutions focus on a single visual descriptor that often only encodes a certain characteristic of the image regions, this thesis aims at integrating multiple feature types. For this purpose, feature selection is employed to obtain more accurate and robust facial descriptors. Once descriptors have been computed, a compact set of features is chosen, which facilitates facial image processing for age and gender analysis. In addition to this, a new color descriptor (CLR-LBP) is proposed and the results obtained is shown to be comparable to those of other pre-existing color descriptors. The experimental results indicates that our age and gender framework outperforms other proposed methods when examined on two challenging databases, where face objects are present with different expressions and levels of illumination. This achievement demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed solution and allows us to achieve a higher accuracy over the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Biometrics identification methods proved to be very efficient, more natural and easy for users than traditional methods of human identification. In fact, only biometrics methods truly identify humans, not keys and cards they posses or passwords they should remember. The future of biometrics will surely lead to systems based on image analysis as the data acquisition is very simple and requires only cameras, scanners or sensors. More importantly such methods could be passive, which means that the user does not have to take active part in the whole process or, in fact, would not even know that the process of identification takes place. There are many possible data sources for human identification systems, but the physiological biometrics seem to have many advantages over methods based on human behaviour. The most interesting human anatomical parts for such passive, physiological biometrics systems based on images acquired from cameras are face and ear. Both of those methods contain large volume of unique features that allow to distinctively identify many users and will be surely implemented into efficient biometrics systems for many applications. The article introduces to ear biometrics and presents its advantages over face biometrics in passive human identification systems. Then the geometrical method of feature extraction from human ear images in order to perform human identification is presented.

Face is a popular topic of research in computer vision, image analysis and understanding. This paper proposes a method to detect straight posed face as well as tilted face in colour images. Algorithm first detects skin colour region and then skin region is further processed by finding connected components and holes. Each connected components is tested to extract facial features and Y-value of each holes. If features exist in the connected component then the component is concluded as face. The Y-value of both eyes are compared to find whether the face is straight or tilted. For tilted face, the angle of tilt is determined and the input image is rotated by the angle of tilt to straighten up the face. After straightening the face, the rectangle is drawn to enclose the face. The dimension of drawn rectangle is obtained by using the distance parameter of the line between two eyes.

No feature-based vision system can work unless good features can be identi ed and tracked from frame to frame. Although tracking itself is by and large a solved problem, selecting features that can be tracked well and correspond to physical points in the world is still hard. We propose a feature selection criterion that is optimal by construction because it is based on how the tracker works, and a feature monitoring method that can detect occlusions, disocclusions, and features that do not correspond to points in the world. These methods are based on a new tracking algorithm that extends previous Newton-Raphson style search methods to work under a ne image transformations. We test performance with several simulations and experiments.

It is our aim in this research to optimize the numerical computation of the Haralick texture features [1] that consists of two steps. Haralick texture features are used as a primary component to discern between different protein structures in microscopic bio-images. The first of these two parts is the construction of the co-occurrence matrix. Upon completion of this implementation, we will attempt to optimize the code using a novel recursive blocking algorithm. We will also use standard practices of optimizing code such as scalar replacement and unrolling. The second part, feature calculation, will be optimized by putting to use information about the data that we will be working with and eliminating any redundancies in the code. We will also apply the practices of unrolling and scalar replacement. With these optimizations in place, we will show that we reduce the runtime by a20% in the co-occurrence construction phase and by a factor of20 in the feature calculation phase of computation.

Image registration is an essential step in the process of image fusion, environment surveillance and change detection. Finding correct feature matches during the registration process proves to be difficult, especially for remote sensing images with large background variations (e.g., images taken pre and post an earthquake or flood). Traditional registration methods based on local intensity probably cannot maintain steady performances, as differences are significant in the same area of the corresponding images, and ground control points are not always available in many disaster images. In this paper, an automatic image registration method based on the line segments on the main shape contours (e.g., coastal lines, long roads and mountain ridges) is proposed for remote sensing images with large background variations because the main shape contours can hold relatively more invariant information. First, a line segment detector called EDLines (Edge Drawing Lines), which was proposed by Akinlar et al. in 2011, is used to extract line segments from two corresponding images, and a line validation step is performed to remove meaningless and fragmented line segments. Then, a novel line segment descriptor with a new histogram binning strategy, which is robust to global geometrical distortions, is generated for each line segment based on the geometrical relationships,including both the locations and orientations of theremaining line segments relative to it. As a result of the invariance of the main shape contours, correct line segment matches will have similar descriptors and can be obtained by cross-matching among the descriptors. Finally, a spatial consistency measure is used to remove incorrect matches, and transformation parameters between the reference and sensed images can be figured out. Experiments with images from different types of satellite datasets, such as Landsat7, QuickBird, WorldView, and so on, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is automatic, fast (4 ms faster than the second fastest method, i.e., the rotationand scale-invariant shape context) and can achieve a recall of 79.7%, a precision of 89.1% and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.0 pixels on average for remote sensing images with large background variations.

Nowadays computer vision technology is helping the visually impaired by recognizing objects in their surroundings. Unlike research of navigation and wayfinding, there are no camera-based systems available in the market to find personal items for the blind. This paper proposes an object recognition method to help blind people find missing items using Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). SURF features can extract distinctive invariant features that can be utilized to perform reliable matching between different images in multiple scenarios. These features are invariant to image scale, translation, rotation, illumination, and partial occlusion. The proposed recognition process begins by matching individual features of the user queried object to a database of features with different personal items which are saved in advance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a new Reduced Reference Image Quality Metric for multiply degraded images based on a features extraction step and its combination. The selected features are extracted from the original image and its degraded version. Some of them aim to quantify the level of the considered degradation types, while the others quantify its sharpness. These features are then combined to obtain a single value, which corresponds to the predicted subjective score. Our method has been evaluated and compared in terms of correlation with subjective judgments to some recent methods by using the LIVE Multiply Distorted Image Quality Database.

An age group classification system for gray-scale facial images is proposed in this paper. Four age groups, including babies, young adults, middle-aged adults, and old adults, are used in the classification system. The process of the system is divided into three phases: location, feature extraction, and age classification. Based on the symmetry of human faces and the variation of gray levels, the positions of eyes, noses, and mouths could be located by applying the Sobel edge operator and region labeling. Two geometric features and three wrinkle features from a facial image are then obtained. Finally, two back-propagation neural networks are constructed for classification. The first one employs the geometric features to distinguish whether the facial image is a baby. If it is not, then the second network uses the wrinkle features to classify the image into one of three adult groups. The proposed system is experimented with 230 facial images on a Pentium II 350 processor with 128 MB RAM. One half of the images are used for training and the other half for test. It takes 0.235 second to classify an image on an average. The identification rate achieves 90.52% for the training images and 81.58% for the test images, which is roughly close to human’s subjective justification.


Question: Image processing techniques and feature extraction methods.

The Evolution of Medical Image Analysis: Two Decades of Advancement and Future Prospects
Medical image analysis has been an integral part of the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) community since the inception of these Transactions, initially perceived as an application of pattern analysis and computer vision techniques to a novel dataset. However, over the past two to three decades, the unique challenges and complexities inherent in medical imaging have catalyzed the emergence of a distinct field of study. Characteristic features of this discipline include the acquisition of specialized image information, the handling of fully three-dimensional image datasets, the management of nonrigid object motion and deformation, and the statistical variability in both normal and abnormal conditions. This paper reviews the significant strides made in the field over the last two decades and identifies some of the key challenges that lie ahead. The terms medical imaging, medical image analysis, computer vision, image segmentation, image registration, nonrigid motion, deformable contours, and image-guided surgery are pivotal in understanding the scope and progress of this field.

The Progression of Medical Image Analysis: Insights from Two Decades and the Road Ahead
The field of medical image analysis has been deeply embedded within the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) community since the early days of these Transactions. Initially, the field was viewed as an application of pattern analysis and computer vision techniques to a unique dataset. Yet, over the last two to three decades, the distinctive nature of the problems encountered in medical imaging has led to the establishment of a separate and specialized discipline. This includes dealing with specific types of image information, handling volumetric three-dimensional images, accounting for the nonrigid motion and deformation of objects, and addressing the statistical variation in both normal and pathological conditions. In this paper, we survey the advancements made in the field over the past 20 years and highlight some of the ongoing and future challenges. Key terms encompassing the field include medical imaging, medical image analysis, computer vision, image segmentation, image registration, nonrigid motion, deformable contours, and image-guided surgery, which provide a framework for understanding the evolution and future directions of medical image analysis.

This paper proposes an automated system for recognizing plant species based on leaf images. Plant leaf images corresponding to three plant types, are analyzed using three different shape modelling techniques, the first two based on the Moments-Invariant (M-I) model and the Centroid-Radii (C-R) model and the third based on a proposed technique of Binary-Superposition (B-S). For the M-I model the first four central normalized moments have been considered. For the C-R model an edge detector has been used to identify the boundary of the leaf shape and 36 radii at 10 degree angular separation have been used to build the shape vector. The proposed approach consists of comparing binary versions of the leaf images through superposition and using the sum of non-zero pixel values of the resultant as the feature vector. The data set for experimentations consists of 180 images divided into training and testing sets and comparison between them is done using Manhattan, Euclidean and intersection norms. Accuracies obtained using the proposed technique is seen to be an improvement over the M-I and C-R based techniques, and comparable to the best figures reported in extant literature.

V isual information retrieval systems have entered a new era. First-generation systems allowed access to images and videos through textual data. 1,2 Typical searches for these systems include, for example, " all images of paintings of the Florentine school of the 15th century " or " all images by Cezanne with landscapes. " Such systems expressed information through alphanumeric keywords or scripts. They employed representation schemes like relational models, frame models, and object-oriented models. On the other hand, current-generation retrieval systems support full retrieval by visual content. 3,4 Access to visual information is not only performed at a conceptual level, using keywords as in the textu-al domain, but also at a perceptual level, using objective measurements of visual content. In these systems, image processing, pattern recognition , and computer vision constitute an integral part of the system's architecture and operation. They objectively analyze pixel distribution and extract the content descriptors automatically from raw sensory data. Image content descriptors are commonly represented as feature vectors, whose elements correspond to significant parameters that model image attributes. Therefore, visual attributes are regarded as points in a multidimen-sional feature space, where point closeness reflects feature similarity. These advances (for comprehensive reviews of the field, see the " Further Reading " sidebar) have paved the way for third-generation systems, featuring full multimedia data management and networking support. Forthcoming standards such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 (see the Nack and Lindsay article in this issue) provide the framework for efficient representation, processing, and retrieval of visual information. Yet many problems must still be addressed and solved before these technologies can emerge. An important issue is the design of indexing structures for efficient retrieval from large, possibly distributed , multimedia data repositories. To achieve this goal, image and video content descriptors can be internally organized and accessed through multidimensional index structures. 5 A second key problem is to bridge the semantic gap between the system and users. That is, devise representations capturing visual content at high semantic levels especially relevant for retrieval tasks. Specifically, automatically obtaining a representation of high-level visual content remains an open issue. Virtually all the systems based on automatic storage and retrieval of visual information proposed so far use low-level perceptual representations of pictorial data, which have limited semantics. Building up a representation proves tantamount to defining a model of the world, possibly through a formal description language, whose semantics capture only a few …

-This, paper introduces a new method for describing signature images. The description involves features of the signatures and relations among its parts organized in a hierarchical structure. The description is used to classify the signatures and globally analyse their structure. Description Segmentation Feature extraction Classification Signature analysis I. I N T R O D U C T I O N Although a lot of research on signatures has been reported in the past 20 years (t) they are mainly confined to verification in which a set of goal oriented features is used to give the decision about the authenticity of the claimed signature. However, it is interesting to be able to access a signature database using a compact and meaningful description derived from its pictorial content. Constructing such a signature database, requires an automatic description of signature images. Researches on signature description are very limited and appeared implicitly in verification researches. In on-line systems, Lamarche and Plamondon (z) reconsidered the theoretical model of the handwriting process introduced by Verdenberg and Koster <3) to describe the pen tip speed and orientation and used this description for feature extraction. In off-line systems, Nagel and Rosenfeld (̀ ~ modified the model introduced by Eden (~) for describing upright handwriting by adding the slant parameter and used the parameters of the modified model as a basis for choosing their features for verification, and Brocklehurst (6) used data reduction techniques to encode the signatures into a list of 7 features (called encoded description) and used them for verification. In all cases, neither a structural description of the signature as a 2-D image nor a conceptualization of the features was proposed. In this paper, we introduce a method for signature description and a reliable approach that can describe digitized signature images by this method. The description uses a hierarchical approach, i.e. the signature is at the top level and each lower level gives more detail about the higher one. Since the range of the natural variation of signature writing will change with time as found by Kapoor <~ and Evett, (s) and the ratios of the writing parameters for different samples of the same individual's writing remain essentially constant over a wide range of the writing surface and space available, ('~ features and relations of o u r description are extracted in a relative way (e.g. the length is measured by its ratio to the width, and so on) to attempt to make it insensitive to the natural variation in the genuine signatures. The signature is described using a global description suitable for purposes like classifying the signature data and studying its nature, and a local description convenient for applications which require more detailed information about the signature like signature analysis or similarity oriented retrieval. The global description is represented by a character string, and the local description is represented by a tree structure. In Section 2, the general approach for describing signature images is introduced, and Section 3 introduces the practical method of the description. Section 4 presents the application of the global description to classifying and analysing the signature data, and finally, Section 5 contains the closing remarks. 2. SIGNATURE DESCRIPTION Signatures are a special case of handwriting in which special characters and flourishes are available, and the ratio between the middle zone width and the letter heights is sometimes abnormal. In many cases, the signature is not readable even by a human. Therefore, we deal with the signature as an image that has the principal zones (upper, middle and lower zones) of the handwriting, not as strokes, letters and words. As indicated by Rosenfeld, (9) description of a picture involves properties of the picture or its parts and relationships among them. Our description involves features like slant, and relations among signature properties like the comparison between the widths of the zones. The description is not reversible, that is, the signature cannot be reconstructed from its description. However, the description involves sufficient information to characterize the signature and its parts. Features and relations are extracted quantitatively, and then mapped into a conceptual

Image registration is an essential step in the process of image fusion, environment surveillance and change detection. Finding correct feature matches during the registration process proves to be difficult, especially for remote sensing images with large background variations (e.g., images taken pre and post an earthquake or flood). Traditional registration methods based on local intensity probably cannot maintain steady performances, as differences are significant in the same area of the corresponding images, and ground control points are not always available in many disaster images. In this paper, an automatic image registration method based on the line segments on the main shape contours (e.g., coastal lines, long roads and mountain ridges) is proposed for remote sensing images with large background variations because the main shape contours can hold relatively more invariant information. First, a line segment detector called EDLines (Edge Drawing Lines), which was proposed by Akinlar et al. in 2011, is used to extract line segments from two corresponding images, and a line validation step is performed to remove meaningless and fragmented line segments. Then, a novel line segment descriptor with a new histogram binning strategy, which is robust to global geometrical distortions, is generated for each line segment based on the geometrical relationships,including both the locations and orientations of theremaining line segments relative to it. As a result of the invariance of the main shape contours, correct line segment matches will have similar descriptors and can be obtained by cross-matching among the descriptors. Finally, a spatial consistency measure is used to remove incorrect matches, and transformation parameters between the reference and sensed images can be figured out. Experiments with images from different types of satellite datasets, such as Landsat7, QuickBird, WorldView, and so on, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is automatic, fast (4 ms faster than the second fastest method, i.e., the rotationand scale-invariant shape context) and can achieve a recall of 79.7%, a precision of 89.1% and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.0 pixels on average for remote sensing images with large background variations.

The individualization of an object from a digital image is a common problem in the field of image processing. We propose a modified version of the watershed algorithm for image segmentation. We have presented an adaptive masking and a threshoding mechanism over each color channel to overcome over segmentation problem, before combining the segmentation from each channel into the final one. Our proposed method ensures accuracy and quality of the 10 different kinds of color images. The experimental results are obtained using image quality assessment (IQA) metrics such as PSNR, MSE, PSNRRGB and Color Image Quality Measure (CQM) based on reversible YUV color transformation. Consequently, the proposed modified watershed approach can enhance the image segmentation performance. Similarly, it is worth noticing that our proposed MWS approach is faster than many other segmentation algorithms, which makes it appropriate for real-time application. According to the visual and quantitative verification, the proposed algorithm is performing better than three other algorithms.

SIFT is one of the most robust and widely used image matching algorithms based on local features. But the key-points descriptor of SIFT algorithm have 128 dimensions. Aiming to the problem of its high dimension and complexity, a novel image matching algorithm is proposed. The descriptors of SIFT key-points are constructed by the rotation invariant LTP, city-block distance is also employed to reduce calculation of key-points matching. The experiment is achieved through different lighting, blur changes and rotation of images, the results show that this method can reduce the processing time and raise image matching efficiency.

Threshold based segmentation methods can effectively separate objects from the background. The conventional Otsu's method can achieve good result only when the histogram of an image has two distinct peaks. In this paper, an iterative thresholding based on 2D improved Otsu method using a novel threshold value recognition function is proposed which is used to find the optimum threshold value in different types of histograms and separate into two classes. For the two classes separated by the above threshold value, mean values are computed. Based on the threshold value and the two mean values, the histogram of an image is divided iteratively into three regions, namely, the Foreground (FG) region, Background (BG) region and To-Be-Processed (TBP) region. The pixels greater than the larger mean belongs to FG region, the pixel which are lesser than the smaller mean belongs to BG region. The pixel that lies between the two mean values belongs to the TBP region and only this region is processed at next iteration, the FG and BG region are not processed further. Again for that TBP region, the novel threshold value recognition function is used to find a new threshold value and then the two mean values are computed to separate into three classes, namely, the FG, BG and TBP region. Then the new TBP region is processed in a similar manner iteratively until the two mean values computed at successive iterations are not changed. Finally all the previously determined foreground regions are combined separately and the background regions are combined separately to give the segmented image. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in detecting the objects and has better anti-noise performance compared with the existing methods.

Image processing is one of the most important areas of signal processing. Image processing is applicable for the improvement of pictorial improvement for human perception and autonomous machine application also the efficient storage and transmission. In this paper guided filter is proposed which can be applicable to both images as well as to video. This guided filter has many advantages over the previous version of filter like mean filter, median filter, sobel filter, bilateral filter, etc. Among of those bilateral filter is more popular. But this bilateral filter has certain limitations like gradient reversal effect this introduces false edges in the image. Proposed guided filter can smooth image/video and also preserved the edge that is information at the edges of image/video but this filter has better behaviors near edges. Also the fast implementation of guided filter is possible. This filter also has algorithm implementation regardless of kernel size. Guided filter gives better output than that of bilateral filter after filtering this bilateral filter gives output like cartoon this also a problem with this. The guided filter is both effective and efficient in many applications of computer vision and computer graphics, etc. Filtering techniques are used in image and video processing applications for various technologies.

The extraction of discriminant features is the most fundamental and important problem in face recognition. This paper presents a method to extract optimal discriminant features for face images by using the uncorrelated discriminant transformation and KL expansion. Experiments on the ORL database and the NUST603 database have been performed. Experimental results show that the uncorrelated discriminant transformation is superior to the Foley}Sammon discriminant transformation and the new method to extract uncorrelated discriminant features for face images is very e!ective. An error rate of 2.5% is obtained with the experiments on the ORL database. An average error rate of 1.2% is obtained with the experiments on the NUST603 database. Experiments show that by extracting uncorrelated discriminant features, face recognition could be performed with higher accuracy on lower than 16 16 resolution mosaic images. It is suggested that for the uncorrelated discriminant transformation, the optimal face image resolution can be regarded as the resolution m n which makes the dimensionality N"mn of the original image vector space be larger and closer to the number of known-face classes. 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Holistic face recognition algorithms are sensitive to expressions, illumination, pose, occlusions and makeup. On the other hand, feature-based algorithms are robust to such variations. In this paper, we present a feature-based algorithm for the recognition of textured 3D faces. A novel keypoint detection technique is proposed which can repeatably identify keypoints at locations where shape variation is high in 3D faces. Moreover, a unique 3D coordinate basis can be defined locally at each keypoint facilitating the extraction of highly descriptive pose invariant features. A 3D feature is extracted by fitting a surface to the neighborhood of a keypoint and sampling it on a uniform grid. Features from a probe and gallery face are projected to the PCA subspace and matched. The set of matching features are used to construct two graphs. The similarity between two faces is measured as the similarity between their graphs. In the 2D domain, we employed the SIFT features and performed fusion of the 2D and 3D features at the feature and score-level. The proposed algorithm achieved 96.1% identification rate and 98.6% verification rate on the complete FRGC v2 data set.


Question: Image processing techniques and feature extraction methods.

In the realm of image processing and analysis, the challenge of accurately segmenting images into distinct regions and effectively tracking these regions over time stands as a critical task. Building upon the work of Tenopoulos et al., who introduced a method for contour detection of intricate shapes with an initial user-selected contour close to the desired outcome, we delve deeper into utilizing the user's input points more efficiently. Our approach introduces an optimal technique for contour detection, enabling precise image segmentation. This method hinges on dynamic programming (DP), offering versatility for a broad range of shapes without requiring iterative refinement. The technique is not only exact but also non-iterative, ensuring efficiency.

Moreover, to enhance computational speed by a factor of 20, a multiscale approach is proposed. While this method sacrifices the absolute optimality inherent in the DP method, it significantly accelerates the processing time. In addressing the issues of contour tracking and matching, we adopt a strategy where the final contour from one frame serves as the initial points for contour detection in the subsequent frame, applying the DP process again for consistency.

For matching contours across frames, a novel method is introduced, which involves a smooth displacement field. This field permits unmatched regions while strictly prohibiting cross vectors, ensuring a coherent and optimal alignment of contours. The matching algorithm, too, is rooted in DP, guaranteeing an optimal solution. Our algorithms have been successfully tested on a wide array of applications, encompassing interactive segmentation and the automatic tracking of regions of interest in medical images, showcasing their robustness and adaptability across diverse scenarios.

Recent developments in computer vision have shown that local features can provide efficient representations suitable for robust object recognition. Support Vector Machines have been established as powerful learning algorithms with good generalization capabilities. In this paper, we combine these two approaches and propose a general kernel method for recognition with local features. We show that the proposed kernel satisfies the Mercer condition and that it is suitable for many established local feature frameworks. Large-scale recognition results are presented on three different databases, which demonstrate that SVMs with the proposed kernel perform better than standard matching techniques on local features. In addition, experiments on noisy and occluded images show that local feature representations significantly outperform global approaches.

—Skewing of the scanned image is an inevitable process and its detection is an important issue for document recognition systems. The skew of the scanned document image specifies the deviation of the text lines from the horizontal or vertical axis. This paper surveys methods to detect this skew in

Threshold based segmentation methods can effectively separate objects from the background. The conventional Otsu's method can achieve good result only when the histogram of an image has two distinct peaks. In this paper, an iterative thresholding based on 2D improved Otsu method using a novel threshold value recognition function is proposed which is used to find the optimum threshold value in different types of histograms and separate into two classes. For the two classes separated by the above threshold value, mean values are computed. Based on the threshold value and the two mean values, the histogram of an image is divided iteratively into three regions, namely, the Foreground (FG) region, Background (BG) region and To-Be-Processed (TBP) region. The pixels greater than the larger mean belongs to FG region, the pixel which are lesser than the smaller mean belongs to BG region. The pixel that lies between the two mean values belongs to the TBP region and only this region is processed at next iteration, the FG and BG region are not processed further. Again for that TBP region, the novel threshold value recognition function is used to find a new threshold value and then the two mean values are computed to separate into three classes, namely, the FG, BG and TBP region. Then the new TBP region is processed in a similar manner iteratively until the two mean values computed at successive iterations are not changed. Finally all the previously determined foreground regions are combined separately and the background regions are combined separately to give the segmented image. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in detecting the objects and has better anti-noise performance compared with the existing methods.

Face is a popular topic of research in computer vision, image analysis and understanding. This paper proposes a method to detect straight posed face as well as tilted face in colour images. Algorithm first detects skin colour region and then skin region is further processed by finding connected components and holes. Each connected components is tested to extract facial features and Y-value of each holes. If features exist in the connected component then the component is concluded as face. The Y-value of both eyes are compared to find whether the face is straight or tilted. For tilted face, the angle of tilt is determined and the input image is rotated by the angle of tilt to straighten up the face. After straightening the face, the rectangle is drawn to enclose the face. The dimension of drawn rectangle is obtained by using the distance parameter of the line between two eyes.

■ Compact, efficient and easy to program digital signal processors execute algorithms once too computationally expensive for real-time applications. ■ Modeling and simulation programs more accurately predict the effects that physical ocean parameters have on the performance of imaging systems under different geometric configurations. ■ Image processing algorithms that handle data from multiple synchronous sources and that can extract and match feature points from each such source derive accurate 3-D scene information. ■ Digital compression schemes provide high-quality standardizations for increased data transfer rates (i.e. streaming video) and reduced storage requirements. This paper reports developments over the past three years in the following topics: ■ Image formation and image processing methods; ■ Extended range imaging techniques;

— Invented in 1976, Number Plates Recognition (NPR) has since found wide commercial applications, making its research prospects challenging and scientifically interesting. A complete NPR system functions by vz steps, license plate; localization, sizing and orientation, normalization, character recognitions and geometric analysis. This paper is a review of NPR preliminary stages; it explains number plate localization, sizing and orientations as well as normalizations sections of the Number Plates Detection and Recognition-Tanzania Case study. MATLAB R2012b is employed in these processes. The input incorporated includes front and rear photographic images of vehicles, for proximity and simulation purposes the ample angle of image is 90 degree +-15. The captured image is converted to gray scale, binarized and edge detection algorithms are used to enhance edges. The output of this stage provides the input feature extraction, segmentation and

In this paper we consider the application of the feature-based approach to medical image retrieval, particularly brain MRI scans for early Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. The key idea is to provide the doctor with the images which have similar visual properties and have full case record, giving the ability to make more informed decision in the prodromal phase of the disease. With regard to the state-of-the art SIFT features in a Bag-of-Visual-Words approach we propose to use the Laguerre Circular Harmonic Functions coefficients as feature vectors. An additional pre-classification step based on estimation of Alzheimer's disease early image abnormalities is proposed to improve overall precision.

.4 long standing problem in computer vision is the extraction of meaningfulfeatures from images. This paper describes a method of segmenting curves in images into a combination of circular arcs and straight lines. This uses a recursive algorithm that first analyses lists of connected edge points and finds a polygonal description, and then analyses this description fitting arcs to groups of connected lines. The result is a description of image edges consisting of circular arcs and lines. The algorithm uses no thresholding. Instead the best option is chosen at each decision stage.

In this paper, a unique approach for road extraction utilizing pixel spectral information for classification and image segmentation-derived object features was developed. In this approach, road extraction was performed in two steps. In the first step, support vector machine (SVM) was employed merely to classify the image into two groups of categories: a road group and a non-road group. For this classification, support vector machine (SVM) achieved higher accuracy than Gaussian maximum likelihood (GML). In the second step, the road group image was segmented into geometrically homogeneous objects using a region growing technique based on a similarity criterion, with higher weighting on shape factors over spectral criteria. A simple thresholding on the shape index and density features derived from these objects was performed to extract road features, which were further processed by thinning and vectorization to obtain road centerlines. The experiment showed the proposed approach worked well with images comprised by both rural and urban area features. Introduction Road information not only plays a central role in the transportation application, but also is an important data layer in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Automated road extraction can save time and labor to a great degree in updating a road spatial database. Various road extraction approaches have been developed. Xiong (2001) grouped these methods into five categories: ridge finding, heuristic reasoning, dynamic programming, statistical inference, and map matching. In ridge finding, edge operators are performed on images to derive edge magnitude and direction, followed by a thresholding and thinning process to obtain ridge pixels (Nevatia and Babu, 1980; Treash and Amaratunga, 2000). Alternatively, gradient direction profile analysis can be performed to generate edge pixels (Gong and Wang, 1997). Ridge points are linked to produce the road segments. Heuristic reasoning is a knowledge-based method in which a series of pre-set rules on road characteristics such as shape index, the distance between image primitives, fragments trend, and contextual information are employed to detect and connect image primitives or antiparallel linear edges to road segments (McKeown, et al., 1985; Zhu and Yeh, 1986). In the dynamic programming method, roads are modeled with a set of mathematical equations on the derivatives of gray values and select characteristics of roads, such as smooth curves, homogeneous surface, narrow linear features, and relatively constant width. Dynamic programming is employed to solve the optimization problem Road Extraction Using SVM and Image Segmentation Mingjun Song and Daniel Civco (Gruen and Li, 1995). In the statistical inference method, linear features are modeled as a Markov point process or a geometric-stochastic model on the road width, direction, intensity and background intensity, and maximum a posteriori probability is used to estimate the road network (Barzohar and Cooper, 1996; Stoica, et al., 2000). In a map matching method, existing road maps are used as starting point to update the road network. In general, two steps are involved: first, a mapimage matching algorithm is employed to match the roads on the map to the image; second, new roads are searched based on the assumption that they are connected to existing roads (Stilla, 1995). Xiong’s classification on road extraction methods is only a generalization, and some other methods may combine different techniques. Active contour models, known as snakes, are also used in road extraction (Gruen and Li, 1997; Agouris, et al., 2001). A snake is a spline with minimized energy driven by internal spline and external image forces (Park, et al., 2001). In general, external image forces are represented by the gradient magnitude of an image, which attracts snakes to contours with strong edges. Internal forces are given by a continuity term and a curvature term expressed by the differences of adjacent snaxels, which are vertex nodes of the snake, with weights coming from training data, which control the shape and smoothness of the snakes. Through the optimization, the snake evolves from its initial position to desired position with minimized energy. Park and Kim (2001) used template matching to extract road segments in which a road template was formed around the road seed, and an adaptive least squares matching algorithm was used to detect a target window with similar transformation. This method assumes a small difference in brightness values between template and target windows. Most of these road extraction methods require some road seeds as starting points, which are in general provided by users, and road segments evolve under a certain model. Sometimes control points are needed to correct the evolution of roads (Zhao, et al., 2002). Further, these methods use black-and-white aerial photographs or the panchromatic band of high-resolution satellite images and therefore the geometric characteristics of roads alone play a critical role. Boggess (1993) used a classification method incorporating texture and neural networks to extract roads by classifying roads and other features from Landsat TM imagery, but obtained numerous false-inclusions. Roberts, et al. (2001) developed a spectral mixture library using hyperspectral images to extract roads, but the use of spectral information alone does not capture the spatial properties of these curvilinear features. P H OTO G R A M M E T R I C E N G I N E E R I N G & R E M OT E S E N S I N G December 2004 1 3 6 5 Center for Land use Education and Research, Department of Natural Resources Management and Engineering, The University of Connecticut U-4087, 1376 Storrs Road, Storrs, CT 06269-4087 (mingjun.song@uconn.edu, daniel.civco@ uconn.edu). Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2004, pp. 1365–1371. 0099-1112/04/7012–1365/$3.00/0 © 2004 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing LFX-536.qxd 11/9/04 16:13 Page 1365

This paper presents the study on identification and classification of food grains using different color models such as L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr by combining color and texture features without performing preprocessing. The K-NN and minimum distance classifier are used to identify and classify the different types of food grains using local and global features. Texture and color features are the important features used in the classification of different objects. The local features like Haralick features are computed from co-occurrence matrix as texture features and global features from cumulative histogram are computed along with color features. The experiment was carried out on different food grains classes. The non-uniformity of RGB color space is eliminated by L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color space. The correct classification result achieved for different color models is quite good. KeywordsFeature Extraction; co-occurrence matrix; texture information; Global Features; cumulative histogram; RGB, L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color model.


Question: Image processing techniques and feature extraction methods.

This paper presents an optimized dynamic programming (DP) algorithm designed for enhancing spoken word recognition through time normalization. The foundational principle of time normalization is established using a time-warping function, which serves as the basis for the development of two distinct distance definitions: symmetric and asymmetric forms. Through a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical testing, the superiority of the symmetric form is substantiated. An innovative approach, termed the slope constraint technique, is introduced to augment the algorithm's performance. This technique restricts the slope of the warping function, thereby sharpening the distinction between words belonging to different categories. The slope constraint's effectiveness is qualitatively examined, and the optimal condition for its implementation is determined experimentally. The refined algorithm is then rigorously tested against a variety of DP-algorithms that have been previously employed for spoken word recognition by multiple research teams. Experimental outcomes reveal that the proposed algorithm reduces error rates to approximately two-thirds or less, even when compared to the most efficient conventional algorithms. This underscores the algorithm's significant improvement in spoken word recognition accuracy.

We consider brightness/contrast-invariant and rotation-discriminating template matching that searches an image to analyze A for a query image Q. We propose to use the complex coefficients of the discrete Fourier transform of the radial projections to compute new rotation-invariant local features. These coefficients can be efficiently obtained via FFT. We classify templates in “stable” and “unstable” ones and argue that any local feature-based template matching may fail to find unstable templates. We extract several stable sub-templates of Q and find them in A by comparing the features. The matchings of the sub-templates are combined using the Hough transform. As the features of A are computed only once, the algorithm can find quickly many different sub-templates in A, and it is suitable for: finding many query images in A; multi-scale searching and partial occlusion-robust template matching.

A Brain Cancer Detection and Classification System has been designed and developed. The system uses computer based procedures to detect tumor blocks or lesions and classify the type of tumor using Artificial Neural Network in MRI images of different patients with Astrocytoma type of brain tumors. The image processing techniques such as histogram equalization, image segmentation, image enhancement, morphological operations and feature extraction have been developed for detection of the brain tumor in the MRI images of the cancer affected patients. The extraction of texture features in the detected tumor has been achieved by using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). These features are compared with the stored features in the Knowledge Base. Finally a Neuro Fuzzy Classifier has been developed to recognize different types of brain cancers. The whole system has been tested in two phases firstly Learning/Training Phase and secondly Recognition/Testing Phase. The known MRI images of affected brain cancer patients obtained from Radiology Department of Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) were used to train the system. The unknown samples of brain cancer affected MRI images are also obtained from TMH and were used to test the system. The system was found efficient in classification of these samples and responds any abnormality.

This paper proposes a method for detecting facial regions by combining a Gabor filter and a convolutional neural network. The first stage uses the Gabor filter which extracts intrinsic facial features. As a result of this transformation we obtain four subimages. The second stage of the method concerns the application of the convolutional neural network to these four images. The approach presented in this paper yields better classification performance in comparison to the results obtained by the convolutional neural network alone.

This paper describes a machine learning approach for visual object detection which is capable of processing images extremely rapidly and achieving high detection rates. This work is distinguished by three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a learning algorithm, based on AdaBoost, which selects a small number of critical visual features from a larger set and yields extremely efficient classifiers[6]. The third contribution is a method for combining increasingly more complex classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising object-like regions. The cascade can be viewed as an object specific focus-of-attention mechanism which unlike previous approaches provides statistical guarantees that discarded regions are unlikely to contain the object of interest. In the domain of face detection the system yields detection rates comparable to the best previous systems. Used in real-time applications, the detector runs at 15 frames per second without resorting to image differencing or skin color detection.

It is our aim in this research to optimize the numerical computation of the Haralick texture features [1] that consists of two steps. Haralick texture features are used as a primary component to discern between different protein structures in microscopic bio-images. The first of these two parts is the construction of the co-occurrence matrix. Upon completion of this implementation, we will attempt to optimize the code using a novel recursive blocking algorithm. We will also use standard practices of optimizing code such as scalar replacement and unrolling. The second part, feature calculation, will be optimized by putting to use information about the data that we will be working with and eliminating any redundancies in the code. We will also apply the practices of unrolling and scalar replacement. With these optimizations in place, we will show that we reduce the runtime by a20% in the co-occurrence construction phase and by a factor of20 in the feature calculation phase of computation.

A color-based segmentation scheme applied to dermatoscopic images is proposed. The RGB image is processed in the L*u*v* color space. A 2D histogram is computed with the two principal components and then smoothed with a Gaussian low-pass filter. The maxima location and a set of features are computed from the histogram contour lines. These features are the number of enclosed pixels, the surface of the base and the height of the maximum. They allow for the selection of valid clusters which determine the number of classes. The image is then segmented using a modified version of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering technique that takes into account the cluster orientation. Finally, the segmented image is cleaned using mathematical morphology, the region borders are smoothed and small components are removed.

Figure 1: In many applications, detection speed is as important as accuracy. (a) A standard pipeline for performing modern multiscale detection is to create a densely sampled image pyramid, compute features at each scale, and finally perform sliding window classification (with a fixed scale model). Although effective; the creation of the feature pyramid can dominate the cost of detection, leading to slow multiscale detection. (b) Viola and Jones [6] utilized shift and scale invariant features, allowing a trained detector to be placed at any location and scale without relying on an image pyramid. Constructing such a classifier pyramid results in fast multiscale detection; unfortunately, most features are not scale invariant, including gradient histograms, significantly limiting the generality of this scheme. (c) We propose a fast method for approximating features at multiple scales using a sparsely sampled image pyramid with a step size of an entire octave and within each octave we use a classifier pyramid. The proposed approach achieves nearly the same accuracy as using densely sampled image pyramids, with nearly the same speed as using a classifier pyramid applied to an image at a single scale.

Color is an efficient feature for object detection as it has the advantage of being invariant to changes in scaling, rotation, and partial occlusion. Skin color detection is an essential required step in various applications related to computer vision. The rapidly-growing research in human skin detection is based on the premise that information about individuals, intent, mode, and image contents can be extracted from colored images, and computers can then respond in an appropriate manner. Detecting human skin in complex images has proven to be a challenging problem because skin color can vary dramatically in its appearance due to many factors such as illumination, race, aging, imaging conditions, and complex background. However, many methods have been developed to deal with skin detection problem in color images. The purpose of this study is to provide an up-to-date survey on skin color modeling and detection methods. We also discuss relevant issues such as color spaces, cost and risks, databases, testing, and benchmarking. After investigating these methods and identifying their strengths and limitations, we conclude with several implications for future direction.

The autocorrelation is often used in signal processing as a tool for finding repeating patterns in a signal. In image processing, there are various image analysis techniques that use the autocorrelation of an image in a broad range of applications from texture analysis to grain density estimation. This paper provides an extensive review of two recently introduced and related frameworks for image representation based on autocorrelation, namely Patch Autocorrelation Features (PAF) and Translation and Rotation Invariant Patch Autocorrelation Features (TRIPAF). The PAF approach stores a set of features obtained by comparing pairs of patches from an image. More precisely, each feature is the euclidean distance between a particular pair of patches. The proposed approach is successfully evaluated in a series of handwritten digit recognition experiments on the popular MNIST data set. However, the PAF approach has limited applications, because it is not invariant to affine transformations. More recently, the PAF approach was extended to become invariant to image transformations, including (but not limited to) translation and rotation changes. In the TRIPAF framework, several features are extracted from each image patch. Based on these features, a vector of similarity values is computed between each pair of patches. Then, the similarity vectors are clustered together such that the spatial offset between the patches of each pair is roughly the same. Finally, the mean and the standard deviation of each similarity value are computed for each group of similarity vectors. These statistics are concatenated to obtain the TRIPAF feature vector. The TRIPAF vector essentially records information about the repeating patterns within an image at various spatial offsets. After presenting the two approaches, several optical character recognition and texture classification experiments are conducted to evaluate the two approaches. Results are reported on the MNIST (98.93%), the Brodatz (96.51%), and the UIUCTex (98.31%) data sets. Both PAF and TRIPAF are fast to compute and produce compact representations in practice, while reaching accuracy levels similar to other state-of-the-art methods.

We are developing a dietary assessment system that records daily food intake through the use of food images taken at a meal. The food images are then analyzed to extract the nutrient content in the food. In this paper, we describe the image analysis tools to determine the regions where a particular food is located (image segmentation), identify the food type (feature classification) and estimate the weight of the food item (weight estimation). An image segmentation and classification system is proposed to improve the food segmentation and identification accuracy. We then estimate the weight of food to extract the nutrient content from a single image using a shape template for foods with regular shapes and area-based weight estimation for foods with irregular shapes.


Question: Image processing techniques and feature extraction methods.

This paper introduces dynamic programming as an innovative technique for addressing variational problems encountered in the field of early vision. Unlike conventional variational methods, which often fall short of ensuring a globally optimal solution, dynamic programming excels in this regard. It provides a numerically stable solution and facilitates the imposition of strict constraints on the solution's behavior within a naturally structured framework. The paper highlights the advantages of dynamic programming through its application to energy-minimizing active contour models, a common challenge in image processing. By framing the optimization problem as a discrete multistage decision process, dynamic programming is able to solve it using a "time-delayed" discrete algorithm. Furthermore, the paper discusses a parallel implementation strategy that can significantly reduce computational costs, demonstrating the practical benefits of employing dynamic programming in vision problems.

Soft computing in the field of agriculture science is being employed with computer vision techniques in order to detect the diseases in crops to increase the overall yield. A Modified Rotation Kernel Transformation(MRKT) based directional feature extraction scheme is presents to resolve the issues occurring due to shape, color or other deceptive features during plant disease recognition. The MRKT based scheme is used to calculate the directional features and histograms for plant parts like leaf and fruit of Mango crop. These histograms and the directional feature set with use of artificial neural network lead to a better recognition technique of Anthracnose disease which occurs in form of black spots on fruits and leaves of mango plant. The results obtained using proposed MRKT directional feature set have shows the better results with accuracy up to 98%.

Performance evaluation of salient features has a long-standing tradition in computer vision. In this paper, we fill the gap of evaluation for the recent wave of binary feature descriptors, which aim to provide robustness while achieving high computational efficiency. We use established metrics to embed our assessment into the body of existing evaluations, allowing us to provide a novel taxonomy unifying both traditional and novel binary features. Moreover, we analyze the performance of different detector and descriptor pairings, which are often used in practice but have been infrequently analyzed. Additionally, we complement existing datasets with novel data testing for illumination change, pure camera rotation, pure scale change, and the variety present in photo-collections. Our performance analysis clearly demonstrates the power of the new class of features. To benefit the community, we also provide a website for the automatic testing of new description methods using our provided metrics and datasets (www.cs.unc.edu/feature-evaluation).

In this paper, a unique approach for road extraction utilizing pixel spectral information for classification and image segmentation-derived object features was developed. In this approach, road extraction was performed in two steps. In the first step, support vector machine (SVM) was employed merely to classify the image into two groups of categories: a road group and a non-road group. For this classification, support vector machine (SVM) achieved higher accuracy than Gaussian maximum likelihood (GML). In the second step, the road group image was segmented into geometrically homogeneous objects using a region growing technique based on a similarity criterion, with higher weighting on shape factors over spectral criteria. A simple thresholding on the shape index and density features derived from these objects was performed to extract road features, which were further processed by thinning and vectorization to obtain road centerlines. The experiment showed the proposed approach worked well with images comprised by both rural and urban area features. Introduction Road information not only plays a central role in the transportation application, but also is an important data layer in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Automated road extraction can save time and labor to a great degree in updating a road spatial database. Various road extraction approaches have been developed. Xiong (2001) grouped these methods into five categories: ridge finding, heuristic reasoning, dynamic programming, statistical inference, and map matching. In ridge finding, edge operators are performed on images to derive edge magnitude and direction, followed by a thresholding and thinning process to obtain ridge pixels (Nevatia and Babu, 1980; Treash and Amaratunga, 2000). Alternatively, gradient direction profile analysis can be performed to generate edge pixels (Gong and Wang, 1997). Ridge points are linked to produce the road segments. Heuristic reasoning is a knowledge-based method in which a series of pre-set rules on road characteristics such as shape index, the distance between image primitives, fragments trend, and contextual information are employed to detect and connect image primitives or antiparallel linear edges to road segments (McKeown, et al., 1985; Zhu and Yeh, 1986). In the dynamic programming method, roads are modeled with a set of mathematical equations on the derivatives of gray values and select characteristics of roads, such as smooth curves, homogeneous surface, narrow linear features, and relatively constant width. Dynamic programming is employed to solve the optimization problem Road Extraction Using SVM and Image Segmentation Mingjun Song and Daniel Civco (Gruen and Li, 1995). In the statistical inference method, linear features are modeled as a Markov point process or a geometric-stochastic model on the road width, direction, intensity and background intensity, and maximum a posteriori probability is used to estimate the road network (Barzohar and Cooper, 1996; Stoica, et al., 2000). In a map matching method, existing road maps are used as starting point to update the road network. In general, two steps are involved: first, a mapimage matching algorithm is employed to match the roads on the map to the image; second, new roads are searched based on the assumption that they are connected to existing roads (Stilla, 1995). Xiong’s classification on road extraction methods is only a generalization, and some other methods may combine different techniques. Active contour models, known as snakes, are also used in road extraction (Gruen and Li, 1997; Agouris, et al., 2001). A snake is a spline with minimized energy driven by internal spline and external image forces (Park, et al., 2001). In general, external image forces are represented by the gradient magnitude of an image, which attracts snakes to contours with strong edges. Internal forces are given by a continuity term and a curvature term expressed by the differences of adjacent snaxels, which are vertex nodes of the snake, with weights coming from training data, which control the shape and smoothness of the snakes. Through the optimization, the snake evolves from its initial position to desired position with minimized energy. Park and Kim (2001) used template matching to extract road segments in which a road template was formed around the road seed, and an adaptive least squares matching algorithm was used to detect a target window with similar transformation. This method assumes a small difference in brightness values between template and target windows. Most of these road extraction methods require some road seeds as starting points, which are in general provided by users, and road segments evolve under a certain model. Sometimes control points are needed to correct the evolution of roads (Zhao, et al., 2002). Further, these methods use black-and-white aerial photographs or the panchromatic band of high-resolution satellite images and therefore the geometric characteristics of roads alone play a critical role. Boggess (1993) used a classification method incorporating texture and neural networks to extract roads by classifying roads and other features from Landsat TM imagery, but obtained numerous false-inclusions. Roberts, et al. (2001) developed a spectral mixture library using hyperspectral images to extract roads, but the use of spectral information alone does not capture the spatial properties of these curvilinear features. P H OTO G R A M M E T R I C E N G I N E E R I N G & R E M OT E S E N S I N G December 2004 1 3 6 5 Center for Land use Education and Research, Department of Natural Resources Management and Engineering, The University of Connecticut U-4087, 1376 Storrs Road, Storrs, CT 06269-4087 (mingjun.song@uconn.edu, daniel.civco@ uconn.edu). Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2004, pp. 1365–1371. 0099-1112/04/7012–1365/$3.00/0 © 2004 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing LFX-536.qxd 11/9/04 16:13 Page 1365

It is our aim in this research to optimize the numerical computation of the Haralick texture features [1] that consists of two steps. Haralick texture features are used as a primary component to discern between different protein structures in microscopic bio-images. The first of these two parts is the construction of the co-occurrence matrix. Upon completion of this implementation, we will attempt to optimize the code using a novel recursive blocking algorithm. We will also use standard practices of optimizing code such as scalar replacement and unrolling. The second part, feature calculation, will be optimized by putting to use information about the data that we will be working with and eliminating any redundancies in the code. We will also apply the practices of unrolling and scalar replacement. With these optimizations in place, we will show that we reduce the runtime by a20% in the co-occurrence construction phase and by a factor of20 in the feature calculation phase of computation.

Nowadays computer vision technology is helping the visually impaired by recognizing objects in their surroundings. Unlike research of navigation and wayfinding, there are no camera-based systems available in the market to find personal items for the blind. This paper proposes an object recognition method to help blind people find missing items using Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). SURF features can extract distinctive invariant features that can be utilized to perform reliable matching between different images in multiple scenarios. These features are invariant to image scale, translation, rotation, illumination, and partial occlusion. The proposed recognition process begins by matching individual features of the user queried object to a database of features with different personal items which are saved in advance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Image Segmentation is the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple regions or sets of pixels.Edge Detection is one of the main Technique used in Segmentation.In this paper we used Sobel edge detector for segmenting the dental X-ray image.Using MATLAB,Image is segmented.Sysytem Test tool is used for the verification of the Simulink Model. The Simulink Model based Image Segmentation is a new function in image processing and offers a model based design for processing. Dental Caries is the main problem occurred in the teeths.Segmentation help to identify the places where the problems of dental caries are present.

A new transform is presented that utilizes local radial symmetry to highlight points of interest within a scene. Its lowcomputational complexity and fast runtimes makes this method well-suited for real-time vision applications. The performance of the transform is demonstrated on a wide variety of images and compared with leading techniques from the literature. Both as a facial feature detector and as a generic region of interest detector the new transform is seen to offer equal or superior performance to contemporary techniques at a relatively low-computational cost. A real-time implementation of the transform is presented running at over 60 frames per second on a standard Pentium III PC.

Image segmentation is one of the basic concepts widely used in each and every fields of image processing. The entire process of the proposed work for image segmentation comprises of 3 phases: Threshold generation with dynamic Modified Region Growing phase (DMRG), texture feature generation phase and region merging phase. by dynamically changing two thresholds, the given input image can be performed as DMRG, in which the cuckoo search optimization algorithm helps to optimize the two thresholds in modified region growing. after obtaining the region growth segmented image, the edges are detected with edge detection algorithm. In the second phase, the texture feature is extracted using entropy based operation from the input image. In region merging phase, the results obtained from the texture feature generation phase is combined with the results of DMRG phase and similar regions are merged by using a distance comparison between regions. The proposed work is implemented using Mat lab platform with several medical images. the performance of the proposed work is evaluated using the metrics sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. the results show that this proposed work provides very good accuracy for the segmentation process in images.

—Skewing of the scanned image is an inevitable process and its detection is an important issue for document recognition systems. The skew of the scanned document image specifies the deviation of the text lines from the horizontal or vertical axis. This paper surveys methods to detect this skew in

Fingerprint Enhancement is an important step used to improve the accuracy and rate of automated detection of fingerprints. Enhancing the latent fingerprints facilitates the extraction of minutiae from the fingerprint image. In this paper, two methods of latent fingerprint enhancement are carried out. The first uses Histogram Equalization for enhancing the latent fingerprint. The second method uses a novel approach of Binarization followed by Wiener filtering and an additional Median filter. The improvements in the image are then analyzed based on their entropy, contrast and moment.