1966938
Robust midsagittal plane extraction from normal and pathological 3-D neuroradiology images
This paper focuses on extracting the ideal midsagittal plane (iMSP) from three-dimensional (3-D) normal and pathological neuroimages. The main challenges in this work are the structural asymmetry that may exist in pathological brains, and the anisotropic, unevenly sampled image data that is common in clinical practice. We present an edge-based, cross-correlation approach that decomposes the plane fitting problem into discovery of two-dimensional symmetry axes on each slice, followed by a robust estimation of plane parameters. The algorithm's tolerance to brain asymmetries, input image offsets and image noise is quantitatively evaluated. We find that the algorithm can extract the iMSP from input 3-D images with 1) large asymmetrical lesions; 2) arbitrary initial rotation offsets; 3) low signal-to-noise ratio or high bias field. The iMSP algorithm is compared with an approach based on maximization of mutual information registration, and is found to exhibit superior performance under adverse conditions. Finally, no statistically significant difference is found between the midsagittal plane computed by the iMSP algorithm and that estimated by two trained neuroradiologists.
122978488
Representation and matching of articulated shapes
We consider the problem of localizing the articulated and deformable shape of a walking person in a single view. We represent the non-rigid 2D body contour by a Bayesian graphical model whose nodes correspond to point positions along the contour. The deformability of the model is constrained by learned priors corresponding to two basic mechanisms: local non-rigid deformation, and rotation motion of the joints. Four types of image cues are combined to relate the model configuration to the observed image, including edge gradient map, foreground/background mask, skin color mask, and appearance consistency constraints. The constructed Bayes network is sparse and chain-like, enabling efficient spatial inference through sequential Monte Carlo sampling methods. We evaluate the performance of the model on images taken in cluttered, outdoor scenes. The utility of each image cue is also empirically explored.
5262963
Texture replacement in real images
Texture replacement in real images has many applications, such as interior design, digital movie making and computer graphics. The goal is to replace some specified texture patterns in an image while preserving lighting effects, shadows and occlusions. To achieve convincing replacement results we have to detect texture patterns and estimate the lighting map from a given image. Near regular planar texture patterns are considered in this paper. Given a sample texture patch, a standard tile is computed. Candidate texture regions are determined by mutual information between the standard tile and each image patch. Regions with high mutual information scores are used to estimate the admissible lighting distributions, which is represented by cached statistics. Spatial lighting change constraints are represented by a Markov random field model. Maximum a posteriori estimation of the texture segmentation and lighting map is solved in a stochastic annealing fashion, namely, the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Visually satisfactory result is achieved using this statistical sampling model.
5064803
Body Localization in Still Images Using Hierarchical Models and Hybrid Search
We present a 3-level hierarchical model for localizing human bodies in still images from arbitrary viewpoints. We first fit a simple tree-structured model defined on a small landmark set along the body contours by Dynamic Programming (DP). The output is a series of proposal maps that encode the probabilities of partial body configurations. Next, we fit a mixture of view-dependent models by Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), which handles self-occlusion, anthropometric constraints, and large viewpoint changes. DP and SMC are designed to search in opposite directions such that the DP proposals are utilized effectively to initialize and guide the SMC inference. This hybrid strategy of combining deterministic and stochastic search ensures both the robustness and efficiency of DP, and the accuracy of SMC. Finally, we fit an expanded mixture model with increased landmark density through local optimization. The model hierarchy is trained on a large number of gait images. Extensive tests on cluttered images with varying poses including walking, dancing and various types of sports activities demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
14419032
Content-based 3D neuroradiologic image retrieval: preliminary results
A content-based 3D neuroradiologic image retrieval system is being developed at the Robotics Institute of CMU. The special characteristics of this system include: directly dealing with multimodal 3D images (MR/CT); image similarity based on anatomical structures of the human brain; and combining both visual and collateral information for indexing and retrieval. A testbed has been implemented for using detected salient visual features for indexing and retrieving 3D images.
1236601
Skewed symmetry groups
We introduce the term skewed symmetry groups and provide a complete theoretical treatment for 2D wallpaper groups under affine transformations. For the first time, a given periodic pattern can be classified not simply by its Euclidean symmetry group but,by its highest "potential" symmetry group under affine deformation. A concise wallpaper group migration map is constructed that separates the 17 affinely deformed wallpaper groups into small, distinct orbits. The practical value of this result includes a novel indexing and retrieval scheme for regular patterns, and a maximal-symmetry-based method for estimating shape and orientation from texture under unknown views.
37864683
Genetic programming model for software quality classification
We apply genetic programming techniques to build a software quality classification model based on the metrics of software modules. The model we built attempts to distinguish the fault-prone modules from non-fault-prone modules using genetic programming (GP). These GP experiments were conducted with a random subset selection for GP in order to avoid overfitting. We then use the whole fit data set as the validation data set to select the best model. We demonstrate through two case studies that the GP technique can achieve good results. Also, we compared GP modeling with logistic regression modeling to verify the usefulness of GP.
1409797
On the TCP-Friendliness of VoIP Traffic
Recently, some concerns have been raised regarding whether the rapid growth of the UDP traffic due to the Skype-like applications will throttle down regular TCP users because UDP flows are unresponsive to network congestion, i.e., UDP senders do not reduce their sending rates when congestion occurs in the network. However, most UDP based real time applications, such as Voiceover-IP (VoIP), drop out completely if the user perceived quality becomes unacceptable as the network congestion increases. This user back-off mechanism effectively reduces UDP traffic rate at the aggregated level when the network is congested. In this paper, we investigate the fairness issue between VoIP flows and TCP flows under different network environment. Our study explicitly takes into account both transport layer congestion control mechanism built-into TCP protocol stack and the self-adaptiveness of VoIP users. Various models are developed to characterize VoIP user back-off behaviors in response to call quality degradation resulted from packet loss and delay inside the network. The comparison between VoIP user back-off and TCP rate adaption shows that not only VoIP flows consume much less bandwidth than TCP flows, but also VoIP traffic is indeed very responsive to congestion when the network is overloaded.
10076000
IPR: automated interaction process reconciliation
Inter-organizational business processes usually require complex and time-consuming interactions between partners than simple interactions supported by WSDL. Automated reconciliation is essential to enable dynamic inter-organizational business collaboration. To the best of our knowledge, however, there is not a practical automated reconciliation algorithm available. In this paper, we propose a practical automated reconciliation algorithm, called IPR (interaction process reconciliation) based on Petri net, which is able to effectively facilitate dynamic interactions among trading partners in a peer-to-peer fashion. We implement a prototype IPR server in our lab, and evaluate our design by comprehensive experiments. Results show that IPR significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of matching success rate, response time, and matching efficiency.
36759557
Geometrical analysis of two sets of 3D correspondence data patterns
Given two sets of image correspondence data, the analysis of the corresponding rigid body transformation that accurately describes the object's motion in 3D space is a fundamental problem in image understanding. While many methods have been put forward to analyse 3D transformations, such methods do not make use of the vector distance between feature points and angular information as constraints to analyse transformation parameters. Current methods and algorithms have also suffered from the problems of lack of efficiency, sensitivity to noise, and multiplicity of solutions. In this paper we present a novel geometrical analysis of rigid body transformations and a novel algorithm to calibrate transformation parameters based on image correspondence. The algorithm is validated through experimental calibration and a comparison is made with calibration implemented by the least squares method. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works well in the presence of noise and that its performance is in general superior to algorithms based on the least squares method.
14501514
Semi-supervised Multi-label Learning by Constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization
We present a novel framework for multi-label learning that explicitly addresses the challenge arising from the large number of classes and a small size of training data. The key assumption behind this work is that two examples tend to have large overlap in their assigned class memberships if they share high similarity in their input patterns. We capitalize this assumption by first computing two sets of similarities, one based on the input patterns of examples, and the other based on the class memberships of the examples. We then search for the optimal assignment of class memberships to the unlabeled data that minimizes the difference between these two sets of similarities. The optimization problem is formulated as a constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem, and an algorithm is presented to efficiently find the solution. Compared to the existing approaches for multi-label learning, the proposed approach is advantageous in that it is able to explore both the unlabeled data and the correlation among different classes simultaneously. Experiments with text categorization show that our approach performs significantly better than several state-of-the-art classification techniques when the number of classes is large and the size of training data is small.