Copy-move Forgery Detection via Texture Description
Copy-move forgery is one of the most common type of tampering in digital images. Copy-moves are parts of the image that are copied and pasted onto another part of the same image. Detection methods in general use block-matching methods, which first divide the image into overlapping blocks and then extract features from each block, assuming similar blocks will yield similar features. In this paper we present a block-based approach which exploits texture as feature to be extracted from blocks. Our goal is to study if texture is well suited for the specific application, and to compare performance of several texture descriptors. Tests have been made on both uncompressed and JPEG compressed image…
Detecting multiple copies in tampered images
Copy-move forgeries are parts of the image that are duplicated elsewhere into the same image, often after being modified by geometrical transformations. In this paper we present a method to detect these image alterations, using a SIFT-based approach. First we describe a state of the art SIFT-point matching method, which inspired our algorithm, then we compare it with our SIFT-based approach, which consists of three parts: keypoint clustering, cluster matching, and texture analysis. The goal is to find copies of the same object, i.e. clusters of points, rather than points that match. Cluster matching proves to give better results than single point matching, since it returns a complete and co…
Studio longitudinale degli effetti della psicoterapia sulla funzionalità immunitaria in soggetti affetti da disturbo depressivo unipolare
A Multi-Scale Colour and Keypoint Density-Based Approach for Visual Saliency Detection
In the first seconds of observation of an image, several visual attention processes are involved in the identification of the visual targets that pop-out from the scene to our eyes. Saliency is the quality that makes certain regions of an image stand out from the visual field and grab our attention. Saliency detection models, inspired by visual cortex mechanisms, employ both colour and luminance features. Furthermore, both locations of pixels and presence of objects influence the Visual Attention processes. In this paper, we propose a new saliency method based on the combination of the distribution of interest points in the image with multiscale analysis, a centre bias module and a machine …
Eventi di vita stressanti in un campione di pazienti affetti da psicosi all’esordio: prevalenza, sintomatologia ed età d’esordio
Introduzione: Un consistente numero di studi suggerisce un’elevata prevalenza di eventi traumatici nella storia di soggetti con disturbi psicotici (Shevlin et al, 2008). Piu’ che l’impatto di un singolo evento di vita stressante, l’esposizione cumulativa ad esperienze traumatiche sembra incrementare il rischio di psicosi (van Winkel et al, 2008). Scopo dello studio e’ valutare la prevalenza di tali eventi in soggetti al primo episodio psicotico a confronto con controlli sani e la possibile correlazione con la sintomatologia psicotica e l’età di esordio. Metodologia: In atto sono stati reclutati 74 soggetti al primo episodio psicotico (51 m, 23 f; em=26.39, ds=9.36) e 27 controlli sani (18 m…
Saliency Map for Visual Perception
Human and other primates move their eyes to select visual information from the scene, psycho-visual experiments (Constantinidis, 2005) suggest that attention is directed to visually salient locations in the image. This allows human beings to bring the fovea onto the relevant parts of the image, to interpret complex scenes in real time. In visual perception, an important result was the discovery of a limited set of visual properties (called pre attentive), detected in the first 200-300 milliseconds of observation of a scene, by the low-level visual system. In last decades many progresses have been made into research of visual perception by analyzing both bottom up (stimulus driven) and top d…
Copy–Move Forgery Detection by Matching Triangles of Keypoints
Copy-move forgery is one of the most common types of tampering for digital images. Detection methods generally use block-matching approaches, which first divide the image into overlapping blocks and then extract and compare features to find similar ones, or point-based approaches, in which relevant keypoints are extracted and matched to each other to find similar areas. In this paper, we present a very novel hybrid approach, which compares triangles rather than blocks, or single points. Interest points are extracted from the image, and objects are modeled as a set of connected triangles built onto these points. Triangles are matched according to their shapes (inner angles), their content (c…
Object Recognition and Modeling Using SIFT Features
In this paper we present a technique for object recognition and modelling based on local image features matching. Given a complete set of views of an object the goal of our technique is the recognition of the same object in an image of a cluttered environment containing the object and an estimate of its pose. The method is based on visual modeling of objects from a multi-view representation of the object to recognize. The first step consists of creating object model, selecting a subset of the available views using SIFT descriptors to evaluate image similarity and relevance. The selected views are then assumed as the model of the object and we show that they can effectively be used to visual…
An Unsupervised Method for Suspicious Regions Detection in Mammogram Images
Over the past years many researchers proposed biomedical imaging methods for computer-aided detection and classification of suspicious regions in mammograms. Mammogram interpretation is performed by radiologists by visual inspection. The large volume of mammograms to be analyzed makes such readings labour intensive and often inaccurate. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a new unsupervised method to automatically detect suspicious regions in mammogram images. The method consists mainly of two steps: preprocessing; feature extraction and selection. Preprocessing steps allow to separate background region from the breast profile region. In greater detail, gray levels mapping transform …
Saliency Based Image Cropping
Image cropping is a technique that is used to select the most relevant areas of an image, discarding the useless ones. Handmade selection, especially in case of large photo collections, is a time consuming task. Automatic image cropping techniques may help users, suggesting to them which part of the image is the most relevant, according to specific criteria. We suppose that the most visually salient areas of a photo are also the most relevant ones to the users. In this paper we present an extended version of our previously proposed method, to extract the saliency map of an image, which is based on the analysis of the distribution of the interest points of the image. Three different interest…
Automatic multi-seed detection for MR breast image segmentation
In this paper an automatic multi-seed detection method for magnetic resonance (MR) breast image segmentation is presented. The proposed method consists of three steps: (1) pre-processing step to locate three regions of interest (axillary and sternal regions); (2) processing step to detect maximum concavity points for each region of interest; (3) breast image segmentation step. Traditional manual segmentation methods require radiological expertise and they usually are very tiring and time-consuming. The approach is fast because the multi-seed detection is based on geometric properties of the ROI. When the maximum concavity points of the breast regions have been detected, region growing and m…
La Dismorfofobia tra realtà e fantasia
TEXTURE AND LOCAL KEYPOINTS ANALYSIS FOR ADVANCED IMAGE INSPECTION
Traumi infantili in un campione di pazienti affetti da psicosi all’esordio: associazione con psicopatologia e funzioni cognitive. Risultati preliminari
Introduzione: Numerosi studi hanno evidenziato l’associazione tra traumi infantili e psicosi (Morgan, Fisher, 2007). Sebbene inizialmente fosse enfatizzato il ruolo dell’abuso sessuale, recentemente l’associazione con l’abuso fisico e’ stata riportata come piu’ forte (Fisher et al, 2010; Rubino et al, 2009). Scopi dello studio sono valutare la prevalenza di eventi avversi infantili in un campione di soggetti al primo episodio psicotico e la sua relazione con la psicopatologia e le funzioni cognitive. Metodologia: Sono stati reclutati 74 soggetti al primo episodio psicotico (51 m, 23 f; em=26.39, ds=9.36). Sono state somministrate le seguenti interviste e test: CECA-Q (Bifulco et al, 2005) p…
A Low Cost Solution for NOAA Remote Sensing
United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites adopt Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors to acquire remote sensing data and broadcast Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) images. The orientation of the scan lines is perpendicular to the orbit of the satellite. In this paper we propose a new low cost solution for NOAA remote sensing. More in detail, our method focuses on the possibility of directly sampling the modulated signal and processing it entirely in software enabled by recent breakthroughs on Software Defined Radios (SDR) and CPU computational speed, while keeping the costs extremely low. We aim to achieve good results wit…
analisi dei punteggi PANSS in un campione di pazienti affetti da psicosi
Psicosi: integrazione della sintomatologia, ristrutturazione dell'Io, riorganizzazione del Sè
clinical practice identifies the reactivation of reality testing as the most achievable and desirable aim in the healthcare-specialized treatment of psychosis. In summary, in the cases of psychotic onset and similar scenarios, a positive intervention is represented by those circumstances in wich the patient is able to regain his status quo ante the acute phase of the disorder. This phase, just to be clear, is the on throughout which the most representative symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations, arise determining the dissociative state-. In addition, if during the reorganization of reality testing thethe patient is able to have a critical position relating to his acute state, and th…
Visual saliency by keypoints distribution analysis
In this paper we introduce a new method for Visual Saliency detection. The goal of our method is to emphasize regions that show rare visual aspects in comparison with those showing frequent ones. We propose a bottom up approach that performs a new technique based on low level image features (texture) analysis. More precisely, we use SIFT Density Maps (SDM), to study the distribution of keypoints into the image with different scales of observation, and its relationship with real fixation points. The hypothesis is that the image regions that show a larger distance from the mode (most frequent value) of the keypoints distribution over all the image are the same that better capture our visual a…
Sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array for probing cosmology and fundamental physics with gamma-ray propagation
Full list of authors: Abdalla, H.; Abe, H.; Acero, F.; Acharyya, A.; Adam, R.; Agudo, I; Aguirre-Santaella, A.; Alfaro, R.; Alfaro, J.; Alispach, C.; Aloisio, R.; Batista, R. Alves; Amati, L.; Amato, E.; Ambrosi, G.; Anguner, E. O.; Araudo, A.; Armstrong, T.; Arqueros, F.; Arrabito, L.; Asano, K.; Ascasibar, Y.; Ashley, M.; Backes, M.; Balazs, C.; Balbo, M.; Balmaverde, B.; Baquero Larriva, A.; Martins, V. Barbosa; Barkov, M.; Baroncelli, L.; de Almeida, U. Barres; Barrio, J. A.; Batista, P-, I; Becerra Gonzalez, J.; Becherini, Y.; Beck, G.; Tjus, J. Becker; Belmont, R.; Benbow, W.; Bernardini, E.; Berti, A.; Berton, M.; Bertucci, B.; Beshley, V; Bi, B.; Biasuzzi, B.; Biland, A.; Bissaldi, …
Post-transplant cyclophosphamide and sirolimus based graft-versus-host disease prophylaxis after allogeneic stem cell transplantation for acute myeloid leukemia.
Post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PTCy) has emerged as a promising graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) prophylaxis in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). However, no studies have reported the efficacy of a GvHD prophylaxis based on PTCy with sirolimus (Sir-PTCy) in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In this retrospective study, we analyze the use of sirolimus in combination with PTCy, with or without mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), on 242 consecutive adult patients with AML undergoing a myeloablative first allo-HSCT from different donor types, in three European centers between January 2017 and December 2020. Seventy-seven (32%) patients received allo-HSCT from…
Views selection for SIFT based object modeling and recognition
In this paper we focus on automatically learning object models in the framework of keypoint based object recognition. The proposed method uses a collection of views of the objects to build the model. For each object the collection is composed of N×M views obtained rotating the object around its vertical and horizontal axis. As keypoint based object recognition using a complete set of views is computationally expensive, we focused on the definition of a selection method that creates, for each object, a subset of the initial views that visually summarize the characteristics of the object and should be suited for recognition. We select the views by determining maxima and minima of a function, …
Video object recognition and modeling by SIFT matching optimization
In this paper we present a novel technique for object modeling and object recognition in video. Given a set of videos containing 360 degrees views of objects we compute a model for each object, then we analyze short videos to determine if the object depicted in the video is one of the modeled objects. The object model is built from a video spanning a 360 degree view of the object taken against a uniform background. In order to create the object model, the proposed techniques selects a few representative frames from each video and local features of such frames. The object recognition is performed selecting a few frames from the query video, extracting local features from each frame and looki…
Durata di psicosi non trattata e consumo di cannabis in un campione di pazienti al primo episodio psicotico
Introduzione: la durata di psicosi non trattata (DUP) nei pazienti affetti da psicosi all’esordio rappresenta un fattore predittivo dell’outcome e del decorso del disturbo (Perkins, 2005). La relazione tra consumo di cannabis e DUP è ancora controversa. In questo lavoro viene analizzato il rapporto tra DUP ed età di esordio, consumo di cannabis, funzionamento cognitivo, livello di istruzione e stato di occupazione in un gruppo di pazienti affetti da psicosi all’esordio reclutati nell’ambito dello studio SGAP (Sicilian Genetic and Psychosis) svolto in collaborazione con l’Institute of Psychiatry, King's College of London. Metodologia: sono stati reclutati 74 pazienti di età compresa tra 18 e…
Why you trust in visual saliency
Image understanding is a simple task for a human observer. Visual attention is automatically pointed to interesting regions by a natural objective stimulus in a first step and by prior knowledge in a second step. Saliency maps try to simulate human response and use actual eye-movements measurements as ground truth. An interesting question is: how much corruption in a digital image can affect saliency detection respect to the original image? One of the contributions of this work is to compare the performances of standard approaches with respect to different type of image corruptions and different threshold values on saliency maps. If the corruption can be estimated and/or the threshold is fi…
Eventi di vita stressanti in un campione di pazienti affetti da psicosi all’esordio: prevalenza, sintomatologia ed età d’esordio. Risultati preliminari
Palmprint principal lines extraction
The palmprint recognition has become a focus in biological recognition and image processing fields. In this process, the features extraction (with particular attention to palmprint principal line extraction) is especially important. Although a lot of work has been reported, the representation of palmprint is still an open issue. In this paper we propose a simple, efficient, and accurate palmprint principal lines extraction method. Our approach consists of six simple steps: normalization, median filtering, average filters along four prefixed directions, grayscale bottom-hat filtering, combination of bottom-hat filtering, binarization and post processing. The contribution of our work is a new…
Consumo di cannabis e pattern psicopatologico di pazienti al primo episodio psicotico: confronto tra due campioni
Alcuni studi in letteratura supportano l’associazione tra consumo di cannabis, età di esordio ed espressività psicopatologica nei pazienti al primo episodio psicotico (Orlandi, 2001). Questo lavoro si propone di analizzare la gravità della sintomatologia psicotica in relazione al consumo di cannabis, confrontando due campioni di pazienti all'esordio psicotico (FEP) reclutati a Palermo e a Londra.
Scale detection via keypoint density maps in regular or near-regular textures
In this paper we propose a new method to detect the global scale of images with regular, near regular, or homogenous textures. We define texture ''scale'' as the size of the basic elements (texels or textons) that most frequently occur into the image. We study the distribution of the interest points into the image, at different scale, by using our Keypoint Density Maps (KDMs) tool. A ''mode'' vector is built computing the most frequent values (modes) of the KDMs, at different scales. We observed that the mode vector is quasi linear with the scale. The mode vector is properly subsampled, depending on the scale of observation, and compared with a linear model. Texture scale is estimated as th…
geni psicosi e cannabis: caratteristiche di un campione siciliano rappresentativo di pazienti al primo episodio psicotico
Image Quality Assessment by saliency maps
Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is an interesting challenge for image processing applications. The goal of IQA is to replace human judgement of perceived image quality with a machine evaluation. A large number of methods have been proposed to evaluate the quality of an image which may be corrupted by noise, distorted during acquisition, transmission, compression, etc. Many methods, in some cases, do not agree with human judgment because they are not correlated with human visual perception. In the last years the most modern IQA models and metrics considered visual saliency as a fundamental issue. The aim of visual saliency is to produce a saliency map that replicates the human visual system (…
Meso-scale topological cues influence extracellular matrix production in a large deformation, elastomeric scaffold model
Physical cues are decisive factors in extracellular matrix (ECM) formation and elaboration. Their transduction across scale lengths is an inherently symbiotic phenomenon that while influencing ECM fate is also mediated by the ECM structure itself. This study investigates the possibility of enhancing ECM elaboration by topological cues that, while not modifying the substrate macro scale mechanics, can affect the meso-scale strain range acting on cells incorporated within the scaffold. Vascular smooth muscle cell micro-integrated, electrospun scaffolds were fabricated with comparable macroscopic biaxial mechanical response, but different meso-scale topology. Seeded scaffolds were conditioned …
Image Content Enhancement Through Salient Regions Segmentation for People With Color Vision Deficiencies
Color vision deficiencies affect visual perception of colors and, more generally, color images. Several sciences such as genetics, biology, medicine, and computer vision are involved in studying and analyzing vision deficiencies. As we know from visual saliency findings, human visual system tends to fix some specific points and regions of the image in the first seconds of observation summing up the most important and meaningful parts of the scene. In this article, we provide some studies about human visual system behavior differences between normal and color vision-deficient visual systems. We eye-tracked the human fixations in first 3 seconds of observation of color images to build real f…
Toward an Integrated System for Surveillance and Behaviour Analysis of Groups and People
Security and INTelligence SYStem is an Italian research project which aims to create an integrated system for the analysis of multi-modal data sources (text, images, video, audio), to assist operators in homeland security applications. Within this project the Scientific Research Unit of the University of Palermo is responsible of the image and video analysis activity. The SRU of Palermo developed a web service based architecture that provides image and video analysis capabilities to the integrated analysis system. The developed architecture uses both state of the art techniques, adapted to cope with the particular problem at hand, and new algorithms to provide the following services: image …
A novel solution based on scale invariant feature transform descriptors and deep learning for the detection of suspicious regions in mammogram images.
Background: Deep learning methods have become popular for their high-performance rate in the classification and detection of events in computer vision tasks. Transfer learning paradigm is widely adopted to apply pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) on medical domains overcoming the problem of the scarcity of public datasets. Some investigations to assess transfer learning knowledge inference abilities in the context of mammogram screening and possible combinations with unsupervised techniques are in progress. Methods: We propose a novel technique for the detection of suspicious regions in mammograms that consist of the combination of two approaches based on scale invariant feature …
Ruolo di modulazione sulle funzioni cognitive dell’abuso di cannabis su un campione di soggetti al primo episodio psicotico
An Effective Satellite Remote Sensing Tool Combining Hardware and Software Solutions
In this paper we propose a new effective remote sensing tool combining hardware and software solutions as an extension of our previous work. In greater detail the tool consists of a low cost receiver subsystem for public weather satellites and a signal and image processing module for several tasks such as signal and image enhancement, image reconstruction and cloud detection. Our solution allows to manage data from satellites effectively with low cost components and portable software solutions. We aim at sampling and processing of the modulated signal entirely in software enabled by Software Defined Radios (SDR) and CPU computational speed overcoming hardware limitation such as high receive…
lo dell'insight nell'espressività psicopatologica in un gruppo di pazienti affetti da psicosi all'esordio
Exploiting Visual Saliency Algorithms for Object-Based Attention: A New Color and Scale-Based Approach
Visual Saliency aims to detect the most important regions of an image from a perceptual point of view. More in detail, the goal of Visual Saliency is to build a Saliency Map revealing the salient subset of a given image by analyzing bottom-up and top-down factors of Visual Attention. In this paper we proposed a new method for Saliency detection based on colour and scale analysis, extending our previous work based on SIFT spatial density inspection. We conducted several experiments to study the relationships between saliency methods and the object attention processes and we collected experimental data by tracking the eye movements of thirty viewers in the first three seconds of observation o…
Familiarità, psicosi e cannabis: caratteristiche di un campione siciliano di pazienti al primo episodio psicotico
Ruolo dell'insight nell'espressività psicopatologica in un gruppo di pazienti affetti da psicosi all'esordio
Una buona capacità di insight pare costituire un fattore predittivo di minore espressività psicopatologica nei pazienti affetti da psicosi. In questo lavoro intendiamo analizzare le relazioni tra grado di insight e gravità dei sintomi psicotici utilizzando i punteggi totali e parziali ottenuti alla Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) in un gruppo di pazienti affetti da psicosi all'esordio nell'ambito del progetto SGAP "Sicilian Genetic and Psychosis" svolto in collaborazione con il GAP Study dell'Institute of Psychiatry, King's College of London.
An Effective Satellite Remote Sensing Tool Combining Hardware and Software Solutions
In this paper we propose a new effective remote sensing tool combining hardware and software solutions as an extension of our previous work. In greater detail the tool consists of a low cost receiver subsystem for public weather satellites and a signal and image processing module for several tasks such as signal and image enhancement, image reconstruction and cloud detection. Our solution allows to manage data from satellites effectively with low cost components and portable software solutions. We aim at sampling and processing of the modulated signal entirely in software enabled by Software Defined Radios (SDR) and CPU computational speed overcoming hardware limitation such as high receive…