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…

TutorJ: un Intelligent Tutoring System di Supporto all'Apprendimento di Java

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…

Text localization from photos

In this paper a new text extraction algorithm is proposed. In real scenes the text is usually overlapped or is part of the background. To identify the text regions, in complex conditions, a method exploiting a “multi-resolution feature based method” for extracting text with undefined dimension has been developed. Once identified, the multi-resolution information are merged and skimmed through a set of Support Vector Machines (SVM). The tests and the comparisons with other techniques, performed on heterogeneous images, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed.

Segmentation of MR brain images with bias artifact

Brain MR Images corrupted by RF- Inhomogeneity (bias artifact) exhibit brightness variations across the image. As a consequence, a standard Fuzzy C-Means (fern) segmentation algorithm may fail. In this work we show a new general-purpose bias removing algorithm, which can be used as a pre-processing step for a fern segmentation. We also compare our experimental results with the ones achieved by using E2 D - H U M filter, showing an improvement in brain segmentation and bias removal.

Homomorphic Approach to RF-Inhomogeneity Removal Based on Gabor Filter

In this paper a bias correction algorithm for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The magnetic resonance (MR) images affected by this artifact, also called RF-inhomogeneity, exhibit irregular spatial brightness variations caused by magnetic field inhomogeneity. Here we present an original algorithm based on E2D - HUM, already proposed by some of the authors, where a modified Gabor filter is introduced in the elaboration chain to provide directional capabilities to suppress the artifact. The process of restoration doesn't care about the structure of the image and it has been applied to MR images of different parts of body like knee, abdomen, pelvis and brain. A comparison with oth…

Combining Top-down and Bottom-up Visual Saliency for Firearms Localization

Object detection is one of the most challenging issues for computer vision researchers. The analysis of the human visual attention mechanisms can help automatic inspection systems, in order to discard useless information and improving performances and efficiency. In this paper we proposed our attention based method to estimate firearms position in images of people holding firearms. Both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms are involved in our system. The bottom-up analysis is based on a state-of-the-art approach. The top-down analysis is based on the construction of a probabilistic model of the firearms position with respect to the people’s face position. This model has been created by analyzi…

Blood vessels and feature points detection on retinal images

In this paper we present a method for the automatic extraction of blood vessels from retinal images, while capturing points of intersection/overlap and endpoints of the vascular tree. The algorithm performance is evaluated through a comparison with handmade segmented images available on the STARE project database (STructured Analysis of the REtina). The algorithm is performed on the green channel of the RGB triad. The green channel can be used to represent the illumination component. The matched filter is used to enhance vessels w.r.t. the background. The separation between vessels and background is accomplished by a threshold operator based on gaussian probability density function. The len…

Automatic Extraction of Blood Vessels, Bifurcations and End Points in the Retinal Vascular Tree

In this paper we present an effective algorithm for automated extraction of the vascular tree in retinal images, including bifurcations, crossovers and end-points detection. Correct identification of these features in the ocular fundus helps the diagnosis of important systematic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension. The pre-processing consists in artefacts removal based on anisotropic diffusion filter. Then a matched filter is applied to enhance blood vessels. The filter uses a full adaptive kernel because each vessel has a proper orientation and thickness. The kernel of the filter needs to be rotated for all possible directions. As a consequence, a suitable kernel has been designed …

Pervasive access to MRI bias artifact suppression service on a grid.

Bias artifact corrupts magnetic resonance images in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the Exponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any a priori hypothesis about the tissues or the Magnetic Resonance image modality. Moreover, E2D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In our work we propos…

Fuzzy C-Means Inspired Free Form Deformation Technique for Registration

This paper presents a novel method aimed to free form deformation function approximation for purpose of image registration. The method is currently feature-based. The algorithm is inspired to concepts derived from Fuzzy C-means clustering technique such as membership degree and cluster centroids. After algorithm explanation, tests and relative results obtained are presented and discussed. Finally, considerations on future improvements are elucidated.

Artificial intelligence techniques for cancer treatment planning

An artificial intelligence system, NEWCHEM, for the development of new oncology therapies is described. This system takes into account the most recent advances in molecular and cellular biology and in cell-drug interaction, and aims to guide experimentation in the design of new optimal protocols. Further work is being carried out, aimed to embody in the system all the basic knowledge of biology, physiopathology and pharmacology, to reason qualitatively from first principles so as to be able to suggest cancer therapies.

Content-Based Image Retrieval as Validation for Defect Detection in Old Photos

Face Processing on Low-Power Devices

The research on embedded vision-based techniques is considered nowadays as one of the most interesting matters of computer vision. In this work we address the scenario in which a real-time face processing system is needed to monitor people walking through some locations. Some face detection (e.g., Viola-Jones face detector) and face recognition (e.g., eigenfaces) approaches have reached a certain level of maturity, so we focused on the development of such techniques on embedded systems taking into account both hardware and software constraints. Our goal is to detect the presence of some known individuals inside some sensitive areas producing a compact description of the observed people. Cap…

Pose classification using support vector machines

In this work a software architecture is presented for the automatic recognition of human arm poses. Our research has been carried on in the robotics framework. A mobile robot that has to find its path to the goal in a partially structured environment can be trained by a human operator to follow particular routes in order to perform its task quickly. The system is able to recognize and classify some different poses of the operator's arms as direction commands like "turn-left", "turn-right", "go-straight", and so on. A binary image of the operator silhouette is obtained from the gray-level input. Next, a slice centered on the silhouette itself is processed in order to compute the eigenvalues …

Depth-Aware Multi-object Tracking in Spherical Videos

This paper deals with the multi-object tracking (MOT) problem in videos acquired by 360-degree cameras. Targets are tracked by a frame-by-frame association strategy. At each frame, candidate targets are detected by a pre-trained state-of-the-art deep model. Associations to the targets known till the previous frame are found by solving a data association problem considering the locations of the targets in the scene. In case of a missing detection, a Kalman filter is used to track the target. Differently than works at the state-of-the-art, the proposed tracker considers the depth of the targets in the scene. The distance of the targets from the camera can be estimated by geometrical facts pec…

Mean shift clustering for personal photo album organization

In this paper we propose a probabilistic approach for the automatic organization of pictures in personal photo album. Images are analyzed in term of faces and low-level visual features of the background. The description of the background is based on RGB color histogram and on Gabor filter energy accounting for texture information. The face descriptor is obtained by projection of detected and rectified faces on a common low dimensional eigenspace. Vectors representing faces and background are clustered in an unsupervised fashion exploiting a mean shift clustering technique. We observed that, given the peculiarity of the domain of personal photo libraries where most of the pictures contain fa…

Unsupervised tissue classification of brain MR images for voxel-based morphometry analysis

In this article, a fully unsupervised method for brain tissue segmentation of T1-weighted MRI 3D volumes is proposed. The method uses the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm and a Fully Connected Cascade Neural Network (FCCNN) classifier. Traditional manual segmentation methods require neuro-radiological expertise and significant time while semiautomatic methods depend on parameter's setup and trial-and-error methodologies that may lead to high intraoperator/interoperator variability. The proposed method selects the most useful MRI data according to FCM fuzziness values and trains the FCCNN to learn to classify brain’ tissues into White Matter, Gray Matter, and Cerebro-Spinal Fluid in …

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 …

A Teledentistry system for the second opinion

In this paper we present a Teledentistry system aimed to the Second Opinion task. It make use of a particular camera called intra-oral camera, also called dental camera, in order to perform the photo shooting and real-time video of the inner part of the mouth. The pictures acquired by the Operator with such a device are sent to the Oral Medicine Expert (OME) by means of a current File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service and the real-time video is channeled into a video streaming thanks to the VideoLan client/server (VLC) application. It is composed by a HTML5 web-pages generated by PHP and allows to perform the Second Opinion both when Operator and OME are logged and when one of them is offline.

Fuzzy C-Means Segmentation on Brain MR Slices Corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity

Brain MR Images corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity exhibit brightness variations in such a way that a standard Fuzzy C-Means (fcm) segmentation algorithm fails. As a consequence, modified versions of the algorithm can be found in literature, which take into account the artifact. In this work we show that the application of a suitable pre-processing algorithm, already presented by the authors, followed by a standard fcm segmentation achieves good results also. The experimental results ones are compared with those obtained using SPM5, which can be considered the state of the art algorithm oriented to brain segmentation and bias removal.

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…

Texture Synthesis for Digital Restoration in the Bit-Plane Representation

In this paper we propose a new approach to handle the problem of restoration of grayscale textured images. The purpose is to recovery missing data of a damaged area. The key point is to decompose an image in its bit-planes, and to process bits rather than pixels. We propose two texture synthesis methods for restoration. The first one is a random generation process, based on the conditional probability of bits in the bit-planes. It is designed for images with stochastic textures. The second one is a best-matching method, running on each bit-plane, that is well suited to synthesize periodic patterns. Results are compared with a state-of-the-art restoration algorithm.

Physical Metaphor for Streaming Media Retargeting

We here introduce an image/video retargeting method that operates arbitrary aspect ratios resizing achieved in real-time performances. Most of the literature retargeting approaches sacrifice real-time performances in behalf of quality. On the other hand, existing fast methods provide arguable results. We can obtain a valuable trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. The method named Spring Simulation Retargeting (SSR) is mainly based on a physical springs-based simulation. The media are assumed as flexible objects composed of particles and springs with different local stiffness properties, related to the visual importance of the content. The variation of the object size generates ela…

Noise Filtering Using Edge-Driven Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion

This paper presents a method aimed to noise removal in MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). We propose an improvement of Perona and Malik's anisotropic diffusion filter. In our schema, the diffusion equation of the filter has been modified to take into account the edges direction, This allows the filter to blur uniform areas, while it better preserves the edges. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation is presented and the results are compared with other methods.

Real metrology by using depth map information

Usually in an image no real information about the scene’s depth (in terms of absolute distance) is available. In this paper, a method that extracts real depth measures is developed. This approach starts considering a region located in the center of the depth map. This region can be positioned, interactively, in any part of the depth map in order to measure the real distance of every object inside the scene. The histogram local maxima of this region are determined. Among these values the biggest, that represents the gray-level of the most considerable object, is chosen. This gray-level is used in an exponential mapping function that converts, using the input camera settings, the depth map gr…

Automatic image representation for content-based access to personal photo album

The proposed work exploits methods and techniques for automatic characterization of images for content-based access to personal photo libraries. Several techniques, even if not reliable enough to address the general problem of content-based image retrieval, have been proven quite robust in a limited domain such as the one of personal photo album. In particular, starting from the observation that most personal photos depict a usually small number of people in a relatively small number of different contexts (e.g. Beach, Public Garden, Indoor, Nature, Snow, City, etc...) we propose the use of automatic techniques borrowed from the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition to index imag…

Springs-based Simulation for Image Retargeting

In this paper an efficient method for image retargeting is pro- posed. It relies onto a mechanical model based on springs network. Each pixel displacement (compression or expan- sion) is given by the network response, according to the springs stiffness. The properties of the springs are deter- mined as function of the visual relevance of the pixels. Such model does not require any optimization, since its so- lution is obtained simply from a linear system of equations, allowing real-time application even for large images. The approach is fully automatic, though can be improved by interactively providing cues such as geometric constraints and/or manual relevant object labeling. The results pr…

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…

Clinical Anatomy and information technology.

Innovative modelling techniques in computer vision

Abstract The paper is concerned with two of main research activities currently carried on at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab of DIE. The first part deals with hybrid artificial vision models, intended to provide object recognition and classification capabilities to an autonomous intelligen system. In this framework, a system recovering 3-D shape information from grey-level images of a scene, building a geometric representation of the scene in terms of superquadrics at the geometric level, and reasoning about the scene at the symbolic level is described. In the second part, attention is focused on automatic indexing of image databases. JACOB, a prototypal system allowing…

<title>Multifeature image and video content-based storage and retrieval</title>

In this paper we present most recent evolution of JACOB, a system we developed for image and video content-based storage and retrieval. The system is based on two separate archives: a 'features DB' and a 'raw-data DB'. When a user puts a query, a search is done in the 'features DB'; the selected items are taken form the 'raw-data DB' and shown to the user. Two kinds of sessions are allowed: 'database population' and 'database querying'. During a 'database population' session the user inserts new data into the archive. The input data can consist of digital images or videos. Videos are split into shots and for each shot one or more representative frames are automatically extracted. Shots and …

Biological target volume segmentation for radiotherapy treatment planning

Geometric and conceptual knowledge representation within a generative model of visual perception

A representation scheme of knowledge at both the geometric and conceptual levels is offered which extends a generative theory of visual perception. According to this theory, the perception process proceeds through different scene representations at various levels of abstraction. The geometric domain is modeled following the CSG (constructive solid geometry) approach, taking advantage of the geometric modelling scheme proposed by A. Pentland, based on superquadrics as representation primitives. Recursive Boolean combinations and deformations are considered in order to enlarge the scope of the representation scheme and to allow for the construction of real-world scenes. In the conceptual doma…

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 …

Automatic Generation of Custom Tourist Routes

In this paper we present a new tool for the automatic generation of custom tourist routes. Starting from the user preferences (place to visit, starting and ending points, available time, favourite types of attractions) our system is able to extract information from the Web and to suggest a custom route to the user. Our system is based only onto online information, which is dynamically extracted at the query time, so that it can work for every location in the world, with no restrictions. Furthermore, our method does not require any user intervention, unless the input parameters. Our system is also able to give to the users supplementary information about the route stops, as a photo slideshow…

Probabilistic Corner Detection for Facial Feature Extraction

After more than 35 years of resarch, face processing is considered nowadays as one of the most important application of image analysis. It can be considered as a collection of problems (i.e., face detection, normalization, recognition and so on) each of which can be treated separately. Some face detection and face recognition techniques have reached a certain level of maturity, however facial feature extraction still represents the bottleneck of the entire process. In this paper we present a novel facial feature extraction approach that could be used for normalizing Viola-Jones detected faces and let them be recognized by an appearance-based face recognition method. For each observed featur…

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…

A tool to support the creation of datasets of tampered videos

Digital Video Forensics is getting a growing interest from the Multimedia research community, as the need for methods to validate the authenticity of a video content is increasing with the number of videos freely available to the digital users. Unlike Digital Image Forensics, to our knowledge, there are not standard datasets to test video forgery detection techniques. In this paper we present a new tool to support the users in creating datasets of tampered videos. We furthermore present our own dataset and we discuss some remarks about how to create forgeries difficult to be detected by an observer, to the naked eye.

Enabling Technologies on Hybrid Camera Networks for Behavioral Analysis of Unattended Indoor Environments and Their Surroundings

This paper presents a layered network architecture and the enabling technologies for accomplishing vision-based behavioral analysis of unattended environments. Specifically the vision network covers both the attended environment and its surroundings by means of multi-modal cameras. The layer overlooking at the surroundings is laid outdoor and tracks people, monitoring entrance/exit points. It recovers the geometry of the site under surveillance and communicates people positions to a higher level layer. The layer monitoring the unattended environment undertakes similar goals, with the addition of maintaining a global mosaic of the observed scene for further understanding. Moreover, it merges …

Clustering techniques for personal photo album management

In this work we propose a novel approach for the automatic representation of pictures achieving at more effective organization of personal photo albums. Images are analyzed and described in multiple representation spaces, namely, faces, background and time of capture. Faces are automatically detected, rectified and represented projecting the face itself in a common low-dimensional eigenspace. Backgrounds are represented with low-level visual features based on RGB histogram and Gabor filter bank. Faces, time and background information of each image in the collection is automatically organized using a mean-shift clustering technique. Given the particular domain of personal photo libraries, wh…

Method for Classifying a Digital Image

Volumetric Bias Correction

This paper presents a method to suppress the bias artifact, also known as RF-inhomogeneity, in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). This artifact produces illumination variations due to magnetic field fluctuations of the device. In the latest years many works have been devoted to face this problem. In this work we present the 3D version of a new approach to bias correction, which is called Exponential Entropy Driven Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM). This technique has been already presented by some of the authors for the 2D case only. The description of the whole method is detailed, and some experimental results are reported.

Population and Query Interface for a Content-Based Video Database

In this paper we describe the first full implementation of a content-based indexing and retrieval system for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos. We consider a video as a collection of spatiotemporal segments called video objects; each video object is a sequence of video object planes. A set of representative video object planes is used to index each video object. During the database population, the operator, using a semi-automatic outlining tool we developed, manually selects video objects and insert some semantical information. Low-level visual features like color, texture, motion and geometry are automatically computed. The system has been implemented on a commercial relational DBMS and is based on…

Automatic Generation of Subject-Based Image Transitions

This paper presents a novel approach for the automatic generation of image slideshows. Counter to standard cross-fading, the idea is to operate the image transitions keeping the subject focused in the intermediate frames by automatically identifying him/her and preserving face and facial features alignment. This is done by using a novel Active Shape Model and time-series Image Registration. The final result is an aesthetically appealing slideshow which emphasizes the subject. The results have been evaluated with a users’ response survey. The outcomes show that the proposed slideshow concept is widely preferred by final users w.r.t. standard image transitions.

A knowledge based architecture for the virtual restoration of ancient photos

Abstract Historical images are essential documents of the recent past. Nevertheless, time and bad preservation corrupt their physical supports. Digitization can be the solution to extend their “lives”, and digital techniques can be used to recover lost information. This task is often difficult and time-consuming, if commercial restoration tools are used for the purpose. A new solution is proposed to help non-expert users in restoring their damaged photos. First, we defined a dual taxonomy for the defects in printed and digitized photos. We represented our restoration domain with an ontology and we created some rules to suggest actions to perform in case of some specific events. Classes and …

A Lightweight Software Architecture for Robot Navigation and Visual Logging through Environmental Landmarks Recognition

A robot architecture with real-time performance in navigation tasks is presented. The system architecture is multi-threaded with shared memory and fast message passing through static signalling. In this paper, we focused on the reactive layer components and its straightforward implementation. The proposed architecture is described with reference to an experimental setup, in which the robot task is visual logging of environmental landmarks detected on the basis of sensor readings. Our experimental results show how the robot is able to identify, make snapshots and log a set of landmarks by matching 2D geometric patterns.

Distributed Image Databases: Hybrid Similarity Functions

A computer support system to support diagnosis by imaging and its experimental application to images of patients affected by multiple sclerosis

Multi-modal Image Registration Using Fuzzy Kernel Regression

This paper presents a study aimed to the realization of a novel multiresolution registration framework. The transformation function is computed iteratively as a composition of local deformations determined by the maximization of mutual information. At each iteration, local transformations are joint together using fuzzy kernel regression. This technique represents the core of the mothod and it's formally described from a probabilistic perspective. It avoids blocking artifacts and allows to keep the final deformation spatially congruent and smooth. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that this approach is equally effective for registering datasets acquired from both si…

Unsupervised Clustering in Personal Photo Collections

In this paper we propose a probabilistic approach for the automatic organization of collected pictures aiming at more effective representation in personal photo albums. Images are analyzed and described in two representation spaces, namely, faces and background. Faces are automatically detected, rectified and represented projecting the face itself in a common low dimensional eigenspace. Backgrounds are represented with low-level visual features based on RGB histogram and Gabor filter energy. Face and background information of each image in the collection is automatically organized by mean-shift clustering technique. Given the particular domain of personal photo libraries, where most of the …

Bias Correction on Knee MR Images

Application of an intelligent study and research support system for clinical anatomy in a cooperation scenario

Scientific research and teaching are strongly interrelated. A student should be educated both to the fundamentals of a discipline and to the research tasks as the future development of a discipline is entrusted to the students of today. Computer based tutoring systems already showed useful in pursuing the former target while the Intelligent Study and Research Support System developed at DINFO may be used to fulfill both in an integrated manner. This paper introduces the possible application of the ISRSS to training of Clinical Anatomy in a scenario of international cooperation among academic institutions.

Video Indexing Using MPEG Motion Compensation Vectors

In the last years a lot of work has been done on color, textural, structural and semantic indexing of "content-based" video databases. Motion-based video indexing has been less explored, with approaches generally based on the analysis of optical flows. Compressed videos require the decompression of the sequences and the computation of optical flows, two steps computationally heavy. In this paper we propose some methods to index videos by motion features (mainly related to camera motion) and by motion-based spatial segmentation of frames, in a fully automatic way. Our idea is to use MPEG motion vectors as an alternative to optical flows. Their extraction is very simple and fast; it doesn't r…

Context Aware Services For Tourists In A Late Middle Age Castle

An image retrieval system for artistic database on cultural heritage

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…

A software system to support the description and the explanation of medical images based on medical diagnosis criteria

An Integrated Architecture for Surveillance and Monitoring in an Archaeological Site

This paper describes an on-going work aimed at designing and deploying a system for the surveillance and monitoring of an archaeological site, namely the "Valley of the Temples" in Agrigento, Italy. Given the relevance of the site from an artistical and historical point of view, it is important to protect the monuments from malicious or simply incautious behavior; however, the vastity of the area to be monitored and the vague definition of its boundaries make it unpractical to provide extensive coverage through traditional sensors or similar devices. We describe the design of an architecture for the surveillance of the site and for the monitoring of the visitors' behavior consisting in an i…

Medical image registration: Interpolations, similarities and optimizations strategies

This paper presents a study conducted for evaluating different interpolation schemes, similarity metrics and optimization algorithms for the purpose of volumetric medical image registration. Each technique has been implemented to be plugged in a modular system. Rotation, translation and scale error has been measured to obtain a performance evaluation for all of the combinations of the considered techniques. Several experimental tests were conducted for validation both on synthetic and real datasets providing an exhaustive overview of the various strategies used.

Convolutional architectures for virtual screening

Abstract Background A Virtual Screening algorithm has to adapt to the different stages of this process. Early screening needs to ensure that all bioactive compounds are ranked in the first positions despite of the number of false positives, while a second screening round is aimed at increasing the prediction accuracy. Results A novel CNN architecture is presented to this aim, which predicts bioactivity of candidate compounds on CDK1 using a combination of molecular fingerprints as their vector representation, and has been trained suitably to achieve good results as regards both enrichment factor and accuracy in different screening modes (98.55% accuracy in active-only selection, and 98.88% …

Suitability of a content-based retrieval method in astronomical image databases

Abstract Indexing and retrieval methods based on the image content are required to effectively use information from large repositories of digital images. Usually, the way to search for data and images in astronomical archives is via textual queries expressed in terms of constraints on observation parameters. In this paper we present a method for automatic extraction of images by using shape descriptions based on local symmetry. The proposed indexing methodology has been developed and tested inside JACOB, a prototypal system for content-based video database querying.

JACOB: Just A COntent Based query system for video databases

The increasing development of advanced multimedia applications requires new technologies for organizing and retrieving by content databases of still digital images or digital video sequences. The authors describe JACOB, a prototypal system allowing content-based browsing and querying in video databases. The JACOB system automatically splits a video into a sequence of shots, extracts a few representative frames (said r-frames) from each shot and computes r-frame descriptors based on features like color and texture. No user action is required during the database population step. Queries exploit this image content description and may be direct or by example

Slice to Volume Registration

Multidirectional Scratch Detection and Restoration in Digitized Old Images

Line scratches are common defects in old archived videos, but similar imperfections may occur in printed images, in most cases by reason of improper handling or inaccurate preservation of the support. Once an image is digitized, its defects become part of that image. Many state-of-the-art papers deal with long, thin, vertical lines in old movie frames, by exploiting both spatial and temporal information. In this paper we aim to face with a more challenging and general problem: the analysis of line scratches in still images, regardless of their orientation, color, and shape. We present a detection/restoration method to process this defect.

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…

Improved color interpolation using discrete wavelet transform

New approaches to Color Interpolation based on Discrete Wavelet Transform are described. The Bayer data are split into the three colour components; for each component the Wavelet Coefficient Interpolation (WCI) algorithm is applied and results are combined to obtain the final colour interpolated image. A further anti-aliasing algorithm can be applied in order to reduce false colours. A first approach consists of interpolating wavelet coefficients starting from a spatial analysis of the input image. It was considered an interpolation step based on threshold levels associated to the spatial correlation of the input image pixel. A second approach consists of interpolating wavelet coefficients …

MORPHOLOGICAL BRAIN EXTRACTION FROM PD-WEIGHTED MR IMAGES: ALGORITHM AND EXPERIMENTATION

Effective and Efficient Interpolation for Mutual Information based Multimodality Elastic Image Registration

Mutual information (MI) is a popular similarity metric for multimodality image registration purpose. However, it is negatively influenced by artifacts due to interpolation effects. As a result, registration algorithms performance could be affected. In this paper a novel interpolation scheme is presented. It is both effective and efficient. Effective because it limits the presence of local maxima in the mutual information curve, efficient because it is simple to compute being based on simple and optimized distance measures. The method is validated and compared against other techniques both from performance and time complexity persepectives. Differently from other reference works, which perfo…

A convolutional neural network for virtual screening of molecular fingerprints

In the last few years, Deep Learning (DL) gained more and more impact on drug design because it allows a huge increase of the prediction accuracy in many stages of such a complex process. In this paper a Virtual Screening (VS) procedure based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is presented, that is aimed at classifying a set of candidate compounds as regards their biological activity on a particular target protein. The model has been trained on a dataset of active/inactive compounds with respect to the Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 1 (CDK1) a very important protein family, which is heavily involved in regulating the cell cycle. One qualifying point of the proposed approach is the use of molec…

An Explorable Immersive Panorama

The immersive panoramas are widely used to provide virtual tours of real scene. Their use covers a wide field of applications: art, industry, space research, topography, forensic investigation and all those systems requiring the exploration of a virtual environment which simulates a real one. Often sophisticated devices are used to perform the panorama acquisition. In this paper, we present an image based immersive panorama requiring low cost devices for the acquisition task and provides an innovative human-computer interaction approach. Many panoramic images of the same location are captured. The visualization system changes the panorama in a transparent way with respect to the user intera…

A Tunable Digital Ishihara Plate for Pre-School Aged Children

Colors play a fundamental role for children, both in the everyday life and in education. They recognize the surrounding world, and play games making a large use of colors. They learn letters and numbers by means of colors. As a consequence, early diagnosis of color blindness is an crucial to support an individual affected by this visual perception alteration at the initial phase of his/her life. The diagnosis of red-green color deficiencies (protanopia or deuteranopia) is commonly accomplished by means of the Ishihara test, which consists of plates showing dots with different sizes where some of them compose numbers within a gamut of colors while the ones composing the background have diffe…

Video indexing using optical flow field

The increasing development of advanced multimedia applications requires new technologies for organizing and retrieving by content databases of digital video. Several content based features (color, texture, motion, etc.) are needed to perform a reliable content based retrieval. We present a method for automatic motion based video indexing and retrieval. A prototypal system has been developed to prove the validity of our approach. Our system automatically splits a video into a sequence of shots, extracts a few representative frames (said r-frames) from each shot and computes some motion based features related to the optical flow field. Motion based queries are then performed either in a quali…

Using Temporal Texture for Content-Based Video Retrieval

Textures evolving over time are called temporal textures and are very common in everyday life. Examples are the smoke flowing or the wavy water of a river. The idea explored in this paper is that image features based on temporal texture could allow a better performance of current content-based video retrieval systems that are mainly based on static characteristics of representative frames, like color and texture. To this aim we analyze the spatio-temporal nature of texture and its application in content-based access to video databases. In particular, we represent temporal texture using the spatio-temporal autoregressive (STAR) model and a variation of self-organizing maps (SOM) where each n…

A system based on neural architectures for the reconstruction of 3-D shapes from images

The connectionist approach to the recovery of 3-D shape information from 2-D images developed by the authors, is based on a system made up by two cascaded neural networks. The first network is an implementation of the BCS, an architecture which derives from a biological model of the low level visual processes developed by Grossberg and Mingolla: this architecture extracts a sort of brightness gradient map from the image. The second network is a backpropagation architecture that supplies an estimate of the geometric parameters of the objects in the scene under consideration, starting from the outputs of the BCS. A detailed description of the system and the experimental results obtained by si…

Illumination Correction on MR Images

Objective. An important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance Images is the rf inhomogeneity, also called bias artifact. This anomaly produces an abnormal illumination fluctuation on the image, due to variations of the device magnetic field. This artifact is particularly strong on images acquired with a device specialized on upper and lower limbs due to their coil configuration. A method based on homomorphic filtering aimed to suppress this artifact was proposed by Guillemaud. This filter has two faults: it doesnt provide an indication about the cutoff frequency (cf) and introduces another illumination artifact on the edges of the foreground. This work is an improvement to this method because i…

A Knowledge Based Model for Digital Restoration and Enhancement of Images Concerning Archaeological and Monumental Heritage of Mediterranean Coast

A P2P Architecture for Multimedia Content Retrieval

The retrieval facilities of most Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are limited to queries based on unique identifiers or small sets of keywords. This approach can be highly labor-intensive and inconsistent. In this paper we investigate a scenario where a huge amount of multimedia resources are shared in a P2P network, by means of efficient content-based image and video retrieval functionalities. The challenge in such systems is to limit the number of sent messages, maximizing the usefulness of each peer contacted in the query process. We achieve this goal by the adoption of a novel algorithm for routing user queries. The proposed approach exploits compact representations of multimedia resources sh…

Keyword Based Keyframe Extraction in Online Video Collections

Keyframe extraction methods aim to find in a video sequence the most significant frames, according to specific criteria. In this paper we propose a new method to search, in a video database, for frames that are related to a given keyword, and to extract the best ones, according to a proposed quality factor. We first exploit a speech to text algorithm to extract automatic captions from all the video in a specific domain database. Then we select only those sequences (clips), whose captions include a given keyword, thus discarding a lot of information that is useless for our purposes. Each retrieved clip is then divided into shots, using a video segmentation method, that is based on the SURF d…

A Dataset of Annotated Omnidirectional Videos for Distancing Applications

Omnidirectional (or 360°) cameras are acquisition devices that, in the next few years, could have a big impact on video surveillance applications, research, and industry, as they can record a spherical view of a whole environment from every perspective. This paper presents two new contributions to the research community: the CVIP360 dataset, an annotated dataset of 360° videos for distancing applications, and a new method to estimate the distances of objects in a scene from a single 360° image. The CVIP360 dataset includes 16 videos acquired outdoors and indoors, annotated by adding information about the pedestrians in the scene (bounding boxes) and the distances to the camera of some point…

Detection of Duplicated Regions in Tampered Digital Images by Bit-Plane Analysis

In this paper we present a new method for searching duplicated areas in a digital image. The goal is to detect if an image has been tampered by a copy-move process. Our method works within a convenient domain. The image to be analyzed is decomposed in its bit-plane representation. Then, for each bitplane, block of bits are encoded with an ASCII code, and a sequence of strings is analyzed rather than the original bit-plane. The sequence is lexicographically sorted and similar groups of bits are extracted as candidate areas, and passed to the following plane to be processed. Output of the last planes indicates if, and where, the image has been altered.

Hybrid architecture for shape reconstruction and object recognition

The proposed architecture is aimed to recover 3-D- shape information from gray-level images of a scene; to build a geometric representation of the scene in terms of geometric primitives; and to reason about the scene. The novelty of the architecture is in fact the integration of different approaches: symbolic reasoning techniques typical of knowledge representation in artificial intelligence, algorithmic capabilities typical of artificial vision schemes, and analogue techniques typical of artificial neural networks. Experimental results obtained by means of an implemented version of the proposed architecture acting on real scene images are reported to illustrate the system capabilities.

Fuzzy Smoothed Composition of Local Mapping Transformations for Non-rigid Image Registration

This paper presents a novel method for medical image regis- tration. The global transformation is obtained by composing affine trans- formations, which are recovered locally from given landmarks. Transfor- mations of adjacent regions are smoothed to avoid blocking artifacts, so that a unique continuous and differentiable global function is obtained. Such composition is operated using a technique derived from fuzzy C- means clustering. The method was successfully tested on several datasets; results, both qualitative and quantitative, are shown. Comparisons with other methods are reported. Final considerations on the efficiency of the technique are explained.

Motion analysis using the novelty filter

Abstract An original approach to the motion analysis, based on the novelty filter, is proposed. The novelty filter stresses the novelties occurring in a pattern representing an image of the scene under consideration with respect to patterns representing previous images of the same scene, so that visual information about the motion of the objects is obtained. The novelty filter may be implemented by a neural network architecture, taking advantage of the capabilities of massive parallelism, adaptive learning and noise robustness. The novelty filter may learn the entire trajectory of an object, through an incremental learning of a sequence of images capturing the scene, thus emphasizing if the…

WATERSHED BASED DETECTION OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS LESIONS IN MR IMAGES

Morphological exponential entropy driven-HUM.

This paper presents an improvement to the Ex- ponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E 2 D − HUM ) algorithm devoted to illumination artifact sup- pression on Magnetic Resonance Images. E 2 D−HUM requires a segmentation step to remove dark regions in the foreground whose intensity is comparable with background, because strong edges produce streak artifacts on the tissues. This new version of the algorithm keeps the same good properties of E 2 D − HUM without a segmentation phase, whose parameters should be chosen in relation to the image. I. INTRODUCTION Most of the studies on illumination correction found in literature are oriented to brain (18) magnetic resonance images (…

QUALITATIVE MODELING OF CELL GROWTH PROCESSES

In this paper we present a qualitative physics model to reason about cell growth processes and cell-drug interactions, to be used in the knowledge base of NEWCHEM, an expert system intended to guide experimentation in the design of new optimal protocols in cancer treatment, After a brief discussion of the contributions that artificial intelligence techniques could make in cancer research and a brief presentation of some currently developed expert systems, some details of the proposed model based on the Forbus and Kuipers approaches to qualitative physics are given and its implementation as a LISP program is briefly discussed.

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles: Enhanced P2P Services Providing Multimedia Content

[This paper has been withdrawn by the publisher]Traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) services provide only basic searching facilities, based on unique identifiers or small sets of keywords. Unfortunately, this approach is very inadequate and inefficient when a huge amount of multimedia resources is shared. In this paper, we present an original image and video sharing system, in which a user is able to interactively search interesting resources by means of content-based image and video retrieval techniques. In order to limit the network traffic cost, maximizing the usefulness of each peer contacted in the query process, we also propose the adoption of an adaptive overlay routing algorithm, exploit…

A Dual Taxonomy for Defects in Digitized Historical Photos

Old photos may be affected by several types of defects. Manual restorers use their own taxonomy to classify damages by which a photo is affected, in order to apply the proper restoration techniques for a specific defect. Once a photo is digitally acquired, defects become part of the image, and their aspect change. This paper wants to be a first attempt to correlate real defects of printed photos, and digital defects of their digitized versions. A dual taxonomy is proposed, for real and digital defects, and used to classify an image dataset, for a posteriori comparative study. Furthermore, a set of digital features is analyzed for digitized images, to identify which of them could be useful f…

Improved multi-resolution image fusion

This work describes an automatic technique able to fuse different images of the same scene, acquired at different settings, in order to obtain an enhanced single representation of the scene of interest by an improved picture fusion scheme. This allows the extending of the functionalities (depth of field, dynamic range) of medium and low cost digital cameras. When multi-scale decomposition is used on multi-focused images, magnification effects of the lens focusing system cause an incorrect estimation of all pixels in the final image. In our approach new techniques able to reduce these artifacts are introduced. The algorithm has been applied both on full RGB and on color filter array (CFA) im…

New systems for extracting 3-D shape information from images

Neural architectures may offer an adequate way to deal with early vision since they are able to learn shape features or classify unknown shapes, generalising the features of a few meaningful examples, with a low computational cost after the training phase. Two different neural approaches are proposed by the authors: the first one consists of a cascaded architecture made up by a first stage named BWE (Boundary Webs Extractor) which is aimed to extract a brightness gradient map from the image, followed by a backpropagation network that estimates the geometric parameters of the object parts present in the perceived scene. The second approach is based on the extraction of the boundary webs map …

Three-dimensional Fuzzy Kernel Regression framework for registration of medical volume data

Abstract In this work a general framework for non-rigid 3D medical image registration is presented. It relies on two pattern recognition techniques: kernel regression and fuzzy c-means clustering. The paper provides theoretic explanation, details the framework, and illustrates its application to implement three registration algorithms for CT/MR volumes as well as single 2D slices. The first two algorithms are landmark-based approaches, while the third one is an area-based technique. The last approach is based on iterative hierarchical volume subdivision, and maximization of mutual information. Moreover, a high performance Nvidia CUDA based implementation of the algorithm is presented. The f…

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…

Second Opinion System for Intraoral Lesions

In this paper we present the prototype of a teledentistry system to perform the remote diagnosis of oral diseases. It makes use of a particular device called intra-oral (or dental) camera properly designed to shoot video and take pictures of the inner part of the mouth. The intra-oral cameras can be connected via USB to a common PC and they are very cheap, unlike the intra-oral photography kit for DSLR cameras. Usually this kind of devices are used in dentistry studies for local visualization by means of specialized software. The novelty of our system is that the real-time video produced by this device is canalized into a video streming by means of Video LAN client server (VLC) and pictures…

A fully automatic method for biological target volume segmentation of brain metastases

Leksell Gamma Knife is a mini-invasive technique to obtain a complete destruction of cerebral lesions delivering a single high dose radiation beam. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is increasingly utilized for radiation treatment planning. Nevertheless, lesion volume delineation in PET datasets is challenging because of the low spatial resolution and high noise level of PET images. Nowadays, the biological target volume (BTV) is manually contoured on PET studies. This procedure is time expensive and operator-dependent. In this article, a fully automatic algorithm for the BTV delineation based on random walks (RW) on graphs is proposed. The results are compared with the outcomes of…

Exponential Entropy Driven HUM on Knee MR Images

A very important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance Images is the RF inhomogeneity. This kind of artifact generates variations of illumination which trouble both direct examination by the doctor and segmentation algorithms. Even if homomorphic filtering approaches have been presented in literature, none of them has developed a measure to determine the cut-off frequency. In this work we present a measure based on information theory with a large experimental setup aimed to demonstrate the validity of our approach.

Integrating computer vision techniques and wireless sensor networks in video surveillance systems

Nowadays video-surveillance systems are essential tools to monitor sites and to guarantee the safety of people: automatic detection of moving objects in the scene and recognition of dangerous events are particularly interesting. Our project aims to realize tools and techniques for video surveillance systems in outdoor environment to detect people in an automatic real-time way without the direct control of a human operator. The reference framework consists of distributed stationary cameras coordinated with sensor networks. In particular, wireless sensors are used to sense characteristic quantities of the monitored site, such as variations in temperature, humidity, noise, vibrations, and so o…

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…

Real-time content-aware image resizing using reduced linear model

In this paper an effective and efficient method for contentaware image resizing is proposed. It is based on the solution of a linear system where each pixel displacement (compression or expansion) is determined in dependence of the visual relevance of the pixel itself. The linear nature of the model allows real-time application of the method even for large images. This fully automatic approach can be also improved by interactively providing cues such as geometric constraints and/or manual relevant object labeling. The results have proven that the presented method achieves results comparable or superior to existent strategies, while improving efficiency.

Automatic Generation of User Interfaces using the Set Description Language

We present a paradigm to generate automatically graphical user interfaces from a formal description of the data model following the well-known model-view-control paradigm. This paradigm provide complete separation between data model and interface description, setting the programmer free from the low-level aspects of programming interfaces, letting him take care of higher level aspects. The interface along with the data model is described by means of a formal language, the Set Description Language. We also describe the infrastructure based on this paradigm we implemented to generate graphical user interfaces for generic applications. Moreover, it can adapt the user interface of a program to …

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…

Multi-modal non-rigid registration of medical images based on mutual information maximization

In this paper, a new multi-modal non-rigid registration technique for medical images is presented. Firstly, the registration problem is outlined and some of the most common approaches reported, then, the proposed algorithm is presented. The proposed technique is based on mutual information maximization and computes a deformation field through a suitable globally smoothed affine piecewise transformation. The algorithm has been conceived with particular attention to computational load and accuracy of results. Experimental results involving intra-patient, inter-patients and atlas images on brain CT and MR (T1, T2 and PD modalities) are reported.

An associative link from geometric to symbolic representations in artificial vision

Recent approaches to modelling the reference of internal symbolic representations of intelligent systems suggest to consider a computational level of a subsymbolic kind. In this paper the integration between symbolic and subsymbolic processing is approached in the framework of the research work currently carried on by the authors in the field of artificial vision. An associative mapping mechanism is defined in order to relate the constructs of the symbolic representation to a geometric model of the observed scene.

Multifeature Image and Video Content-Based storage and retrieval

In this paper we present most recent evolution of JACOB, a system we developed for image and video content-based storage and retrieval. The system is based on two separate archives: a 'features DB' and a 'raw-data DB'. When a user puts a query, a search is done in the 'features DB'; the selected items are taken form the 'raw-data DB' and shown to the user. Two kinds of sessions are allowed: 'database population' and 'database querying'. During a 'database population' session the user inserts new data into the archive. The input data can consist of digital images or videos. Videos are split into shots and for each shot one or more representative frames are automatically extracted. Shots and …

Restoration of Digitized Damaged Photos using Bit-Plane Slicing

Digital image restoration aims to recover damaged zones of a digital image, using surrounding information. In this paper we propose a novel approach, based on bit-plane slicing decomposition, with the purpose to make information analysis and reconstruction process easy, fast and effective. Tests have been made on digitized damaged old photos to restore several classes of typical defects in old photographic prints.

A Gabor-based Technique for Bias Removal in MR images

Magnetic Resonance images are often characterized by irregularly displaced luminance fluctuations that are called bias artifact. This disturb is due to a drop in signal intensity caused by the distance between imaged sample and receiver coil. An original approach to bias removal in Magnetic Resonance images is presented, which is based on the use of Gabor filter to extract the artifact. The proposed technique restores the image using a correction model, which is derived from the attenuation of signal diffusion across the tissues. No hypotheses are made about the structure of the tissues under investigation and the used MR spectrum. The approach is presented in detail, and extensive experime…

Experiences with CiceRobot, a Museum Guide Cognitive Robot

The paper describes CiceRobot, a robot based on a cognitive architecture for robot vision and action. The aim of the architecture is to integrate visual perception and actions with knowledge representation, in order to let the robot to generate a deep inner understanding of its environment. The principled integration of perception, action and of symbolic knowledge is based on the introduction of an intermediate representation based on Gardenfors conceptual spaces. The architecture has been tested on a RWI B21 autonomous robot on tasks related with guided tours in the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento. Experimental results are presented.

Automatic Illustration of Short Texts via Web Images

In this paper we propose a totally unsupervised and automatic illustration method, which aims to find onto the Web a set of images to illustrate the content of an input short text. The text is modelled as a semantic space and a set of relevant keywords is extracted. We compare and discuss different methods to create semantic representations by keyword extraction. Keywords are used to query Google Image Search engine for a list of relevant images. We also extract information from the Web pages that include the retrieved images, to create an Image Semantic Space, which is compared to the Text Semantic Space in order to rank the list of retrieved images. Tests showed that our method achieves v…

Towards MKDA: A Knowledge Discovery Assistant for Researches in Medicine

Nowadays doctors are generating a huge amount of raw data. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be sources of new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so much researchers in Medicine are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The user must define only the experiment specifications in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps users in their composition. Then the system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP) on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and pr…

Three-domain image representation for personal photo album management

In this paper we present a novel approach for personal photo album management. Pictures are analyzed and described in three representation spaces, namely, faces, background and time of capture. Faces are automatically detected and rectified using a probabilistic feature extraction technique. Face representation is then produced by computing PCA (Principal Component Analysis). Backgrounds are represented with low-level visual features based on RGB histogram and Gabor filter bank. Temporal data is obtained through the extraction of EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) data. Each image in the collection is then automatically organized using a mean-shift clustering technique. While many system…

A Web-based Intelligent Tutoring System for Clinical Anatomy

Physical simulation for real-time image/video retargeting

Retargeting methods present content on arbitrary aspect ratio me- dia displays limiting distortions in relevant objects. This is done by means of applying non-homogeneous resizing operators across the whole media, constraining it to fit into the required size. Several succesful systems have been proposed to achieve image retargeting, while video retargeting is still challenging due to time consistency and computational complexity requirements. Two important con- tributes were proposed: non-homogeneous retargeting [Wolf et al. 2007] and improved seam-carving [Rubinstein et al. 2008]. The first one claims to achieve real-time performance but considers spa- tial coordinates separately. The lat…

Morphological Exponential Entropy Driven Hum on Knee MR Images

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 …

Bias artifact suppression on MR volumes.

RF-Inhomogeneity correction is a relevant research topic in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). A volume corrupted by this artifact exhibits nonuni- form illumination both inside a single slice and between adjacent ones. In this work a bias correction technique is presented, which suppresses this artifact on MR vol- umes scanned from different body parts without any a-priori hypothesis on the artifact model. Theoretical foundations of the method are reported together with experimental results and a comparison is presented with both the 2D version of the algorithm and other techniques that are widely used in MRI literature.

Retargeting Framework Based on Monte-carlo Sampling

Advance in image technology and proliferation of acquisition devices like smartphones, digital cameras, etc., made the display of digital images ubiquitous. Many displays exist in the market, spanning within a large variety of resolutions and shapes. Thus, displaying content optimizing the available number of pixels has become a very important issue in the multimedia community, and the image retargeting problem is being widely faced. In this work, we propose an image retargeting framework based on monte-carlo sampling. We operate the non-homogeneous resizing as the composition of several simple atomic resizing functions. The shape of such atomic operator can be chosen within a set of tested…

A new algorithm for bit rate allocation in JPEG2000 tile encoding

A new algorithm for allocating a given bit rate to different image tiles in the JPEG2000 encoding system is proposed. The algorithm outperforms other approaches commonly used in implementations. The new algorithm is suitable when information content is not equally distributed across the image. It is based on the computation of an index of the information content of each tile. To implement the proposed approach, we modified JasPer, a free software-based JPEG2000 coder implementation (Adams, M.D. and Kossentini, F., Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Image Process., vol.2, p.53-6, 2000). The experimentation was carried out on a subset of the JPEG2000 test images. Experimental results are reported, show…

A computer support system to support diagnosis by imaging and its experimental application in Images of patients affected by multiple sclerosis

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…

MultiSlice human organ extraction based on GVF

Segmentation techniques based on active contours algorithm are widely used in medical imaging. Unfortunately, they require a lot of parameters to be used and this can rep- resent an issue for those physicians with not much informatics skills. This paper proposes a software tool which allows to segment multiple slice can differ organ extraction setting a small number of parameters. Moreover, the tool offers the functionality to perform a multiple segmentation the same time, so that an entire volume composed by hundreds slices can be segmented.

AN ADVANCED WEB BASED SYSTEM TO SUPPORT LEARNING OF CLINICAL ANATOMY

Automatic Volumetric Liver Segmentation Using Texture Based Region Growing

In this paper an automatic texture based volumetric region growing method for liver segmentation is proposed. 3D seeded region growing is based on texture features with the automatic selection of the seed voxel inside the liver organ and the automatic threshold value computation for the region growing stop condition. Co-occurrence 3D texture features are extracted from CT abdominal volumes and the seeded region growing algorithm is based on statistics in the features space. Each CT volume is composed by 230 slices, having 512 x 512 pixels as spatial resolution, and 12-bit gray level resolution. In this initial feasible study, 5 healthy volunteer acquisitions has been used. Tests have been p…

Extracting Touristic Information from Online Image Collections

In this paper, we present a Geographical Information Retrieval system, which aims to automatically extract and analyze touristic information from photos of online image collections (in our case of study Flickr). Our system collect all the photos, and the related information, that are associated to a specific city. We then use Google Maps service to geolocate the retrieved photos, and finally we analyze geo-referenced data to obtain our goals: 1) determining and locating the most interesting places of the city, i.e. the most visited locations, and 2) reconstructing touristic routes of the users visiting the city. Information is filtered by using a set of constraints, which we apply to select…

Frequency Determined Homomorphic Unsharp Masking Algorithm on Knee MR Images

A very important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance (MR) Images is the RF inhomogeneity, also called Bias artifact. The visual effect produced by this kind of artifact is an illumination variation which afflicts this kind of medical images. In literature a lot of works oriented to the suppression of this artifact can be found. The approaches based on homomorphic filtering offer an easy way to perform bias correction but none of them can automatically determine the cut-off frequency. In this work we present a measure based on information theory in order to find the frequency mentioned above and this technique is applied to MR images of the knee which are hardly bias corrupted.

Automatic skull stripping in MRI based on morphological filters and fuzzy c-means segmentation

In this paper a new automatic skull stripping method for T1-weighted MR image of human brain is presented. Skull stripping is a process that allows to separate the brain from the rest of tissues. The proposed method is based on a 2D brain extraction making use of fuzzy c-means segmentation and morphological operators applied on transversal slices. The approach is extended to the 3D case, taking into account the result obtained from the preceding slice to solve the organ splitting problem. The proposed approach is compared with BET (Brain Extraction Tool) implemented in MRIcro software.

Motion and Color Based Video Indexing and Retrieval

In this paper we present a method for automatic motion and color based video indexing and retrieval. Our system automatically splits a video into a sequence of shots and extracts a few representative frames (r-frames) from each shot. For each r-frame we compute the optical flow field; motion features are then derived from the flow field. Color features are related to the three-dimensional RGB color histogram. Queries (direct or by example) are based on these features. Obtained results proved that motion and color based querying can play a central role in content based video retrieval

A hybrid scheme for action representation

Strong deficiencies are present in symbolic models for action representation and planning, regarding mainly the difficulty of coping with real, complex environments. These deficiencies can be attributed to several problems, such as the inadequacy in coping with incompletely structured situations, the difficulty of interacting with visual and motorial aspects, the difficulty in representing low-level knowledge, the need to specify the problem at a high level of detail, and so on. Besides the purely symbolic approaches, several nonsymbolic models have been developed, such as the recent class of subsym-bolic techniques. A promising paradigm for the modeling of reasoning, which combines feature…

Towards MKDA: A Knowledge Discovery Assistant For Researches in Medicine

Nowadays doctors are generating a huge amount of raw data. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be sources of new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so much researchers in Medicine are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The user must define only the experiment specifications in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps users in their composition. Then the system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP) on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and pr…

Automatic induction of rules for computer-aided diagnosis in the multiple sclerosis by analysis of brain MR images

Content based indexing of MPEG-4 video on relational DBMS

Scratches Removal in Digitised Aerial Photos Concerning Sicilian Territory

In this paper we propose a fast and effective method to detect and restore scratches in aerial photos from a photographic archive concerning Sicilian territory. Scratch removal is a typical problem for old movie films but similar defects can be seen in still images. Our solution is based on a semiautomatic detection process and an unsupervised restoration algorithm. Results are comparable with those obtained with commercial restoration tools.

An architecture for automatic gesture analysis

The field of human-computer interaction has been widely investigated in the last years, resulting in a variety of systems used in different application fields like virtual reality simulation environments, software user interfaces, and digital library systems.A very crucial part of all these systems is the input module which is devoted to recognize the human operator in terms of tracking and/or recognition of human face, arms position, hand gestures, and so on.In this work a software architecture is presented, for the automatic recognition of human arms poses. Our research has been carried on in the robotics framework. A mobile robot that has to find its path to the goal in a partially struc…

Population and query interface for a content-based video database

Fuzzy-based Kernel Regression Approaches for Free Form Deformation and Elastic Registration of Medical Images

In modern medicine, a largely diffused method for gathering knowledge about organs and tissues is obtained by means of merging information from several datasets. Such data are provided from multimodal or sequential acquisitions. As a consequence, a pre-processing step that is called “image registration” is required to achieve data integration. Image registration aims to obtain the best possible spatial correspondence between misaligned datasets. This procedure is also useful to correct distortions induced by magnetic interferences with the acquisition equipment signals or the ones due patient’s involuntary movements such as heartbeat or breathing. The problem can be regarded as finding the …

Semi-Automated evaluation of small bowel mural attenuation at CT enterography using different temporal windows in patients affected by active Crohn disease