基于Ncut准则的图分割的新算法

针对有权图分割时不能很好解决子图内部耦合度不高的问题,使用可以同时优化子图内部顶点耦合度和子图之间顶点耦合度的Ncut准则,提出了一种新的基于迭代改善策略的RNK分割算法。算法通过不断交换可以改善Ncut值的顶点对优化现有分割。与传统分割算法相比,可以同时保证子图内最大耦合度和子图间最小的耦合度。并提出一种散列技术,提高查找最优交换顶点对的效率。当图为稠密矩阵时,改善效果尤为明显。通过对随机图分割的实验结果表明,该算法较传统的KL算法可以得到更理想的分割结果。     

Graph partitioning active contours (GPAC) for image segmentation

In this paper, we introduce new types of variational segmentation cost functions and associated active contour methods that are based on pairwise similarities or dissimilarities of the pixels. As a solution to a minimization problem, we introduce a new curve evolution framework, the graph partitioning active contours (GPAC). Using global features, our curve evolution is able to produce results close to the ideal minimization of such cost functions. New and efficient implementation techniques are also introduced in this paper. Our experiments show that GPAC solution is effective on natural images and computationally efficient. Experiments on gray-scale, color, and texture images show promising segmentation results.     

Contour matching using epipolar geometry

Matching features computed in images is an important process in multiview image analysis. When the motion between two images is large, the matching problem becomes very difficult. In this paper, we propose a contour matching algorithm based on geometric constraints. With the assumption that the contours are obtained from images taken from a moving camera with static scenes, we apply the epipolar constraint between two sets of contours and compute the corresponding points on the contours. From the initial epipolar constraints obtained from corner point matching, candidate contours are selected according to the epipolar geometry, contour end point constraints, and contour distance measures. In order to reduce the possibility of false matches, the number of match points on a contour is also used as a selection measure. The initial epipolar constraint is refined from the matched sets of contours. The algorithm can be applied to a pair or two pairs of images. All of the processes are fully automatic and successfully implemented and tested with various real images     

Multiregion level-set partitioning of synthetic aperture radar images

The purpose of this study is to investigate synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation into a given but arbitrary number of gamma homogeneous regions via active contours and level sets. The segmentation of SAR images is a difficult problem due to the presence of speckle which can be modeled as strong, multiplicative noise. The proposed algorithm consists of evolving simple closed planar curves within an explicit correspondence between the interiors of curves and regions of segmentation to minimize a criterion containing a term of conformity of data to a speckle model of noise and a term of regularization. Results are shown on both synthetic and real images.     

双目视觉下基于区域生长的三维人脸重建算法

为解决传统立体匹配算法匹配低纹理人脸图像时极易产生误匹配的问题,提出一种基于区域生长的人脸立体匹配算法。该算法利用级联回归树算法提取的人脸特征点将人脸划分为不同区域以分别限制各区域的视差搜索范围,从而避免在全局范围上查找匹配点;同时利用人脸的局部形状特性,采用局部曲面拟合的方式筛除误匹配种子点并生成大量可靠种子点用于区域生长;最后,分别在实验室环境采集的人脸图像和FRGC v2.0人脸数据库上进行定性和定量实验。实验结果表明,与传统算法相比,所提算法能够重建出更加准确的三维人脸模型。经点云配准后与人脸点云真实值的均方根误差在2 mm以内,且不同光照、姿态、表情下人脸图像的重建表明所改进的立体匹配算法具有较好的鲁棒性。     

Template-driven segmentation of confocal microscopy images

High quality 3D visualization of anatomic structures is necessary for many applications. The anatomic structures first need to be segmented. A variety of segmentation algorithms have been developed for this purpose. For confocal microscopy images, the noise introduced during the specimen preparation process, such as the procedure of penetration or staining, may cause images to be of low contrast in some regions. This property will make segmentation difficult. Also, the segmented structures may have rugged surfaces in 3D visualization. In this paper, we present a hybrid method that is suitable for segmentation of confocal microscopy images. A rough segmentation result is obtained from the atlas-based segmentation via affine registration. The boundaries of the segmentation result are close to the object boundaries, and are regarded as the initial contours of the active contour models. After convergence of the snake algorithm, the resulting contours in regions of low contrast are locally refined by parametric bicubic surfaces to alleviate the problem of incorrect convergence. The proposed method increases the accuracy of the snake algorithm because of better initial contours. Besides, it can provide smoother segmented results in 3D visualization.     

Motion layer extraction in the presence of occlusion using graph cuts

Extracting layers from video is very important for video representation, analysis, compression, and synthesis. Assuming that a scene can be approximately described by multiple planar regions, this paper describes a robust and novel approach to automatically extract a set of affine or projective transformations induced by these regions, detect the occlusion pixels over multiple consecutive frames, and segment the scene into several motion layers. First, after determining a number of seed regions using correspondences in two frames, we expand the seed regions and reject the outliers employing the graph cuts method integrated with level set representation. Next, these initial regions are merged into several initial layers according to the motion similarity. Third, an occlusion order constraint on multiple frames is explored, which enforces that the occlusion area increases with the temporal order in a short period and effectively maintains segmentation consistency over multiple consecutive frames. Then, the correct layer segmentation is obtained by using a graph cuts algorithm and the occlusions between the overlapping layers are explicitly determined. Several experimental results are demonstrated to show that our approach is effective and robust.     

A heuristic triangulation algorithm for multiple planar contours using an extended double branching procedure

This paper presents a heuristic triangulation algorithm for reconstructing surfaces over a set of cross-sectional contours. The multiple branching problem, an important problem of conventional triangulation methods, is reated as a set of double branchings, and an algorithm based on countour merging is developed. Several imaginary contours are generated to handle the multiple branching problem with many branch contours. A double branching algorithm based on the partitioning of the root contour is also proposed. The results show that our method works well even for objects with many complicated branches.     

Efficient algorithm for graph-partitioning problem using a problem transformation method

This paper shows that the uniform k-way partitioning problem can be transformed into the max-cut problem using a graph modification technique. An iterative algorith, based on Kernighan-Lin's (KL) method, for partitioning graphs is presented that exploits the problem equivalence property. The algorithm deals with nodes of various sizes without any performance degradation. The computing time per pass of the algorithm is O(itkN²), where N is the number of nodes in the given graph. In practice, only a small number of passes are typically needed, leading to a fast approximation algorithm for k-way partitioning. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the KL algorithm in the quality of solutions. The performance gap between the proposed and KL algorithms becomes much bigger as the amount of size differences between nodes increases.     

Contour segmentation in 2D ultrasound medical images with particle filtering

Object segmentation in medical images is an actively investigated research area. Segmentation techniques are a valuable tool in medical diagnostics for cancer tumours and cysts, for planning surgery operations and other medical treatment. In this paper, a Monte Carlo algorithm for extracting lesion contours in ultrasound medical images is proposed. An efficient multiple model particle filter for progressive contour growing (tracking) from a starting point is developed, accounting for convex, non-circular forms of delineated contour areas. The driving idea of the proposed particle filter consists in the incorporation of different image intensity inside and outside the contour into the filter likelihood function. The filter employs image intensity gradients as measurements and requires information about four manually selected points: a seed point, a starting point, arbitrarily selected on the contour, and two additional points, bounding the measurement formation area around the contour. The filter performance is studied by segmenting contours from a number of real and simulated ultrasound medical images. Accurate contour segmentation is achieved with the proposed approach in ultrasound images with a high level of speckle noise.     

Dynamic programming for detecting, tracking, and matchingdeformable contours

The problem of segmenting an image into separate regions and tracking them over time is one of the most significant problems in vision. Terzopoulos et al. (1987) proposed an approach to detect the contour regions of complex shapes, assuming a user selected initial contour not very far from the desired solution. We propose to further explore the information provided by the user's selected points and apply an optimal method to detect contours which allows a segmentation of the image. The method is based on dynamic programming (DP), and applies to a wide variety of shapes. It is exact and not iterative. We also consider a multiscale approach capable of speeding up the algorithm by a factor of 20, although at the expense of losing the guaranteed optimality characteristic. The problem of tracking and matching these contours is addressed. For tracking, the final contour obtained at one frame is sampled and used as initial points for the next frame. Then, the same DP process is applied. For matching, a novel strategy is proposed where the solution is a smooth displacement field in which unmatched regions are allowed while cross vectors are not. The algorithm is again based on DP and the optimal solution is guaranteed. We have demonstrated the algorithms on natural objects in a large spectrum of applications, including interactive segmentation and automatic tracking of the regions of interest in medical images     

A disk expansion segmentation method for ultrasonic breast lesions

Automatically extracting lesion boundaries in ultrasound images is difficult due to the variance in shape and interference from speckle noise. An effective scheme of removing speckle noise can facilitate the segmentation of ultrasonic breast lesions, which can be performed with an iterative disk expansion method. In this study, a disk expansion segmentation method is proposed to semi-automatically find lesion contours in ultrasonic breast image. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the simulations with seven types of cysts, three in vitro phantom images and 10 clinical breast images are introduced. The mean normalized true positive area overlap between simulated contours and contours obtained by the proposed method is over 85% in simulation results. A strong correlation exists between physicians’ manual delineations and detected contours in clinical breast images. In addition, the method is also verified to be able to simultaneously contour multiple lesions in a single image. In comparison with the conventional active contour model, our proposed method does not require any initial seed within a lesion and thus, it is more convenient and applicable.     

Color image segmentation based on mean shift and normalized cuts.

In this correspondence, we develop a novel approach that provides effective and robust segmentation of color images. By incorporating the advantages of the mean shift (MS) segmentation and the normalized cut (Ncut) partitioning methods, the proposed method requires low computational complexity and is therefore very feasible for real-time image segmentation processing. It preprocesses an image by using the MS algorithm to form segmented regions that preserve the desirable discontinuity characteristics of the image. The segmented regions are then represented by using the graph structures, and the Ncut method is applied to perform globally optimized clustering. Because the number of the segmented regions is much smaller than that of the image pixels, the proposed method allows a low-dimensional image clustering with significant reduction of the complexity compared to conventional graph-partitioning methods that are directly applied to the image pixels. In addition, the image clustering using the segmented regions, instead of the image pixels, also reduces the sensitivity to noise and results in enhanced image segmentation performance. Furthermore, to avoid some inappropriate partitioning when considering every region as only one graph node, we develop an improved segmentation strategy using multiple child nodes for each region. The superiority of the proposed method is examined and demonstrated through a large number of experiments using color natural scene images.     

Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation

This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour framework, while texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic framework of normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results on a wide range of images are shown.     

Layer-based video registration

Registration of a mission video sequence with a reference image without any metadata (camera location, viewing angles, and reference DEMs) is still a challenging problem. This paper presents a layer-based approach to registering a video sequence to a reference image of a 3D scene containing multiple layers. First, the robust layers from a mission video sequence are extracted and a layer mosaic is generated for each layer, where the relative transformation parameters between consecutive frames are estimated. Then, we formulate the image-registration problem as a region-partitioning problem, where the overlapping regions between two images are partitioned into supporting and nonsupporting (or outlier) regions, and the corresponding motion parameters are also determined for the supporting regions. In this approach, we first estimate a set of sparse, robust correspondences between the first frame and reference image. Starting from corresponding seed patches, the aligned areas are expanded to the complete overlapping areas for each layer using a graph-cut algorithm with level set, where the first frame is registered to the reference image. Then, using the transformation parameters estimated from the mosaic, we initially align the remaining frames in the video to the reference image. Finally, using the same partitioning framework, the registration is further refined by adjusting the aligned areas and removing outliers. Several examples are demonstrated in the experiments to show that our approach is effective and robust.Received: 16 September 2004, Accepted: 23 September 2004, Published online: 19 January 2005     

Generating discriminating cartoon faces using interacting snakes

As a computational bridge between the high-level a priori knowledge of object shape and the low-level image data, active contours (or snakes) are useful models for the extraction of deformable objects. We propose an approach for manipulating multiple snakes iteratively, called interacting snakes, that minimizes the attraction energy functionals on both contours and enclosed regions of individual snakes and the repulsion energy functionals among multiple snakes that interact with each other. We implement the interacting snakes through explicit curve (parametric active contours) representation in the domain of face recognition. We represent human faces semantically via facial components such as eyes, mouth, face outline, and the hair outline. Each facial component is encoded by a closed (or open) snake that is drawn from a 3D generic face model. A collection of semantic facial components form a hypergraph, called semantic face graph, which employs interacting snakes to align the general facial topology onto the sensed face images. Experimental results show that a successful interaction among multiple snakes associated with facial components makes the semantic face graph a useful model for face representation, including cartoon faces and caricatures, and recognition.     

An optimal graph theoretic approach to data clustering: theory andits application to image segmentation

A novel graph theoretic approach for data clustering is presented and its application to the image segmentation problem is demonstrated. The data to be clustered are represented by an undirected adjacency graph 𝒢 with arc capacities assigned to reflect the similarity between the linked vertices. Clustering is achieved by removing arcs of 𝒢 to form mutually exclusive subgraphs such that the largest inter-subgraph maximum flow is minimized. For graphs of moderate size (~ 2000 vertices), the optimal solution is obtained through partitioning a flow and cut equivalent tree of 𝒢, which can be efficiently constructed using the Gomory-Hu algorithm (1961). However for larger graphs this approach is impractical. New theorems for subgraph condensation are derived and are then used to develop a fast algorithm which hierarchically constructs and partitions a partially equivalent tree of much reduced size. This algorithm results in an optimal solution equivalent to that obtained by partitioning the complete equivalent tree and is able to handle very large graphs with several hundred thousand vertices. The new clustering algorithm is applied to the image segmentation problem. The segmentation is achieved by effectively searching for closed contours of edge elements (equivalent to minimum cuts in 𝒢), which consist mostly of strong edges, while rejecting contours containing isolated strong edges. This method is able to accurately locate region boundaries and at the same time guarantees the formation of closed edge contours     

A Self-adaptive ASIFT-SH method

When monitoring events on a building site using a system of multiple cameras, it is necessary to establish correspondence between the acquired imaging material. The basic problem when attempting this task is the establishment of any correspondence between points located on uniform areas of the images (e.g. regions with uniform colour or texture). The basic version of our ASIFT-SH method can mainly solve such a problem. This method consists of four steps: (i) determining the initial corresponding points within the images of both views by using the ASIFT method, (ii) grouping of initial corresponding points from the first step into subsets, based on segmented regions, (iii) calculation of local homographies for a particular subset of corresponding points, and (iv) determining any correspondence between arbitrary points from a particular camera’s viewpoint, by using a suitable local homography. The critical step of this method concerns segmentation. Therefore, we have introduced into our algorithm a step for adaptive adjustment, the segmented regions being remodelled so that they better meet the required coplanarity criterion. This introduced step is based on a 3D reconstruction of the initial corresponding points and a search for the minimal number of planes within the 3D space to which these points belong. Those points that belong to a particular plane, represent a newly-created subset of the initial corresponding points. The results point out that the introduction of this adaptive step into ASIFT-SH significantly improves the accuracy of corresponding points’ calculation. The mean error is 1.63 times lower and the standard deviation is 2.56 times lower than by the basic version of the ASIFT-SH method.     

Object segmentation in hyperspectral images using active contours and graph cuts

The interest in object segmentation on hyperspectral images is increasing and many approaches have been proposed to deal with this area. In this project, we developed an algorithm that combines both the active contours and the graph cut approaches for object segmentation in hyperspectral images. The active contours approach has the advantage of producing subregions with continuous boundaries. The graph cut approach has emerged as a technique for minimizing energy functions while avoiding the problems of local minima. Additionally, it guarantees continuity and produces smooth contours, free of self-crossing and uneven spacing problems. The algorithm uses the complete spectral signature of a pixel and also considers spatial neighbourhood for graph construction, thereby combining both spectral and spatial information present in the image. The algorithm is tested using real hyperspectral images taken from a variety of sensors, such as Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) and Hyperspectral Data Imagery Collection Experiment (HYDICE), and also taken by the SOC hyperspectral camera. This approach can segment different objects in an image. This algorithm can be applied in many fields and it should represent an important advance in the field of object segmentation.     

Image segmentation by iterative optimization of multiphase multiple piecewise constant model and Four-Color relabeling

In the paper an iteratively unsupervised image segmentation algorithm is developed, which is based on our proposed multiphase multiple piecewise constant (MMPC) model and its graph cuts optimization. The MMPC model use multiple constants to model each phase instead of one single constant used in Chan and Vese (CV) model and cartoon limit so that heterogeneous image object segmentation can be effectively dealt with. We show that the multiphase optimization problem based on our proposed model can be approximately solved by graph cuts methods. Four-Color theorem is used to relabel the regions of image after every iteration, which makes it possible to represent and segment an arbitrary number of regions in image with only four phases. Therefore, the computational cost and memory usage are greatly reduced. The comparison with some typical unsupervised image segmentation methods using a large number of images from the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset demonstrates the proposed algorithm can effectively segment natural images with a good performance and acceptable computational time.