Benjamin Perret

A robust hit-or-miss transform for template matching applied to very noisy astronomical images

The morphological hit-or-miss transform (HMT) is a powerful tool for digital image analysis. Its recent extensions to grey level images have proven its ability to solve various template matching problems. In this paper we explore the capacity of various existing approaches to work in very noisy environments and discuss the generic methods used to improve their robustness to noise. We also propose a new formulation for a fuzzy morphological HMT which has been especially designed to deal with very noisy images. Our approach is validated through a pattern matching problem in astronomical images that consists of detecting very faint objects: low surface brightness galaxies. Despite their influence on the galactic evolution model, these objects remain mostly misunderstood by the astronomers. Due to their low signal to noise ratio, there is no automatic and reliable detection method yet. In this paper we introduce such a method based on the proposed hit-or-miss operator. The complete process is described starting from the building of a set of patterns until the reconstruction of a suitable map of detected objects. Implementation, running cost and optimisations are discussed. Outcomes have been examined by astronomers and compared to previous works. We have observed promising results in this difficult context for which mathematical morphology provides an original solution.

Playing with Kruskal: Algorithms for Morphological Trees in Edge-Weighted Graphs

The goal of this paper is to provide linear or quasi-linear algorithms for producing some of the various trees used in mathemetical morphology, in particular the trees corresponding to hierarchies of watershed cuts and hierarchies of constrained connectivity. A specific binary tree, corresponding to an ordered version of the edges of the minimum spanning tree, is the key structure in this study, and is computed thanks to variations around Kruskal algorithm for minimum spanning tree.

Hyperconnections and Hierarchical Representations for Grayscale and Multiband Image Processing

Connections in image processing are an important notion that describes how pixels can be grouped together according to their spatial relationships and/or their gray-level values. In recent years, several works were devoted to the development of new theories of connections among which hyperconnection (h-connection) is a very promising notion. This paper addresses two major issues of this theory. First, we propose a new axiomatic that ensures that every h-connection generates decompositions that are consistent for image processing and, more precisely, for the design of h-connected filters. Second, we develop a general framework to represent the decomposition of an image into h-connections as a tree that corresponds to the generalization of the connected component tree. Such trees are indeed an efficient and intuitive way to design attribute filters or to perform detection tasks based on qualitative or quantitative attributes. These theoretical developments are applied to a particular fuzzy h-connection, and we test this new framework on several classical applications in image processing, i.e., segmentation, connected filtering, and document image binarization. The experiments confirm the suitability of the proposed approach: It is robust to noise, and it provides an efficient framework to design selective filters.

Constructive Links between Some Morphological Hierarchies on Edge-Weighted Graphs

In edge-weighted graphs, we provide a unified presentation of a family of popular morphological hierarchies such as component trees, quasi flat zones, binary partition trees, and hierarchical watersheds. For any hierarchy of this family, we show if (and how) it can be obtained from any other element of the family. In this sense, the main contribution of this paper is the study of all constructive links between these hierarchies.

Directed Connected Operators: Asymmetric Hierarchies for Image Filtering and Segmentation

Connected operators provide well-established solutions for digital image processing, typically in conjunction with hierarchical schemes. In graph-based frameworks, such operators basically rely on symmetric adjacency relations between pixels. In this article, we introduce a notion of directed connected operators for hierarchical image processing, by also considering non-symmetric adjacency relations. The induced image representation models are no longer partition hierarchies (i.e., trees), but directed acyclic graphs that generalize standard morphological tree structures such as component trees, binary partition trees or hierarchical watersheds. We describe how to efficiently build and handle these richer data structures, and we illustrate the versatility of the proposed framework in image filtering and image segmentation.

Connected Component Trees for Multivariate Image Processing and Applications in Astronomy

In this paper, we investigate the possibilities offered by the extension of the connected component trees (cc-trees) to multivariate images. We propose a general framework for image processing using the cc-tree based on the lattice theory and we discuss the possible applications depending on the properties of the underlying ordered set. This theoretical reflexion is illustrated by two applications in multispectral astronomical imaging: source separation and object detection.

Connected image processing with multivariate attributes: An unsupervised Markovian classification approach

This article presents a new approach for constructing connected operators for image processing and analysis. It relies on a hierarchical Markovian unsupervised algorithm in order to classify the nodes of the traditional Max-Tree. This approach enables to naturally handle multivariate attributes in a robust non-local way. The technique is demonstrated on several image analysis tasks: filtering, segmentation, and source detection, on astronomical and biomedical images. The obtained results show that the method is competitive despite its general formulation. This article provides also a new insight in the field of hierarchical Markovian image processing showing that morphological trees can advantageously replace traditional quadtrees.

Evaluation of Morphological Hierarchies for Supervised Segmentation

We propose a quantitative evaluation of morphological hierarchies (quasi-flat zones, constraint connectivity, watersheds, observation scale) in a novel framework based on the marked segmentation problem. We created a set of automatically generated markers for the one object image datasets of Grabcut and Weizmann. In order to evaluate the hierarchies, we applied the same segmentation strategy by combining several parameters and markers. Our results, which shows important differences among the considered hierarchies, give clues to understand the behaviour of each method in order to choose the best one for a given application. The code and the marker datasets are available online.

Toward a new axiomatic for hyper-connections

We propose a new class of hyper-connections in order to improve the consistency of hyper-connected filters and to simplify their design. Our idea relies on the principle that the decomposition of an image into h-components must be necessary and sufficient. We propose a set of three equivalent axioms to achieve this goal. We show that an existing h-connection already fulfils these properties and we propose a new h-connection based on flat functions that also fulfils these axioms. Finally we show that this new class brings several new interesting properties that simplify the use of h-connections and guarantee the consistency of h-connected filters as they ensure that: 1) every deletion of image components will effectively modify the filtered image 2) a deleted component can not re-appear in the filtered image.

Evaluation of morphological hierarchies for supervised video segmentation

This paper aims to evaluate the morphological hierarchies (observation scale, watersheds area and volume) in the context of marked video segmentation. Here, we automatically created a set of markers for each video taking into account its ground-truth. In order to evaluate the hierarchies, we have applied several types of markers and their combinations for simulating supervised segmentation idea. The performance of each segmentation was evaluated in terms of F-measures, and according to our results, the observation scale hierarchies outperform the considered hierarchies when the markers for both background and foreground were skeleton-based.