Quansen Sun

A new method of feature fusion and its application in image recognition

A new method of feature extraction, based on feature fusion, is proposed in this paper according to the idea of canonical correlation analysis (CCA). At first, the theory framework of CCA used in pattern recognition and its reasonable description are discussed. The process can be explained as follows: extract two groups of feature vectors with the same pattern; establish the correlation criterion function between the two groups of feature vectors; and extract their canonical correlation features to form effective discriminant vector for recognition. Then, the problem of canonical projection vectors is solved when two total scatter matrixes are singular, such that it fits for the case of high-dimensional space and small sample size, in this sense, the applicable range of CCA is extended. At last, the inherent essence of this method used in recognition is analyzed further in theory. Experimental results on Concordia University CENPARMI database of handwritten Arabic numerals and Yale face database show that recognition rate is far higher than that of the algorithm adopting single feature or the existing fusion algorithm.

A modified possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for bias field estimation and segmentation of brain MR image

A modified possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is presented for fuzzy segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images that have been corrupted by intensity inhomogeneities and noise. By introducing a novel adaptive method to compute the weights of local spatial in the objective function, the new adaptive fuzzy clustering algorithm is capable of utilizing local contextual information to impose local spatial continuity, thus allowing the suppression of noise and helping to resolve classification ambiguity. To estimate the intensity inhomogeneity, the global intensity is introduced into the coherent local intensity clustering algorithm and takes the local and global intensity information into account. The segmentation target therefore is driven by two forces to smooth the derived optimal bias field and improve the accuracy of the segmentation task. The proposed method has been successfully applied to 3 T, 7 T, synthetic and real MR images with desirable results. Comparisons with other approaches demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is robust to initialization, thereby allowing fully automatic applications.

A double-threshold image binarization method based on edge detector

This paper presents a new double-threshold image binarization method based on the edge and intensity information. We first find seeds near the image edges and present an edge connection method to close the image edges. Then, we use closed image edges to partition the binarized image that is generated using a high threshold, and obtain a primary binarization result by filling the partitioned high-threshold binary image with the seeds. Finally, the final binarization result is obtained by remedying the primary binarization result with the low-threshold binary image. Compared with the classical binarization methods and the similar binarization methods, our method is effective on the binarization of images with low contrast, noise and non-uniform illumination.

Fuzzy Local Gaussian Mixture Model for Brain MR Image Segmentation

Accurate brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance (MR) images is an essential step in quantitative brain image analysis. However, due to the existence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images, many segmentation algorithms suffer from limited accuracy. In this paper, we assume that the local image data within each voxels neighborhood satisfy the Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and thus propose the fuzzy local GMM (FLGMM) algorithm for automated brain MR image segmentation. This algorithm estimates the segmentation result that maximizes the posterior probability by minimizing an objective energy function, in which a truncated Gaussian kernel function is used to impose the spatial constraint and fuzzy memberships are employed to balance the contribution of each GMM. We compared our algorithm to state-of-the-art segmentation approaches in both synthetic and clinical data. Our results show that the proposed algorithm can largely overcome the difficulties raised by noise, low contrast, and bias field, and substantially improve the accuracy of brain MR image segmentation.

Fuzzy c-means clustering with weighted image patch for image segmentation

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering has been widely used in image segmentation. However, in spite of its computational efficiency and wide-spread prevalence, the FCM algorithm does not take the spatial information of pixels into consideration, and hence may result in low robustness to noise and less accurate segmentation. In this paper, we propose the weighted image patch-based FCM (WIPFCM) algorithm for image segmentation. In this algorithm, we use image patches to replace pixels in the fuzzy clustering, and construct a weighting scheme to able the pixels in each image patch to have anisotropic weights. Thus, the proposed algorithm incorporates local spatial information embedded in the image into the segmentation process, and hence improve its robustness to noise. We compared the novel algorithm to several state-of-the-art segmentation approaches in synthetic images and clinical brain MR studies. Our results show that the proposed WIPFCM algorithm can effectively overcome the impact of noise and substantially improve the accuracy of image segmentations.

A moment-based nonlocal-means algorithm for image denoising

Image denoising is a crucial step to increase image quality and to improve the performance of all the tasks needed for quantitative imaging analysis. The nonlocal (NL) means filter is a very successful technique for denoising textured images. However, this algorithm is only defined up to translation without considering the orientation and scale for each image patch. In this paper, we introduce the Zernike moments into NL-means filter, which are the magnitudes of a set of orthogonal complex moments of the image. The Zernike moments in small local windows of each pixel in the image are computed to obtain the local structure information for each patch, and then the similarities according to this information are computed instead of pixel intensity. For the rotation invariant of the Zernike moments, we can get much more pixels or patches with higher similarity measure and make the similarity of patches translation-invariant and rotation-invariant. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated on real images corrupted by white Gaussian noise (WGN). The comparative experimental results show that the improved NL-means filter achieves better denoising performance.

Face detection using template matching and skin-color information

A face-detection approach is proposed in the paper. Firstly, a luminance-conditional distribution model of skin-color information is used to detect skin pixels in color images; then, morphological operations are used to extract skin-region rectangles; finally, template matching based on a linear transformation is used to detect face in each skin-region rectangle. Experimental results on some color images from the FERET database and from the Internet are encouraging. The proposed algorithm is shown to be effective and efficient in detecting frontal faces in color images.

Robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means algorithm for brain MR image segmentation

Abstract Objective Accurate brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance (MR) images is an essential step in quantitative brain image analysis, and hence has attracted extensive research attention. However, due to the existence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images, many segmentation algorithms suffer from limited robustness to outliers, over-smoothness for segmentations and limited segmentation accuracy for image details. To further improve the accuracy for brain MR image segmentation, a robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means (RSCFCM) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Method Firstly, a novel spatial factor is proposed to overcome the impact of noise in the images. By incorporating the spatial information amongst neighborhood pixels, the proposed spatial factor is constructed based on the posterior probabilities and prior probabilities, and takes the spatial direction into account. It plays a role as linear filters for smoothing and restoring images corrupted by noise. Therefore, the proposed spatial factor is fast and easy to implement, and can preserve more details. Secondly, the negative log-posterior is utilized as dissimilarity function by taking the prior probabilities into account, which can further improve the ability to identify the class for each pixel. Finally, to overcome the impact of intensity inhomogeneity, we approximate the bias field at the pixel-by-pixel level by using a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. The fuzzy objective function is then integrated with the bias field estimation model to overcome the intensity inhomogeneity in the image and segment the brain MR images simultaneously. Results To demonstrate the performances of the proposed algorithm for the images with/without skull stripping, the first group of experiments is carried out in clinical 3T-weighted brain MR images which contain quite serious intensity inhomogeneity and noise. Then we quantitatively compare our algorithm to state-of-the-art segmentation approaches by using Jaccard similarity on benchmark images obtained from IBSR and BrainWeb with different level of noise and intensity inhomogeneity. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce higher accuracy segmentation and has stronger ability of denoising, especially in the area with abundant textures and details. Conclusion In this paper, the RSCFCM algorithm is proposed by utilizing the negative log-posterior as the dissimilarity function, introducing a novel factor and integrating the bias field estimation model into the fuzzy objective function. This algorithm successfully overcomes the drawbacks of existing FCM-type clustering schemes and EM-type mixture models. Our statistical results (mean and standard deviation of Jaccard similarity for each tissue) on both synthetic and clinical images show that the proposed algorithm can overcome the difficulties caused by noise and bias fields, and is capable of improving over 5% segmentation accuracy comparing with several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Rapid and brief communication: A theorem on the generalized canonical projective vectors

This paper proposes a kind of generalized canonical projective vectors (GCPV), based on the framework of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) applying image recognition. Apart from canonical projective vectors (CPV), the process of obtaining GCPV contains the class information of samples, such that the combined features extracted according to the basis of GCPV can give a better classification performance. The experimental result based on the Concordia University CENPARMI handwritten Arabian numeral database has proved that our method is superior to the method based on CPV.

A novel multiset integrated canonical correlation analysis framework and its application in feature fusion

Multiset canonical correlation analysis (MCCA) is difficult to effectively express the integrated correlation among multiple feature vectors in feature fusion. Thus, this paper firstly presents a novel multiset integrated canonical correlation analysis (MICCA) framework. The MICCA establishes a discriminant correlation criterion function of multi-group variables based on generalized correlation coefficient. The criterion function can clearly depict the integrated correlation among multiple feature vectors. Then the paper presents a multiple feature fusion theory and algorithm using the MICCA method. The detailed process of the algorithm is as follows: firstly, extract multiple feature vectors from the same patterns by using different feature extraction methods; then extract multiset integrated canonical correlation features using MICCA; finally form effective discriminant feature vectors through two given feature fusion strategies for pattern classification. The multi-group feature fusion method based on MICCA not only achieves the aim of feature fusion, but also removes the redundancy between features. The experiment results on CENPARMI handwritten Arabic numerals and UCI multiple features database show that the MICCA method has better recognition rates and robustness than the fusion methods based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and MCCA.