Xianghua Xie

Handbook of Texture Analysis

Texture analysis is one of the fundamental aspects of human vision by which we discriminate between surfaces and objects. In a similar manner, computer vision can take advantage of the cues provided by surface texture to distinguish and recognize objects. In computer vision, texture analysis may be used alone or in combination with other sensed features (e.g. color, shape, or motion) to perform the task of recognition. Either way, it is a feature of paramount importance and boasts a tremendous body of work in terms of both research and applications.Currently, the main approaches to texture analysis must be sought out through a variety of research papers. This collection of chapters brings together in one handy volume the major topics of importance, and categorizes the various techniques into comprehensible concepts. The methods covered will not only be relevant to those working in computer vision, but will also be of benefit to the computer graphics, psychophysics, and pattern recognition communities, academic or industrial.

MAC: Magnetostatic Active Contour Model

We propose an active contour model using an external force field that is based on magnetostatics and hypothesized magnetic interactions between the active contour and object boundaries. The major contribution of the method is that the interaction of its forces can greatly improve the active contour in capturing complex geometries and dealing with difficult initializations, weak edges, and broken boundaries. The proposed method is shown to achieve significant improvements when compared against six well-known and state-of-the-art shape recovery methods, including the geodesic snake, the generalized version of gradient vector flow (GVF) snake, the combined geodesic and GVF snake, and the charged particle model.

RAGS: region-aided geometric snake

An enhanced, region-aided, geometric active contour that is more tolerant toward weak edges and noise in images is introduced. The proposed method integrates gradient flow forces with region constraints, composed of image region vector flow forces obtained through the diffusion of the region segmentation map. We refer to this as the region-aided geometric snake or RAGS. The diffused region forces can be generated from any reliable region segmentation technique, greylevel or color. This extra region force gives the snake a global complementary view of the boundary information within the image which, along with the local gradient flow, helps detect fuzzy boundaries and overcome noisy regions. The partial differential equation (PDE) resulting from this integration of image gradient flow and diffused region flow is implemented using a level set approach. We present various examples and also evaluate and compare the performance of RAGS on weak boundaries and noisy images.

Active Contouring Based on Gradient Vector Interaction and Constrained Level Set Diffusion

This paper presents an extension of our recently introduced MAC model to deal with the initialization dependency problem that commonly appears in edge-based approaches. Its dynamic force field, unique bidirectionality, and constrained diffusion-based level set evolution provide great freedom in contour initialization and show significant improvements in initialization independency compared to other edge-based techniques. It can handle more sophisticated topological changes than splitting and merging. It provides new potentials for edge-based active contour methods, particularly when detecting and localizing objects with unknown location, geometry, and topology.

Correction to "MAC: Magnetostatic Active Contour Model" [Apr 08 632-646]

In the above titled paper (ibid., vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 632-646, Apr 08), there was an error in a definition. The correct definition is presented here.

Geometrically Induced Force Interaction for Three-Dimensional Deformable Models

In this paper, we propose a novel 3-D deformable model that is based upon a geometrically induced external force field which can be conveniently generalized to arbitrary dimensions. This external force field is based upon hypothesized interactions between the relative geometries of the deformable model and the object boundary characterized by image gradient. The evolution of the deformable model is solved using the level set method so that topological changes are handled automatically. The relative geometrical configurations between the deformable model and the object boundaries contribute to a dynamic vector force field that changes accordingly as the deformable model evolves. The geometrically induced dynamic interaction force has been shown to greatly improve the deformable model performance in acquiring complex geometries and highly concave boundaries, and it gives the deformable model a high invariancy in initialization configurations. The voxel interactions across the whole image domain provide a global view of the object boundary representation, giving the external force a long attraction range. The bidirectionality of the external force field allows the new deformable model to deal with arbitrary cross-boundary initializations, and facilitates the handling of weak edges and broken boundaries. In addition, we show that by enhancing the geometrical interaction field with a nonlocal edge-preserving algorithm, the new deformable model can effectively overcome image noise. We provide a comparative study on the segmentation of various geometries with different topologies from both synthetic and real images, and show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements against existing image gradient techniques.

State of the Art Report on Video-Based Graphics and Video Visualization

In recent years, a collection of new techniques which deal with video as input data, emerged in computer graphics and visualization. In this survey, we report the state of the art in video‐based graphics and video visualization. We provide a review of techniques for making photo‐realistic or artistic computer‐generated imagery from videos, as well as methods for creating summary and/or abstract visual representations to reveal important features and events in videos. We provide a new taxonomy to categorize the concepts and techniques in this newly emerged body of knowledge. To support this review, we also give a concise overview of the major advances in automated video analysis, as some techniques in this field (e.g. feature extraction, detection, tracking and so on) have been featured in video‐based modelling and rendering pipelines for graphics and visualization.

Magnetostatic Field for the Active Contour Model: A Study in Convergence

A new external velocity field for active contours is proposed. The velocity field is based on magnetostatics and hypothesised magnetic interactions between the active contour and image gradients. In this paper, we introduce the method and study its convergence capability for the recovery of shapes with complex topology and geometry, including deep, narrow concavities. The proposed active contour can be arbitrarily initialised. Level sets are used to achieve topological freedom. The proposed method is compared against shape recovery methods based on distance vector flow, constant flow, generalised version of GVF, geodesic GGVF, and curvature vector flow.

Tracking 3D human pose with large root node uncertainty

Representing articulated objects as a graphical model has gained much popularity in recent years, often the root node of the graph describes the global position and orientation of the object. In this work a method is presented to robustly track 3D human pose by permitting greater uncertainty to be modeled over the root node than existing techniques allow. Significantly, this is achieved without increasing the uncertainty of remaining parts of the model. The benefit is that a greater volume of the posterior can be supported making the approach less vulnerable to tracking failure. Given a hypothesis of the root node state a novel method is presented to estimate the posterior over the remaining parts of the body conditioned on this value. All probability distributions are approximated using a single Gaussian allowing inference to be carried out in closed form. A set of deterministically selected sample points are used that allow the posterior to be updated for each part requiring just seven image likelihood evaluations making it extremely efficient. Multiple root node states are supported and propagated using standard sampling techniques. We believe this to be the first work devoted to efficient tracking of human pose whilst modeling large uncertainty in the root node and demonstrate the presented method to be more robust to tracking failures than existing approaches.

Radial basis function based level set interpolation and evolution for deformable modelling

We present a study in level set representation and evolution using radial basis functions (RBFs) for active contour and active surface models. It builds on recent works by others who introduced RBFs into level sets for structural topology optimisation. Here, we introduce the concept into deformable models and present a new level set formulation able to handle more complex topological changes, in particular perturbation away from the evolving front. In the conventional level set technique, the initial active contour/surface is implicitly represented by a signed distance function and periodically re-initialised to maintain numerical stability. We interpolate the initial distance function using RBFs on a much coarser grid, which provides great potential in modelling in high dimensional space. Its deformation is considered as an updating of the RBF interpolants, an ordinary differential equation (ODE) problem, instead of a partial differential equation (PDE) problem, and hence it becomes much easier to solve. Re-initialisation is found no longer necessary, in contrast to conventional finite difference method (FDM) based level set approaches. The proposed level set updating scheme is efficient and does not suffer from self-flattening while evolving, hence it avoids large numerical errors. Further, more complex topological changes are readily achievable and the initial contour or surface can be placed arbitrarily in the image. These properties are extensively demonstrated on both synthetic and real 2D and 3D data. We also present a novel active contour model, implemented with this level set scheme, based on multiscale learning and fusion of image primitives from vector-valued data, e.g. colour images, without channel separation or decomposition.