Gaussian Blur Filter Research Articles

A NEW METHOD FOR MEDICAL IMAGE FUSION BASED ON GAUSSIAN BLUR FILTER AND ROBINSON COMPASS OPERATOR

Medical image fusion is a process of extracting features from multi-modal medical images and combining them into a composite image. It brings huge support in medical imaging and clinical diagnosis. However, the extraction of both structural and functional information from input MRI and PET images using multi-scale transform fusion methods poses a challenge of providing high-quality decomposition layers since during the decomposition process, images can still lose information such as blur or noise at the edges of the image. To address this limitation, we present a new method to improve the visual information fidelity of medical image fusion. Firstly, the YCbCr color space is utilized to prevent distortion when merging color and grey images. The second algorithm uses the CLAHE model, which allows the input images to have good contrast. Then, a Gaussian blur filter is employed to decompose the images into base and detail layers. The use of Gaussian blur ensures a smoothing filter of the edges. After that, the Robinson compass operator is applied to create the fusion rule of detail components. Finally, the fused base and detail layers are concatenated together to form the final composite image. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the latest methods in bringing visual information fidelity of the input images to the fused image, which is helpful in supporting doctors and radiologists in visual analysis of the medical images.

FEATURES OF THE MODIFICATION OF THE INCEPTIONRESNETV2 ARCHITECTURE AND THE CREATION OF A DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEM FOR DETERMINING THE DEGREE OF DAMAGE TO RETINAL VESSELS

Diabetic retinopathy is a retinal disease caused by diabetes. The progression of this disease can lead to blindness. Every year, the number of patients with this disease increases. Diabetic retinal damage can be slowed if it is diagnosed early. The article describes the features of the creation of a neural network model and the development of a system with high accuracy rates for the recognition of diabetic retinopathy. The advantages of the InceptionResNetv2 convolutional neural network architecture are considered. This network uses residual connections that help facilitate the learning process. InceptionResNetv2 uses different methods to reduce the dimensionality of the feature map, making it more economical in terms of memory and computation. This model has a number of advantages compared to other networks. InceptionResNetv2 can be applied to blood vessel segmentation in eye images with different resolutions. In the study, modification of InceptionResNetv2 was carried out. The use of additional MaxPooling and Dense layers improved the speed and accuracy of the InceptionResNetv2 convolutional neural network. The Dropout layer is effectively used to prevent overtraining. The system for determining the degree of retinal damage of diabetic origin is implemented in the Python programming language. Model layers are built using the Keras library. Images from the set of EyePacs were processed by methods of cropping the black frames with a Gaussian blur filter and minimizing the effect of changing the position of the images. During the research, it was found that 21 epochs are needed to achieve maximum accuracy. The program calculates the probability of an image belonging to a certain class with high accuracy. The recognition accuracy rate for class 1 was 98.6%, for class 2 - 98.5%, for class 3 - 98.3%, for class 4 - 98.15%, for class 5 - 98.1%.

Sex estimation from Thai hand radiographs using convolutional neural networks

Manual analysis of hand radiographs for sex estimation is prone to biases and errors. This study addresses the need for automated methods by exploring the potential of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to accurately identify individual sex from Thai hand radiographs, overcoming limitations in data availability and variable quality. To improve dataset quality, we applied contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and Gaussian blur filter techniques to Thai hand radiographs from 385 male and 788 female individuals. We split these images into training, validation, and test sets. We also applied image augmentation techniques to increase the number of radiographs in the training dataset. Seven CNN models were trained, validated, and evaluated on 100 unseen male and female radiographs each. Among these models, the InceptionResNetV2 architecture demonstrated superior performance, achieving an accuracy of 87.50 % and an F1-Score of 86.91 %. Notably, this model utilized information from the 2nd to the 5th metacarpal bone and proximal phalanges in males, and from the 2nd metacarpal bone in females. Our findings provide a solid foundation for sex estimation from Thai hand radiographs, highlighting the power of CNNs in mitigating challenges associated with data quantity and quality. By automating the sex estimation process using CNNs, forensic analysis can benefit from enhanced accuracy and objectivity, enabling faster and more reliable sex assessment. We envisage that future research will build upon these findings to further improve the performance of sex estimation, contributing to advancements in forensic analysis and facilitating more effective utilization of Thai hand radiographs for sex estimation.

Mitigating Artifacts in Real-World Video Super-resolution Models

The recurrent structure is a prevalent framework for the task of video super-resolution, which models the temporal dependency between frames via hidden states. When applied to real-world scenarios with unknown and complex degradations, hidden states tend to contain unpleasant artifacts and propagate them to restored frames. In this circumstance, our analyses show that such artifacts can be largely alleviated when the hidden state is replaced with a cleaner counterpart. Based on the observations, we propose a Hidden State Attention (HSA) module to mitigate artifacts in real-world video super-resolution. Specifically, we first adopt various cheap filters to produce a hidden state pool. For example, Gaussian blur filters are for smoothing artifacts while sharpening filters are for enhancing details. To aggregate a new hidden state that contains fewer artifacts from the hidden state pool, we devise a Selective Cross Attention (SCA) module, in which the attention between input features and each hidden state is calculated. Equipped with HSA, our proposed method, namely FastRealVSR, is able to achieve 2x speedup while obtaining better performance than Real-BasicVSR. Codes will be available at https://github.com/TencentARC/FastRealVSR.

Lane Line Detection and Object Scene Segmentation Using Otsu Thresholding and the Fast Hough Transform for Intelligent Vehicles in Complex Road Conditions

An Otsu-threshold- and Canny-edge-detection-based fast Hough transform (FHT) approach to lane detection was proposed to improve the accuracy of lane detection for autonomous vehicle driving. During the last two decades, autonomous vehicles have become very popular, and it is constructive to avoid traffic accidents due to human mistakes. The new generation needs automatic vehicle intelligence. One of the essential functions of a cutting-edge automobile system is lane detection. This study recommended the idea of lane detection through improved (extended) Canny edge detection using a fast Hough transform. The Gaussian blur filter was used to smooth out the image and reduce noise, which could help to improve the edge detection accuracy. An edge detection operator known as the Sobel operator calculated the gradient of the image intensity to identify edges in an image using a convolutional kernel. These techniques were applied in the initial lane detection module to enhance the characteristics of the road lanes, making it easier to detect them in the image. The Hough transform was then used to identify the routes based on the mathematical relationship between the lanes and the vehicle. It did this by converting the image into a polar coordinate system and looking for lines within a specific range of contrasting points. This allowed the algorithm to distinguish between the lanes and other features in the image. After this, the Hough transform was used for lane detection, making it possible to distinguish between left and right lane marking detection extraction; the region of interest (ROI) must be extracted for traditional approaches to work effectively and easily. The proposed methodology was tested on several image sequences. The least-squares fitting in this region was then used to track the lane. The proposed system demonstrated high lane detection in experiments, demonstrating that the identification method performed well regarding reasoning speed and identification accuracy, which considered both accuracy and real-time processing and could satisfy the requirements of lane recognition for lightweight automatic driving systems.

An Optical Approach for Cell Pellet Detection.

Cell-based screening methods are increasingly used in diagnostics and drug development. As a result, various research groups from around the world have been working on this topic to develop methods and algorithms that increase the degree of automation of various measurement techniques. The field of computer vision is becoming increasingly important and has therefore a significant influence on the development of various processes in modern laboratories. In this work we describe an approach for detecting two height information, the phase boundary of a cell pellet and the bottom edge of the tube, and thereby a method for determining the highest point of the topology. The starting point for the development of the method described are cells obtained by various procedures and stabilized by a fixative. Centrifugation of the tube causes the cells to settle to the bottom of the tube, resulting in a cell pellet with a clear phase boundary between the cells and the fixative. For further studies, the supernatant fixative has to be removed without reducing the number of cells. The fixative is to be extracted automatically by a liquid robot, which is only possible by accurately determining the cell pellet height. Due to centrifugation, an uneven topology is formed, which is why the entire phase boundary must be examined to detect the highest point of the cell pellet. For this approach, the tube to be examined, which contains the cells and the fixative, is rotated 360° in defined small steps after centrifugation. During rotation, an image is captured in each step, after which a defined image area is separated from the center of the image and merged into a panoramic image. This produces a panoramic image of the cell topology which represents the complete phase boundary, the boundary located on the outside of the tube. This panoramic image is modified through various image processing steps to extract and detect the phase boundary. Various image processing algorithms from the OpenCV library are used. In the first step, the panoramic image is convolved with a Gaussian blur filter to reduce noise. In the following step, a black and white image is generated by a thresholding process. This black and white image, or binary image, is convolved with a Sobel operator in the x and y directions and the results are superimposed. This overlaid image shows the top edge of the cell pellet and other edges located in the image. A logical exclusion method of the obtained boundaries is used for the detection of the phase boundary. To detect the tube bottom, a multilevel model was trained in advance with an appropriate data set. This model can detect and localize in near real time the tube bottom in an image. By using the two-height information of the different boundaries, phase boundary and tube bottom, the highest point of the cell pellet can be detected. This information is then passed on to a higher-level process so that the liquid robot can approach this point with the pipette tip to remove the excess fixative. By determining the highest point, the probability of being able to remove a larger amount of fixative without reducing the number of cells is highest. This ensures that post-processing studies have the largest possible number of cells available with complete automation.

A Novel Attack Mode on Advanced Technology Nodes Exploiting Transistor Self-Heating

Self-heating (SH) is a phenomenon that can induce excessive heat inside the transistor channel. SH represents an emerging and serious concern, especially in advanced technology nodes, where excessive heat acting on elevated channel geometries will notably shift the critical transistor parameters (e.g., threshold-voltage <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and carrier mobility <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ). The underlying 3-D device structures (e.g., FinFET, nanowire, or nanosheet structures), along with newly employed materials such as silicon-germanium (SiGe), which show worse thermal conductivity than traditional materials, can considerably exacerbate SH. On top of that, quantum confinement, a phenomenon that becomes dominant at sub-10nm, further increases the intensity of SH. In this article, we are the first to explore SH effects from the perspective of hardware security, rather than the performance, reliability standpoints covered in state-of-the-art (SOTA) work. As proof of concept, we devise an SH-based hardware trojan (HT) that exploits the SH-induced <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> change in 7-nm FinFET circuits. Leveraging <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -dependent reconfigurable logic, we design a reconfigurable HT payload that maliciously changes its functional behavior once the SH-induced <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> change takes effect. Following SOTA work, we present a comprehensive modeling and analysis of SH effects at the device level and highlight its impact on transistor <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Next, we study how fabrication-time changes in the transistor doping and geometry can promote the SH-assisted degradation. We then describe various payload configurations for the proposed HT, quantify its overheads, and discuss its resilience against standard HT detection techniques. Finally, we demonstrate two case studies using the proposed HT, one to leak the secret key from a pipelined design of an advanced encryption standard (AES) circuit, and another to showcase denial-of-service for a Gaussian-blur filter circuit. Our work utilizes industry-standard models with parameters extracted from measurements and calibrated with experiments. Our results are obtained from meticulous study and optimization across the device-, circuit-, and system-levels.

Crack Detection of Eggshell using Image Processing and Computer Vision

This article presents an eggshell crack inspection using image processing techniques. This approach uses the concept of industrial 4.0 to reduce manual coordination in the egg industry’s manufacturing process. The method started with receiving images from a webcam camera. Then, we rescaled the image to 1147 x 633 for faster computation. Next, divide the image into the red and green channels. The red channel image was converted to grayscale using a Gaussian blur filter with a kernel filter 11 x 11 to reduce noise, followed by turning the image to binary. After that, multiply the binary image with the grayscale of the green channel to remove the background. By that time, a morphological operation was used to enhance the quality of the image. Finally, use the contour matrix to find the area of the object and then build the condition to detect the crack in the eggshell. These techniques of image processing are used to inspect the eggshell crack with a high accuracy of more than 98% as well as the high performance of computing.

Classification of Overlapping Eggs Based on Image Processing

This paper presents a method for classifying the overlapped eggs and counting the number of eggs on the conveyor belt using image processing techniques. The image was acquired by a webcam camera that connected to the computer and then rescaled. The image was then converted to grayscale and noise was reduced using a Gaussian blur filter. Otsu’s Binarization is used to convert the image to binary. The binary image is then subjected to morphological operations. Following that, using the Watershed Algorithm, separate the egg’s overlapped area. Finally, the prepared image is ready to be counted using the contour matrix method. This method independently classifies each egg segmentation and can count up to 18 eggs per frame with a processing time of less than 1 second.

Automated Femoral Landmark Detection from Pelvic X-Rays

Surgical planning requires the identification of anatomical landmarks on medical images pre, intra, and post-procedures. Landmark detection on X-rays is thus an important, though time intensive, step to ensure good surgical outcomes. The operative workflow can be made more efficient by using machine learning approaches to automate the detection of landmarks. These models could also assist with the development of robotic surgical procedures, as robotic approaches to surgery require the robotic device to orient itself to the patient's anatomy. Previously described models are effective, but complex, making it difficult for landmark identification to occur in real-time in a robotic system. We propose a streamlined approach to landmark detection on pelvis radiographs that achieves similar accuracy to gold-standard manual annotations. To train and evaluate the network, 902 pelvic radiographs (382 Outlet view, 520 AP view) were annotated with 22 landmarks and split into training (n = 700), validation (n = 99), and testing (n = 103) set. A U-Net architecture with five encoding layers and five decoding layers was used. Landmark labels were converted into 128 × 128 × 22 heatmap array by placing a Gaussian blur filter (5% of image size) over each landmark in order to generate a single 128 × 128 layer of the array, thus generating the 22 layers of the overall heatmap array with one landmark heatmap on each layer. Each layer was an array of 0 except a circular Gaussian around the area of the landmark. A 256 × 256 array representing the image was fed into the U-Net architecture, which outputted a 128 × 128 × 22 heatmap array. Intersection over union loss was used to train the network. Following training for 100 epochs, the algorithm was able to predict the position of 22 clinically relevant landmarks with an average error of 2.36±.5 mm compared to ground-truth annotations made by trained experts and musculoskeletal radiologists with experience in pelvic scan analysis. The network was able to accurately determine the position of relevant landmarks. It was able to do this despite highly variable contrast and brightness in the dataset. Prediction accuracy was invariant to view (AP: 2.27±.51 mm, Outlet: 2.45±.64 mm). A prediction took 1.13±.07 seconds. The network is able to rapidly provide accurate femoral landmarks on a radiograph of the pelvis. This will allow for the automation of numerous clinically relevant measurements. Additionally, an important avenue of further research is exploring whether automated use of these measurements can aid in the prediction of femur fractures in machine learning models.

875 Using Stress Testing to Identify Vulnerabilities in Artificial Intelligence Models for the Identification of Culprit Carotid Lesions in Cerebrovascular Events

Abstract Introduction Carotid atherosclerosis is a major risk factor for ischaemic stroke, a leading cause of death. Carotid CT angiography (CTA) is commonly performed following a stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA) to help guide patient management in secondary prevention of stroke. Deep learning algorithms can help extract greater information from scans. Method The dataset comprised CTA scans from 40 culprit and 40 non-culprit carotid arteries of patients with recent stroke/TIA, and 40 carotid arteries of asymptomatic patients without previous stroke/TIA. A 3D convolutional neural network was trained to classify carotid artery type. Each input comprised 14 axial CTA carotid patches (centred around the carotid artery) concatenated together to form a 3D volume (capturing ∼3cm of artery). 75% of the dataset was used for training and 25% for internal validation. Following training, computer vision operations were applied to input images to assess their impact on the model’s classification decisions. Results The model achieved 100% accuracy on the training set and 67% on the internal validation set. However, after subjecting input images to image operations, vulnerabilities in the deep learning model were revealed, even when using input images from the training set. For example, using a Gaussian blur filter with sigma 1.0 was sufficient to change classification decisions, as was horizontally flipping the image. Conclusions Deep learning has exceptional capabilities for learning, however the risk with such high-capacity models is failure to learn relevant features from the data. Stress testing provides a viable method to further evaluate deep learning models before clinical deployment.

Automatic Blob Detection for Dental Caries

Dental Caries are one of the most prevalent chronic diseases around the globe. Detecting carious lesions is a challenging task. Conventional computer aided diagnosis and detection methods in the past have heavily relied on the visual inspection of teeth. These methods are only effective on large and clearly visible caries on affected teeth. Conventional methods have been limited in performance due to the complex visual characteristics of dental caries images, which consist of hidden or inaccessible lesions. The early detection of dental caries is an important determinant for treatment and benefits much from the introduction of new tools, such as dental radiography. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based technique for dental caries detection namely: blob detection. The proposed technique automatically detects hidden and inaccessible dental caries lesions in bitewing radio-graphs. The approach employs data augmentation to increase the number of images in the data set to have a total of 11,114 dental images. Image pre-processing on the data set was through the use of Gaussian blur filters. Image segmentation was handled through thresholding, erosion and dilation morphology, while image boundary detection was achieved through active contours method. Furthermore, the deep learning based network through the sequential model in Keras extracts features from the images through blob detection. Finally, a convexity threshold value of 0.9 is introduced to aid in the classification of caries as either present or not present. The process of detection and classifying dental caries achieved the results of 97% and 96% for the precision and recall values, respectively.

Vehicles Detection System at Different Weather Conditions

The importance of efficient vehicle detection (VD) is increased with the expansion of road networks and the number of vehicles in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This paper proposes a system for detecting vehicles at different weather conditions such as sunny, rainy, cloudy and foggy days. The first step to the proposed system implementation is to determine whether the video’s weather condition is normal or abnormal. The Random Forest (RF) weather condition classification was performed in the video while the features were extracted for the first two frames by using the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). In this system, the background subtraction was applied by the mixture of Gaussian 2 (MOG 2) then applying a number of pre-processing operations, such as Gaussian blur filter, dilation, erosion, and threshold. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a histogram equalization technique for complex weather conditions instead of a Gaussian blur filter for improving the video clarity, which leads to increase detection accuracy. Based on the previous steps, the system defines each region in the frame expected to contain vehicles. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifies the defined regions into a vehicle or not. As compared to the previous methods, the proposed system showed high efficiency of about 96.4% and ability to detect vehicles at different weather conditions.

Analysis of Crop disease detection with SVM, KNN and Random forest classification

Due to an uneven climatic condition crops are being affected which leads to decrease in agriculture yield. It greatly affects global agricultural economy. However, the condition becomes more worse when diseases are identified in crops. Agriculture plays a vital role in every country’s economy. Thus, there is a need to identify the crop disease before it is visible on a crop so that disease can be avoided by using appropriate measures. The traditional way of identifying a crop disease is through observation by naked eyes. But as it requires large number of experts and continuous monitoring of crop it will be costly for large fields. Hence, an automatic system is required which can not only examine the crops to detect disease but also can classify the type of disease on crops. The proposed system determines disease from an input image. The input image has to go through following stages: Image Acquisition, Image pre-processing, Image segmentation, Feature Extraction, and Classification in order to determine diseased crop and accordingly provides remedy for that disease. Infected crop image is taken as input in Image Acquisition stage. In Image pre-processing stage noise is removed from the input image by applying gaussian blur filter and non-local means denoising algorithm. Also, the background of image is eliminated using Thresholding algorithm. To extract Region of Interest (ROI) i.e. infected region from input image K-means Clustering algorithm is used. Then color, texture and shape features are extracted from ROI and features are further send to the classification stage. Three different classification algorithms namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forest are implemented for classification out of which Support Vector Machine Algorithm is found to be best in terms of accuracy. Hence, classification is carried out by using Multivariate Support Vector Machine algorithm which detect disease present in crop accurately. In this way, the proposed system detects a disease from the given input image.

Dental Images' Segmentation Using Threshold Connected Component Analysis.

Recent advances in medical imaging analysis, especially the use of deep learning, are helping to identify, detect, classify, and quantify patterns in radiographs. At the center of these advances is the ability to explore hierarchical feature representations learned from data. Deep learning is invaluably becoming the most sought out technique, leading to enhanced performance in analysis of medical applications and systems. Deep learning techniques have achieved great performance results in dental image segmentation. Segmentation of dental radiographs is a crucial step that helps the dentist to diagnose dental caries. The performance of these deep networks is however restrained by various challenging features of dental carious lesions. Segmentation of dental images becomes difficult due to a vast variety in topologies, intricacies of medical structures, and poor image qualities caused by conditions such as low contrast, noise, irregular, and fuzzy edges borders, which result in unsuccessful segmentation. The dental segmentation method used is based on thresholding and connected component analysis. Images are preprocessed using the Gaussian blur filter to remove noise and corrupted pixels. Images are then enhanced using erosion and dilation morphology operations. Finally, segmentation is done through thresholding, and connected components are identified to extract the Region of Interest (ROI) of the teeth. The method was evaluated on an augmented dataset of 11,114 dental images. It was trained with 10 090 training set images and tested on 1024 testing set images. The proposed method gave results of 93% for both precision and recall values, respectively.

GESTURE RECOGNITION SYSTEM FOR NIGERIAN TRIBAL GREETING POSTURES USING SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE

This paper presents the application of Gaussian blur filters and Support Vector Machine (SVM) techniques for greeting recognition among the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria. Existing efforts have considered different recognition gestures. However, tribal greeting postures or gestures recognition for the Nigerian geographical space has not been studied before. Some cultural gestures are not correctly identified by people of the same tribe, not to mention other people from different tribes, thereby posing a challenge of misinterpretation of meaning. Also, some cultural gestures are unknown to most people outside a tribe, which could also hinder human interaction; hence there is a need to automate the recognition of Nigerian tribal greeting gestures. This work hence develops a Gaussian Blur – SVM based system capable of recognizing the Yoruba tribe greeting postures for men and women. Videos of individuals performing various greeting gestures were collected and processed into image frames. The images were resized and a Gaussian blur filter was used to remove noise from them. This research used a moment-based feature extraction algorithm to extract shape features that were passed as input to SVM. SVM is exploited and trained to perform the greeting gesture recognition task to recognize two Nigerian tribe greeting postures. To confirm the robustness of the system, 20%, 25% and 30% of the dataset acquired from the preprocessed images were used to test the system. A recognition rate of 94% could be achieved when SVM is used, as shown by the result which invariably proves that the proposed method is efficient.

Qualitative assessment of visual impairment in patients with age-related macular degeneration using standardized, image-based questionnaires

The purpose of the study is to test a simple approach for characterizing subjective perception in patients with choroidal neovascularization (CNV) secondary to age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This multi-center study was performed in four private ophthalmology practices including 20 patients with CNV. Subjects were presented the original image on the affected eye and afterwards modified candidate images to the contralateral eye. Then they chose one image that most closely matched the perception on the affected eye. This was repeated with three different images representing three everyday life scenes manipulated to mimic visual perception with reduced color perception (image 1), central scotomas (image 2), and blurring with four varying sizes (image 3). The frequency of response to the forced choice questionnaire experiment for each image was recorded. Our results show that images manipulated using a Gaussian blur filter, a brightness filter, and a sinusoidal distortion filter were selected by 9, 10, and 1 patients, respectively. Size of modification was not associated with visual acuity in image 1 or image 3. In image 2, however, the size of the modification was dependent on visual acuity ( p = .01). In conclusion, subjective perception in patients with AMD may significantly differ between individual patients. A better understanding of the visual disturbance will facilitate communication and involvement of patients in treatment decisions.

An approach to a robust watermark extraction from images containing text

This paper presents an approach to a robust watermark extraction from images containing text. Data extraction based on developed approach to robust watermark embedding into text data, characterizing by conversion invariance of text data into an image format. The comparative analysis of existing approaches of steganographic data embedding into text data is carried out, their advantages and disadvantages are determined. The choice of groups to steganographic data embedding methods based on text formatting is justified. As an embedding algorithm is determined approach based on interline space shifting. The block diagram and the description of the developed algorithm of data embedding into text data are given. An experimental estimation of the embedding capacity and perceptual invisibility of the developed data embedding approach was carried out. An approach to extract embedded information from images containing a robust watermark, based on the existing limitations, has been developed. The Radon transform is chosen as the basic extraction procedure of embedded information, allowing to extract values of the interline spacing. An approach based on Gaussian mixture model separating to isolate the values of the bits was chosen. The limits of the retrieval of embedded data have been experimentally established, and the robustness of the developed embedding approach to the implementation of various transformations has been estimated. The following parameters of robustness developed approach are defined: rotation of an image containing embedded data at any angle; scaling an image with a scaling factor not exceeding 1.5; conversion to any bitmap format; the application of a median filter to an image with a convolution core limit of not more than 9, a Gaussian blur filter with a blurring limit not exceeding 8 and an average filter with a convolution kernel limit of not more than 5.

Significance-Driven Logic Compression for Energy-Efficient Multiplier Design

Approximate arithmetic has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for many imprecision-tolerant applications. It can offer substantial reductions in circuit complexity, delay, and energy consumption by relaxing accuracy requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient approximate multiplier design using a significance-driven logic compression (SDLC) approach. Fundamental to this approach is an algorithmic and configurable lossy compression of the partial product rows based on their progressive bit significance. This is followed by the commutative remapping of the resulting product terms to reduce the number of product rows. As such, the complexity of the multiplier in terms of logic cell counts and lengths of critical paths is drastically reduced. A number of multipliers with different bit-widths (4-bit to 128-bit) are designed in SystemVerilog and synthesized using Synopsys Design Compiler. Post-synthesis experiments showed that up to an order of magnitude energy savings, and reductions of 65% in critical delay, and almost 45% in silicon area can be achieved for an 128-bit multiplier, compared with an accurate equivalent. These gains are achieved with low accuracy losses estimated at less than 0.0028 mean relative error. Additionally, we demonstrate the performance-energy-quality tradeoffs for different degrees of compression, achieved through configurable logic clustering. While evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed approach three case studies were set up. First, a Gaussian blur filter was designed, which demonstrated up to 80% energy reduction with a meagre loss of image quality. Second, we evaluate our approach in machine learning application using perceptron classifier, showed up to 74% energy reduction with negligible error rate. Third, the proposed multiplier designs were used in a power-constrained image processing application. We showed that SDLC can achieve $60\times $ improvement in computation capability, with potential to be employed in ubiquitous systems.

Enhancement of Principal Component Analysis using Gaussian Blur Filter

Characteristic evolving is most serious move that deal with image discrimination. It makes the content of images as ideal as possible. Gaussian blur filter used to eliminate noise and add purity to images. Principal component analysis algorithm is a straightforward and active method to evolve feature vector and to minimize the dimensionality of data set, this paper proposed using the Gaussian blur filter to eliminate noise of images and improve the PCA for feature extraction. The traditional PCA result as total average of recall and precision are (93% ,97%) and for the improved PCA average recall and precision are (98% ,100%), this show that the improved PCA is more effective in recall and precision.