Low-level Appearance Features Research Articles

Iterative Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network with Multi-Scale Context Learning for Liver Segmentation

ABSTRACT Rapid and accurate extraction of liver tissue from abdominal computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images has critical importance for diagnosis and treatment of hepatic diseases. Due to adjacent organs with similar intensities and anatomical variations between different subjects, the performance of segmentation approaches based on deep learning still has room for improvement. In this study, a novel convolutional encoder-decoder network incorporating multi-scale context information is proposed. The probabilistic map from previous classifier is iteratively fed into the encoder layers, which fuses high-level shape context with low-level appearance features in a multi-scale manner. The dense connectivity is adopted to aggregate feature maps of varying scales from the encoder and decoder. We evaluated the proposed method with 2D and 3D application on abdominal CT and MR images of three public datasets. The proposed method generated liver segmentation with significantly higher accuracy (p <0.05), in comparison to several competing methods. These promising results suggest that the novel model could offer high potential for clinical workflow.

NAU-Net: A New Deep Learning Framework in Glacial Lake Detection

Glacial lake mapping is essential for understanding the response of glacial lakes to climate change and the risk assessment of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). Given that glacial lakes have little area compared with background objects, extracting glacial lakes high precisely is still challenging. Recently, U-Net, a deep learning (DL) method, has shown great potential in glacial lake extraction, due to its elaborate encoder-decoder structure and powerful skip connections. However, the skip connections transmit a lot of information irrelevant to glacial lakes from the low-level appearance features to the high-level semantic features, leading to inefficient utilization of the low-level features. In this letter, we propose a normalized difference water index (NDWI) attention U-Net (NAU-Net) for pixel-wise glacial lake segmentation, which utilizes NDWI as a spatial attention to highlight the signals of water regions in low-level feature maps, thereby making the network pay more attention to glacial lakes. Compared with the classical networks and the state-of-the-art non-DL methods, our NAU-Net shows better performance on glacial lake extraction. The source code can be found at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/JinxiaoWang/NAU-Net</uri> .

Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved competitive performance in salient object detection, in which how to learn effective and comprehensive features plays a critical role. Most of the previous works mainly adopted multiple-level feature integration yet ignored the gap between different features. Besides, there also exists a dilution process of high-level features as they passed on the top-down pathway. To remedy these issues, we propose a novel network named GCPANet to effectively integrate low-level appearance features, high-level semantic features, and global context features through some progressive context-aware Feature Interweaved Aggregation (FIA) modules and generate the saliency map in a supervised way. Moreover, a Head Attention (HA) module is used to reduce information redundancy and enhance the top layers features by leveraging the spatial and channel-wise attention, and the Self Refinement (SR) module is utilized to further refine and heighten the input features. Furthermore, we design the Global Context Flow (GCF) module to generate the global context information at different stages, which aims to learn the relationship among different salient regions and alleviate the dilution effect of high-level features. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Nonlocal atlas-guided multi-channel forest learning for human brain labeling.

It is important for many quantitative brain studies to label meaningful anatomical regions in MR brain images. However, due to high complexity of brain structures and ambiguous boundaries between different anatomical regions, the anatomical labeling of MR brain images is still quite a challenging task. In many existing label fusion methods, appearance information is widely used. However, since local anatomy in the human brain is often complex, the appearance information alone is limited in characterizing each image point, especially for identifying the same anatomical structure across different subjects. Recent progress in computer vision suggests that the context features can be very useful in identifying an object from a complex scene. In light of this, the authors propose a novel learning-based label fusion method by using both low-level appearance features (computed from the target image) and high-level context features (computed from warped atlases or tentative labeling maps of the target image). In particular, the authors employ a multi-channel random forest to learn the nonlinear relationship between these hybrid features and target labels (i.e., corresponding to certain anatomical structures). Specifically, at each of the iterations, the random forest will output tentative labeling maps of the target image, from which the authors compute spatial label context features and then use in combination with original appearance features of the target image to refine the labeling. Moreover, to accommodate the high inter-subject variations, the authors further extend their learning-based label fusion to a multi-atlas scenario, i.e., they train a random forest for each atlas and then obtain the final labeling result according to the consensus of results from all atlases. The authors have comprehensively evaluated their method on both public LONI_LBPA40 and IXI datasets. To quantitatively evaluate the labeling accuracy, the authors use the dice similarity coefficient to measure the overlap degree. Their method achieves average overlaps of 82.56% on 54 regions of interest (ROIs) and 79.78% on 80 ROIs, respectively, which significantly outperform the baseline method (random forests), with the average overlaps of 72.48% on 54 ROIs and 72.09% on 80 ROIs, respectively. The proposed methods have achieved the highest labeling accuracy, compared to several state-of-the-art methods in the literature.

Multihuman Tracking Based on a Spatial–Temporal Appearance Match

In this paper, we focus on the improvements of appearance representation for multihuman tracking. Many previous methods extracted low-level appearance features, such as color histogram and texture, even combined with spatial information for each frame. These methods ignore the temporal distribution of features. The features of each frame may not be stable due to illumination, human pose variation, and image noise. In order to improve it, we propose a novel appearance representation called the spatial-temporal appearance model based on the statistical distribution of Gaussian mixture model (GMM). It represents the appearance of a tracklet as a whole with dynamic spatial and temporal information. The spatial information is the dynamic subregions. The temporal information is the dynamic duration time of each subregion. Each subregion is modeled as the weighted Gaussian distribution of GMM. The online expectation-maximization (online EM) algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of GMM. Then, we propose a tracklet association method using Bayesian prediction and Jensen-Shannon divergence. The Bayesian prediction is used to predict the locations of targets. The Jensen-Shannon divergence is used to compute the distance of spatial-temporal appearance distribution between two tracklets. Finally, we test our approach on four challenging datasets (TRECVID, CAVIAR, ETH, and EPFL Terrace) and achieve good results.

자세 예측을 이용한 효과적인 자세 기반 감정 동작 인식

인간의 동작 인식에 대한 이전 연구는 주로 관절체로 표현된 신체 움직임을 추적하고 분류하는데 초점을 맞춰 왔다. 이 방식들은 실제 이미지 사용 환경에서 신체 부위에 대한 정확한 분류가 필요하다는 점이 까다롭기 때문에 최근의 동작 인식 연구 동향은 시공간상의 관심 점과 같이 저수준의, 더 추상적인 외형특징을 이용하는 방식이 일반화되었다. 하지만 몇 년 사이 자세 예측 기술이 발전하면서 자세 기반 방식에 대한 시각을 재정립하는 것이 필요하다. 본 연구는 외형 기반 방식에서 저수준의 외형특징만으로 분류기를 학습시키는 것이 충분한지에 대한 문제를 제기하면서 자세 예측을 이용한 효과적인 자세기반 동작인식 방식을 제안하였다. 이를 위해 다양한 감정을 표현하는 동작 시나리오를 대상으로 외형 기반, 자세 기반 특징 및 두 가지 특징을 조합한 방식을 비교하였다. 실험 결과, 자세 예측을 이용한 자세 기반 방식이 저수준의 외형특징을 이용한 방식보다 감정 동작 분류 및 인식 성능이 더 나았으며 잡음 때문에 심하게 망가진 이미지의 감정 동작 인식에도 자세 예측을 이용한 자세기반의 방식이 효과적이었다. Early researches in human action recognition have focused on tracking and classifying articulated body motions. Such methods required accurate segmentation of body parts, which is a sticky task, particularly under realistic imaging conditions. Recent trends of work have become popular towards the use of more and low-level appearance features such as spatio-temporal interest points. Given the great progress in pose estimation over the past few years, redefined views about pose-based approach are needed. This paper addresses the issues of whether it is sufficient to train a classifier only on low-level appearance features in appearance approach and proposes effective pose-based approach with pose estimation for emotional action recognition. In order for these questions to be solved, we compare the performance of pose-based, appearance-based and its combination-based features respectively with respect to scenario of various emotional action recognition. The experiment results show that pose-based features outperform low-level appearance-based approach of features, even when heavily spoiled by noise, suggesting that pose-based approach with pose estimation is beneficial for the emotional action recognition.

Coupled Action Recognition and Pose Estimation from Multiple Views

Action recognition and pose estimation are two closely related topics in understanding human body movements; information from one task can be leveraged to assist the other, yet the two are often treated separately. We present here a framework for coupled action recognition and pose estimation by formulating pose estimation as an optimization over a set of action-specific manifolds. The framework allows for integration of a 2D appearance-based action recognition system as a prior for 3D pose estimation and for refinement of the action labels using relational pose features based on the extracted 3D poses. Our experiments show that our pose estimation system is able to estimate body poses with high degrees of freedom using very few particles and can achieve state-of-the-art results on the HumanEva-II benchmark. We also thoroughly investigate the impact of pose estimation and action recognition accuracy on each other on the challenging TUM kitchen dataset. We demonstrate not only the feasibility of using extracted 3D poses for action recognition, but also improved performance in comparison to action recognition using low-level appearance features.

Auto-Context and Its Application to High-Level Vision Tasks and 3D Brain Image Segmentation

The notion of using context information for solving high-level vision and medical image segmentation problems has been increasingly realized in the field. However, how to learn an effective and efficient context model, together with an image appearance model, remains mostly unknown. The current literature using Markov Random Fields (MRFs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) often involves specific algorithm design in which the modeling and computing stages are studied in isolation. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm, auto-context. Given a set of training images and their corresponding label maps, we first learn a classifier on local image patches. The discriminative probability (or classification confidence) maps created by the learned classifier are then used as context information, in addition to the original image patches, to train a new classifier. The algorithm then iterates until convergence. Auto-context integrates low-level and context information by fusing a large number of low-level appearance features with context and implicit shape information. The resulting discriminative algorithm is general and easy to implement. Under nearly the same parameter settings in training, we apply the algorithm to three challenging vision applications: foreground/background segregation, human body configuration estimation, and scene region labeling. Moreover, context also plays a very important role in medical/brain images where the anatomical structures are mostly constrained to relatively fixed positions. With only some slight changes resulting from using 3D instead of 2D features, the auto-context algorithm applied to brain MRI image segmentation is shown to outperform state-of-the-art algorithms specifically designed for this domain. Furthermore, the scope of the proposed algorithm goes beyond image analysis and it has the potential to be used for a wide variety of problems for structured prediction problems.