35008704
Image segmentation based on a multiresolution Bayesian framework
A multiresolution Markov random field (MMRF) approach to texture segmentation which makes use of both regional and boundary information is proposed in this work. The algorithm is designed to improve the efficiency and solve two problems: over-segmentation and under-segmentation. At each resolution level, regional information and boundary information between textured regions is extracted to describe each block using the multiresolution Fourier transform (MFT). The image is then modelled as a sequence of Markov random fields (MRFs) of varying resolution and a Gibbs sampling scheme is applied to label the constituent sites at each scale by seeking the configuration with minimal interaction energy. The interaction energy is defined as a function of the regional and boundary information. The constraints of region context, and boundary smoothness and connectivity are also encoded in the interaction energy. Once the algorithm converges at a given scale, the segmentation result is propagated down to the next resolution for further refinement.
24590909
Fragile watermarking scheme exploiting non-deterministic block-wise dependency
Block-wise dependency is recognized as a key requirement in fragile watermarking schemes to thwart the vector quantization (VQ) attack. It has also been observed that deterministic dependency is still susceptible to transplantation attack or even simple cover-up attack. In this work, a new fragile watermarking scheme exploiting non-deterministic dependency is proposed. To watermark the original image, each pixel is adjusted according to the consistency between a key-dependent binary watermark bit, the information from the pixel itself and the non-deterministic secret dependency information calculated from a neighborhood centered at that pixel. Localization resolution is enhanced with a post-processing operation on the output difference map.
19930573
Learning Pathological Characteristics from User's Relevance Feedback for Content-Based Mammogram Retrieval
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been proposed to address the problem of image retrieval from medical image databases. Relevance feedback, explaining the user's query concept, can be used to bridge the semantic gap and improve the performance of CBIR systems. This paper proposes a learning method for relevance feedback, which utilizes probabilistic model to generalize the 2-class problem and provide an estimate of probability of class membership. To build the probabilistic model, support vector machine (SVM) is applied to classify the mammograms, and then scale them to the probability of class membership. Experimental results show that the proposed learning method can effectively improve the average precision rate from 40% to 62% through five iterations of relevance feedback rounds
15590248
A Class of Discrete Multiresolution Random Fields and Its Application to Image Segmentation
In this paper, a class of Random Field model, defined on a multiresolution array is used in the segmentation of gray level and textured images. The novel feature of one form of the model is that it is able to segment images containing unknown numbers of regions, where there may be significant variation of properties within each region. The estimation algorithms used are stochastic, but because of the multiresolution representation, are fast computationally, requiring only a few iterations per pixel to converge to accurate results, with error rates of 1-2 percent across a range of image structures and textures. The addition of a simple boundary process gives accurate results even at low resolutions, and consequently at very low computational cost.
23059132
Image authentication and integrity verification via content-based watermarks and a public key cryptosystem
A technique using the inherent feature map of the underlying image as the watermark is proposed in this work. First, the binary feature map is extracted as watermark and partitioned into blocks. Secondly, neighboring feature map blocks are blended and encrypted for insertion. On the receiver side, the feature map from the received image is extracted again and compared against the recovered watermark to verify the integrity and authenticity. In addition the capability of detecting geometric transformation, removal of original objects and addition of foreign objects, the proposed scheme is also capable of localizing tampering and detecting cropping without a priori knowledge about the image.
8491927
Multiresolution genetic clustering algorithm for texture segmentation
Abstract This work plans to approach the texture segmentation problem by incorporating genetic algorithm and K-means clustering method within a multiresolution structure. As the algorithm descends the multiresolution structure, the coarse segmentation results are propagated down to the lower levels so as to reduce the inherent class–position uncertainty and to improve the segmentation accuracy. The procedure is described as follows. In the first step, a quad-tree structure of multiple resolutions is constructed. Sampling windows of different sizes are utilized to partition the underlying image into blocks at different resolution levels and texture features are extracted from each block. Based on the texture features, a hybrid genetic algorithm is employed to perform the segmentation. While the select and mutate operators of the traditional genetic algorithm are adopted in this work, the crossover operator is replaced with K-means clustering method. In the final step, the boundaries and the segmentation result of the current resolution level are propagated down to the next level to act as contextual constraints and the initial configuration of the next level, respectively.
34090759
Segmentation of external force field for automatic initialization and splitting of snakes
Active contours or snakes have been extensively utilized in handling image segmentation and classification problems. In traditional active contour models, snake initialization is performed manually by users, and topological changes, such as splitting of the snake, cannot be automatically handled. In this paper, we introduce a new method to solve the snake initialization and splitting problem, based on an area segmentation approach: the external force field is segmented first, and then the snake initialization and splitting can be automatically performed by using the segmented external force field. Such initialization and splitting produces multiple snakes, each of which is within the capture range associated to an object and will be evolved to the object boundary. The external force used in this paper is a gradient vector flow with an edge-preserving property (EPGVF), which can prevent the snakes from passing over weak boundaries. To segment the external force field, we represent it with a graph, and a graph-theory approach can be taken to determine the membership of each pixel. Experimental results establish the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
157891
ROLEX: relational on-line exchange with XML
1. OVERVIEW ROLEX is a research system for closely coupled XML-relational interoperation [2]. Whereas typical XML-based applications interoperate with existing relational databases via a “shred-and-publish” approach, the ROLEX system seeks to provide direct access to relational data via XML interfaces at the speed of cached XML data. To achieve this, ROLEX is integrated tightly with both the DBMS and the application through a standard interface supported by most XML parsers, the Document Object Model (DOM). Thus, in general, an application need not be modified to be used with ROLEX. With the DBMS providing performance qualitatively similar to cached data, XML applications can rely on it for concurrency control and recovery services. To support our integration model and performance goals, ROLEX is built on the DataBlitz Main-Memory Database System, allowing us to capitalize on low-latency access to data while still providing concurrency control and recovery [1]. The DOM interface supports the expected navigation functions: parent-to-child, child-to-parent, and sibling-to-sibling. A DOM interface to an XML view query supports all the DOM operations and behaves as if the user were navigating the XML document resulting from the query. In ROLEX, we implement a virtual DOM tree that goes a step further by providing the same interface without creating a physical DOM tree. A novelty of ROLEX is that it uses a navigational profile for the user or application when it optimizes view-query plans. While navigational profiles can, in principle, be quite complex, we currently adopt a very simple model. If n is a node in the schema tree with parent p, the navigation profile stores the probability that some node in the DOM tree generated by n will be visited given that its parent, generated by p, has been visited. Query output is produced by a navigable query plan. It provides, for each node n in the schema tree of a view query, two entities: (1) a subplan for evaluating the tag query for n, and (2) a navigation index. The navigation index serves to materialize the output of the tag query and supports efficient lookup based on parameter values,
402079
Learning What to Talk about in Descriptive Games
Text generation requires a planning module to select an object of discourse and its properties. This is specially hard in descriptive games, where a computer agent tries to describe some aspects of a game world. We propose to formalize this problem as a Markov Decision Process, in which an optimal message policy can be defined and learned through simulation. Furthermore, we propose back-off policies as a novel and effective technique to fight state dimensionality explosion in this framework.
35216739
Image Smoothing Using Parametric Relaxation
Abstract A new image-smoothing algorithm which smooths the image while preserving discontinuities is developed. The method poses the smoothing problem as an estimation problem of the maximum a posteriori probability of a pixel having a certain gray level. A prior probability density function is assigned to each pixel from the raw data, which is an estimate of the gray-level uncertainty. The algorithm is an application of the random measure field in image processing. Contextual information from neighbors is used in refining the probability distribution of each pixel, which is a continuous version of the relaxation algorithm. The way of parametrizing the probability functions enables the derivation of an efficient iterative formula for updating the gray-level values.
8850461
Schema-guided wrapper maintenance for web-data extraction
Extracting data from Web pages using wrappers is a fundamental problem arising in a large variety of applications of vast practical interests. There are two main issues relevant to Web-data extraction, namely wrapper generation and wrapper maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel schema-guided approach to the problem of automatic wrapper maintenance. It is based on the observation that despite various page changes, many important features of the pages are preserved, such as syntactic patterns, annotations, and hyperlinks of the extracted data items. Our approach uses these preserved features to identify the locations of the desired values in the changed pages, and repair wrappers correspondingly by inducing semantic blocks from the HTML tree. Our intensive experiments on real Web sites show that the proposed approach can effectively maintain wrappers to extract desired data with high accuracies.