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Researchers have been involved for decades in search of an efficient skin detection method. However, current methods have not overcome the significant challenges of skin detection, such as variation of illumination, various skin tones of different ethnic groups, and many others. This research proposed a clustering and region-growing-based skin detection method to overcome these limitations. Together with significant insight, these methods result in a more effective algorithm. The insight concerns the capability to dynamically define the number of clusters in a collection of pixels organized as images. In Clustering for most problem domains, the number of clusters is fixed prior and does not perform effectively over a wide variety of data contents. Therefore, this research paper proposed a skin detection method that validated the above findings. The proposed method assigns the number of clusters based on image properties and ultimately allows freedom from manual thresholds or other manual operations. The dynamic determination of clustering outcomes allows for greater automation of skin detection when dealing with uncertain real-world conditions. • Human skin tone is uniform, and clustering is an efficient method to detect human skin. • CIELAB color space is better for separating illumination from the image. • A small number of significant objects can occupy most of the pixel in an image. • Pixel connectivity of an image can automatically decide the number of clusters. • Clustering performs efficiently in Human skin detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counting objects is a fundamental but challenging problem. In this paper, we propose diffusion-based, geometry-free, and learning-free methodologies to count the number of objects in images. The main idea is to represent each object by a unique index value regardless of its intensity or size, and to simply count the number of index values. First, we place different vectors, refer to as seed vectors, uniformly throughout the mask image. The mask image has boundary information of the objects to be counted. Secondly, the seeds are diffused using an edge-weighted harmonic variational optimization model within each object. We propose an efficient algorithm based on an operator splitting approach and alternating direction minimization method, and theoretical analysis of this algorithm is given. An optimal solution of the model is obtained when the distributed seeds are completely diffused such that there is a unique intensity within each object, which we refer to as an index. For computational efficiency, we stop the diffusion process before a full convergence, and propose to cluster these diffused index values. We refer to this approach as Counting Objects by Diffused Index (CODI). We explore scalar and multi-dimensional seed vectors. For Scalar seeds, we use Gaussian fitting in histogram to count, while for vector seeds, we exploit a high-dimensional clustering method for the final step of counting via clustering. The proposed method is flexible even if the boundary of the object is not clear nor fully enclosed. We present counting results in various applications such as biological cells, agriculture, concert crowd, and transportation. Some comparisons with existing methods are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the paper, the algorithm of segment-based stereo matching using graph cuts is developed for extracting depth information from the stereo image pairs. The first step of the algorithm employs the mean-shift algorithm to segment the reference image, which ensures our method to correctly estimate in large untextured regions and precisely localize depth boundaries, followed by the use of Adaptive Support Weighted Self-Adaptation dissimilarity algorithm (ASW-SelfAd) for the estimation of initial disparity. This is followed by application of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in solving the robust disparity plane fitting. In order to ensure reliable pixel sets for the segment, we filter out outliers which contain occlusion region through three main rules, namely; cross-checking, judging reliable area and disparity distance measurement. Lastly, we apply improved clustering algorithm to merge the neighboring segments. The geometrical relationship of adjacent planes such as parallelism and intersection is employed for determination of whether two planes shall be merged. A new energy function is subsequently formulated with the use of graph cuts for the refinement of the disparity map. Finally, the depth information is extracted from the final disparity map. Experimental results on the Middlebury dataset demonstrate that our approach is effective in improving the state of the art. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Multiview video summarization plays a crucial role in abstracting essential information form multiple videos of the same location and time. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the multiview summarization. The proposed approach uses the BIRCH clustering algorithm for the first time on the initial set of frames to get rid of the static and redundant. The work presents a new approach for shot boundary detection using frame similarity measures Jaccard and Dice. The algorithm performs effectively synchronized merging of keyframes from all camera-views to obtain the final summary. Extensive experimentation conducted on various datasets suggests that the proposed approach significantly outperforms most of the existing video summarization approaches. To state a few, a 1.5% improvement on video length reduction, 24.28% improvement in compression ratio, and 6.4% improvement in quality assessment ratio is observed on the lobby dataset. • Shot boundary detection using Jaccard and Dice significantly reduces missed shot cuts. • Application of BIRCH algorithm removes static and redundant frames at an early stage. • Sliding window based threshold selection effectively detects event boundaries. • Synchronized merging and partitioning method ensures the inclusion of all key events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The ER and ACF detector are adapted for character detection, yielding high recall and fast speed. • A novel multi-task learning technology to train a character-level CNN is designed rendering high F-measure score. • The hierarchical clustering is adapted to group characters into words, improving RLSA method by1–2%. In this paper, we present a bottom-up approach for robust spotting of texts in scenes. In the proposed technique, character candidates are first detected using our proposed character detector, which leverages on the strengths of an Extremal Region (ER) detector and an Aggregate Channel Feature (ACF) detector for high character detection recall. The real characters are then identified by using a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) filter for high character detection precision. A hierarchical clustering algorithm is designed which combines multiple visual and geometrical features to group characters into word proposal regions for word recognition. The proposed technique has been evaluated on several scene text spotting datasets and experiments show superior spotting performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Present a novel metric for the content-sensitiveness of superpixel. • Proposed a content-sensitive sampling algorithm to generate content-sensitive superpixel. • Propose a novel superpixel segmentation algorithm based on SOM. Content-sensitive superpixel segmentation generates small superpixels in content-dense regions and large superpixels in content-sparse regions. It achieves higher segmentation accuracy than traditional superpixels. In this paper, we propose a content-sensitive superpixel segmentation algorithm based on Self-Organization-Map (SOM) neural network. First, we propose a novel metric to measure the content-sensitiveness of superpixels. Second, by using this metric, we develop a sampling algorithm to sample pixels from image according to their content-sensitiveness. Finally, a SOM neutral network is trained with the sampled pixels and used to segment the image into content-sensitive superpixels. The Berkeley Image Segmentation database and INRIA database are used to evaluate the proposed method. The experiment results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]